1 hour ago, Magnus Grendel said:

In the Heir To The Empire/Dark Forces Rising/Last Command series and Specter of the Past/Visions of the Future, that's exactly the case - a cloaked ship cannot see where it's going and has to work off preplanned moves and inertial navigation. That's why it needed devious plans by Thrawn using dirty tricks like cloaked asteroids and force-linked ships to make it actually workable on a capital ship.

Certainly in rebel assault, phantoms only fire whilst uncloaked.

It's never quite explained why certain ships can't fire while cloaked, although their 'fog of war' mechanic around them certainly makes a sort of sense. I rationalise the inability of small ships to fire while cloaked by considering the enormous power drain of the cloakig device - a small reactor simply can't power critical systems and the cloaking device at the same time.

Strangely enough, this is the exact opposite of the only canon appearance of a cloaking device. A Clone Wars season 2 episode (I don't recall the name) has a cloaked ship commanded by Anakin and Obi-Wan that has the capability to see clearly outside the cloak boundary, yet cannot fire while cloaked. Given that it is still a relatively small ship (about Falcon sized) I think the power requirement of firing weaponry while cloaked is the issue. As such, I don't think there is any problem with a ship firing while cloaked, provided that it has either an ion or weapons disabled cost.

@Deimos, I love the idea, and I wish cloaking worked along these lines. Sadly, FFG chose a different path.

1 minute ago, Astech said:

It's never quite explained why certain ships can't fire while cloaked, although their 'fog of war' mechanic around them certainly makes a sort of sense. I rationalise the inability of small ships to fire while cloaked by considering the enormous power drain of the cloakig device - a small reactor simply can't power critical systems and the cloaking device at the same time.

Strangely enough, this is the exact opposite of the only canon appearance of a cloaking device. A Clone Wars season 2 episode (I don't recall the name) has a cloaked ship commanded by Anakin and Obi-Wan that has the capability to see clearly outside the cloak boundary, yet cannot fire while cloaked. Given that it is still a relatively small ship (about Falcon sized) I think the power requirement of firing weaponry while cloaked is the issue. As such, I don't think there is any problem with a ship firing while cloaked, provided that it has either an ion or weapons disabled cost.

@Deimos, I love the idea, and I wish cloaking worked along these lines. Sadly, FFG chose a different path.

Well remembered. I was trying to recall if any computer game or TV series ever shows you the 'in cockpit view' - I don't think you ever fly a phantom in any game - but Anakin's ship (what I think ends up becoming the Carrion Spike, or a ship very much like it) does allow you to see out whilst cloaked, but again doesn't allow you to fire for ill-explained reasons.

Of course, another reason for the limitations of cloaking technology is strictly storytelling. If you had ships (say, capital ships with huge generators) that were able to remain undetectable to the enemy but could still see and fire, and had no real downside, people would be rolling their eyes as much as they would for a Kevin J. Anderson creation.

So in this case, it's probably a matter of deciding on the limitations, and then coming up with a technical explanation for those limitations.

5 hours ago, DodgingArcs said:

So thematically the current design is pretty spot on then.

Not really. Its sort of got the "I can't see so can't shoot" thing. But only +2 agility is pretty pathetic of a benefit for that hard of a limitation.

If we were going to go fully faithful to the stupid way cloaking works in star wars, then Cloaking should be the following.

Cloak Action: Assign a Cloak Token to this ship.

Cloak Token: When a ship gains a Cloak Token, immediately discard all red target lock tokens assigned to the ship. While a ship has a Cloak Token, it may never be assigned red target lock tokens. While a ship has a Cloak Token, it may not perform attacks. When defending, a ship with a cloak token increases its agility by 2 and may change up to 2 of its dice results to Evade results.

So it should be really REALLY hard to hit a cloaked ship.

:double post

tbh i like the current mentality of the cloak. Its not a true cloak like in Startrek where the ship is virtually impossible to notice unless they do something stupid like goto a fast warp and leave a trail behind or something.

The xwing cloak mechanic is more like Starcraft in a sense. Its not a complete cloak, you can still "see" them but its incredibly difficult to get a lock on where they are (on that note, i agree with no targetlocks while cloaked. Either way, since locking onto someone would alert them of you). The decloak is basically "Oh you thought i was over there? Nah im over here about 100 meters to the side."

What i HATE about the cloak mechanic is what they did with it. The phantom is a complete glass cannon, it simply cannot function without cloak in the slightest. Enter the most stupid upgrade ever: Advance Cloaking. If this card did NOT exist and cloak was treated more like an approach/escape thing rather than an every turn thing it would be a lot more interesting and allow much more diversity in cloaking ship designs.

I wish the Phantom was made beefier (3agi, 3hull, 2shields) and adv cloaking did not exist. Yes you could still find ways to cloak every round but that would require outside help, which isnt cheap.

Also imo the decloak maneuver shouldnt count as overlapping things unless the ship landed on it. Again, its more of a displacement mechanic, not a move. Technically the phantom didnt actually move, it just "appeared" over there instead of where we thought it was.

Personally, this is what I would do:

Imperial Analyst (crew, 2 point)

Action: select an enemy ship at range 1-3 and assign it the Imperial Analyst. While that token is in play, your pilot skill matches the enemy ship.

(Free the EPT slot, but you still need to make a careful approach to get that new upgrade into play against a higher PS opponent).

5 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Well remembered. I was trying to recall if any computer game or TV series ever shows you the 'in cockpit view' - I don't think you ever fly a phantom in any game - but Anakin's ship (what I think ends up becoming the Carrion Spike, or a ship very much like it) does allow you to see out whilst cloaked, but again doesn't allow you to fire for ill-explained reasons.

You do get to fly a Phantom in the final level of Rebel Assault 2. I just don't know if you ever cloak during that level. Enemy Phantoms DO however decloak on attack vectors pointing right at your ship and ambushing your B-Wing flight group from behind so that does imply an ability to see what they're doing or else they'd have to appear for a moment to line up their attack and lose the element of surprise.

5 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Of course, another reason for the limitations of cloaking technology is strictly storytelling. If you had ships (say, capital ships with huge generators) that were able to remain undetectable to the enemy but could still see and fire, and had no real downside, people would be rolling their eyes as much as they would for a Kevin J. Anderson creation.

So in this case, it's probably a matter of deciding on the limitations, and then coming up with a technical explanation for those limitations.

There is a cruiser of the Zann Consortium that can cloak, but it also has issues with speed, no shielding, and being unable to even fire mass drivers while cloaked. I get the feeling that like many things, increasing the volume of an object increases the power requirements for it more than a similarly shaped object of smaller size.

Man, all this talk is making me hope that when TIE Fighter II gets developed (not if; I insist on being naively optimistic), the TIE Phantom gets to see some play, both flying and flying against (let me guess, the Imperial officer who defects and goes rogue is yet another head of research and development. I think the Imps really need to talk to HR about making loyalty more of a priority for people in such positions.)

5 hours ago, BadMotivator said:

Cloak Token: When a ship gains a Cloak Token, immediately discard all red target lock tokens assigned to the ship. While a ship has a Cloak Token, it may never be assigned red target lock tokens. While a ship has a Cloak Token, it may not perform attacks. When defending, a ship with a cloak token increases its agility by 2 and may change up to 2 of its dice results to Evade results.

So it should be really REALLY hard to hit a cloaked ship.

That's pretty game-breakingly difficult to hit. It would mean that any list composed of PS 8 or lower pilots automatically loses to Whisper, and the Illicit cloak basically becomes a single turn of total invulnerability to fire.

I think a sensor jammer kind of effect would be better, like:
"While you are cloaked, enemy ships must spend a focus token to declare you as the target of an attack"

That way, you get a ship that can be hit, but it takes some serious firepower to do.

5 hours ago, flyboymb said:

There is a cruiser of the Zann Consortium that can cloak, but it also has issues with speed, no shielding, and being unable to even fire mass drivers while cloaked. I get the feeling that like many things, increasing the volume of an object increases the power requirements for it more than a similarly shaped object of smaller size.

On a purely mathematical level, larger ships of identical "shape" and scaled up dimensions have a volume that increases exponentially relative to their surface area. So larger ships have a smaller surface area in comparison to their volume. Unless there's some kind of increasing energy requirement for moving the cloaking field further from the projector, it stands to reason that larger ships would have an easier time cloaking. This is evidenced by the same Clone Wars episode I referenced above, where it was discussed that there had previously been Capital Ship cloaking devices, but that nothing on this scale had ever been done before, suggesting that smaller ships are harder to cloak.

Another idea I have kicked around besides the one in my OP is for a Cloaked ship to always be allowed to move last and fire on PS with initiative being the "tiebreaker" during movement if both sides have Cloaked ships. This allows PS to still be meaningful but give all Phantoms a chance at being the slippery arc dodgers they need to be. Like my previous idea, decloaking would not give the additional movement.

3 hours ago, Astech said:

That's pretty game-breakingly difficult to hit. It would mean that any list composed of PS 8 or lower pilots automatically loses to Whisper, and the Illicit cloak basically becomes a single turn of total invulnerability to fire.

I think a sensor jammer kind of effect would be better, like:
"While you are cloaked, enemy ships must spend a focus token to declare you as the target of an attack"

That way, you get a ship that can be hit, but it takes some serious firepower to do.

On a purely mathematical level, larger ships of identical "shape" and scaled up dimensions have a volume that increases exponentially relative to their surface area. So larger ships have a smaller surface area in comparison to their volume. Unless there's some kind of increasing energy requirement for moving the cloaking field further from the projector, it stands to reason that larger ships would have an easier time cloaking. This is evidenced by the same Clone Wars episode I referenced above, where it was discussed that there had previously been Capital Ship cloaking devices, but that nothing on this scale had ever been done before, suggesting that smaller ships are harder to cloak.

I guess it depends on whether the cloaking effect merely passes along the surface or whether it is a field that surrounds the ship. If it is the former, then your premise would be true. If it is a field however, then the energy needed to produce a larger field will also increase exponentially as the field grows larger.

It could be that smaller ships have a difficulty because traditional cloaks had a minimum power draw that was too much for most smaller reactors to bear or the reactor would be too large for the ship to carry. On the other hand, it could be that it is impossible to cloak a Death Star because even with all its massive power the reactor couldn't generate a field large enough to extend past the surface. The largest thing that I've seen cloaked was the base that produced the TIE Phantoms itself which included an asteroid multiple docked Star Destroyers and an SSD but the majority of that was just inert minerals without energy requirements. From the cutscenes, it seems that the effect is indeed along the surface of the affected ships.

1 minute ago, flyboymb said:

I guess it depends on whether the cloaking effect merely passes along the surface or whether it is a field that surrounds the ship. If it is the former, then your premise would be true. If it is a field however, then the energy needed to produce a larger field will also increase exponentially as the field grows larger.

If that's the case, and the field has to permeate a certain amount off the hull for it to be effective, then the same concept remains true, as you're talking about a fixed distance from the surface of an object, so the larger you go the smaller that "skin" is going to be relative to the volume. It will be an exponential increase, but with smaller coefficients than the volume. Nevertheless, it'd probably make the ships stupidly large in order to be able to fire lasers at the same time *cough* star destroyer *cough*.

Quote

It could be that smaller ships have a difficulty because traditional cloaks had a minimum power draw that was too much for most smaller reactors to bear or the reactor would be too large for the ship to carry. On the other hand, it could be that it is impossible to cloak a Death Star because even with all its massive power the reactor couldn't generate a field large enough to extend past the surface. The largest thing that I've seen cloaked was the base that produced the TIE Phantoms itself which included an asteroid multiple docked Star Destroyers and an SSD but the majority of that was just inert minerals without energy requirements. From the cutscenes, it seems that the effect is indeed along the surface of the affected ships.

Very true, but technically Futurama had cloaking solid gold Death Stars so...

There are a lot of good ideas here.

In my opinion cloak should let you do the following things: nigh impossible to hit, unpredictable,

I like the idea of having to spend a focus token to be able to declare the cloaked ship.

I don't like the reposition part of the ability. It never really clicked with me. The ship doesn't appear out of nowhere, it's just really hard to follow.

So with those in mind:

Cloaked ships act as if they were PS 12 in the activation phase.

When a ship cloaks, it removes all red Target lock tokens and cannot be Target locked while cloaked.

To declare a cloaked ship as the target of an attack, the attacker needs to spend a focus token.

Cloaked ships add 2 to their agility.

Cloaked ships cannot perform attacks.

You may decloak when you activate in the activation phase.

ACD doesn't exist. Cloak doesn't let you move at all. The ship is just a really good arc dodger.

So what this does, is that you cloak, you become so hard to hit that people would rather start attacking someone else, you can also Dodge ordnance, but you cannot attack. You have superior board knowledge, and can move around easily to move into attack position. Once you do that, you have to decloak and attack.

This opens up the ways to build the phantom even. Frees up the Ept, can use lwf, makes them cheaper by removing the 4 point tax.

However, they can be shot down if they decloak easily, and no more crazy crazy moves that decide the game without planning too much. People might actually dial sth else than hard 1-s.

While the ship becomes stronger in some ways, also makes them weaker in others, and opens up options for the ship. It is a more lore friendly version too, instead of the crazy blink fest Whisper does, we have some serious flankers that cannot be dealt with unless they allow it.

Only issue I can see is 3 phantoms not attacking,never decloaking and winning at final salvo. But anyone doing something like that is a coward, and a no good rebel scum.