cloaking rules

I posted the rules to which you refer.

I did not understand from your post if the Advanced Cloaking put the cloaked
ship in standard mode or blind mode cloaking with the additional ability to
fire.

I also have a concern about the ranges you stated for scanning. Can a FCS be
used to search for a cloaked ship and then be used to fire on that ship? If
not, the cloaked ship is immune to all standard ships below Light Cruisers
(since they only have one FCS). Also, most ships of Light Cruiser to
Battlecruiser (1/2 of the Fleetbook Battlecruisers have 2 FCS) could
only attack cloaked ships at 12" or less (one FCS to scan, one FCS to shoot).
At a the bare minimum, the weapons of the cloaked ship should be reduced to
12" and the FCS should be allowed to fire on the cloaked ship as well as
search for it (if it finds it).

A cloaked ship should have the same difficulty locking onto a ship through
the cloak. It should require a 6+ on a d6 modified as below to lock onto
the target (and then normal chances of hitting with the weapons).
Target ship used MD, +1
Target ship fired during the Firing Phase +1
Target ship scanned area of cloaked ship +2 (regardless of if the
cloaked ship was found or not)
Target ship is powering up for FTL +1
Target ship has taken damage this turn +1

I still prefer to not allow a cloaked ship fire, as it adds a lot of
complication and unbalances the game. At the MOST, a cloaking field should add
no more value than level 2 screens (<shudder> Think of a Komarov SDN with a
cloaking field instead of level 2 screens).

When I set up the rules for standard cloaking, I may have been unclear.

The distance of 12" (6" for vector) was set so that it was 2x the range of
salvo missiles. This allowed the area to be saturated by salvo missiles to
simulate depth charges, but a single salvo missile had little (but some)
chance of catching the cloaked ship.

The clock direction and range from the cloaked ship to the marker did NOT have
to remain constant from turn to turn. It just needed to be written down when
it changed. This could make the cloaked ship's movement seem erratic.

I was trying to avoid giving the cloaked ship a free shot at other ships. If
you allow a cloaked ship to fire, the player will always (or almost always)
wait until the cloaked ship is the last ship to fire. Other ships having fired
would not be able to return fire. And the next turn the ship would have to be
searched for in order to find it. (Under your Advanced Cloak, do the bonuses
last through the next turn? If not the problem persists with Advanced Cloaking
system.) I felt that this was too lopsided. I had wanted to allow the cloaked
ship to fire at a penalty, but the mechanics of Full Thrust use different
methods to determine a hit with
different weapons. A -1 penalty for beam weapons is very different from
a -1
for pulse torpedoes (especially after shields are taken into account). Because
of this, I did not include allowing a cloaked ship to fire. I had also thought
about allowing return fire through the next fire phase, but this would not be
possible unless the location of the cloaked ship was made known in the next
turn. I felt that this was unacceptable (I wanted to keep disclosure to the
current turn only).

I also added rules that if a ship was in standard mode, and the location of
his ship was scanned (regardless to if the ship was found or not), the
standard cloaked ship could then fire on the scanning ship (but would pinpoint
his location). This would make scanning for a cloaked ship a 2 edged
proposition. If you scan and find the ship, you can fire on it. If you scan
and don't find the cloaked ship, it will probably get a free shot at you.

-----
Brian Bell
http://fly.to/fullthrust
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