What are the plans for stealth mechanics? How big of an effect will stealth have on general gameplay? What are the trade-offs and benefits?asked by Black Dove
TL;DRStealth means reducing heat and EM signature with less powerful, more efficient equipment, not cloaking, so you are harder to detect but lose output; powering down is another option with a reboot penalty.
So a lot of times when people ask about stealth, they're talking like Predator-style or Klingon cloaking device type, which is not our approach to it at all. Stealth is really an effort to reduce your signature for your ship, so the amount of heat you're generating, EM in general, and you can't really change your profile, so that's hard to do. So the trade-off is you get equipment that is less powerful, consumes less power, is more efficient, so you're not generating as much heat or as much EM signature, and then the end result is that you're harder to detect. You will lose some of the output of that stuff. So you have less power, you have less oomfy guns.
So it's a yin-yang balance kind of thing.
Right, exactly. And you could also turn off your ship and wait for somebody. But then the penalty to that is, well, you have to turn it back on and let it boot up again when you're going to attack. So the trade-offs are just what do you want to be better at.