Enhancements to perception and stealth

[Aury]

Right now it appears that if stealth >= perception, a stealthed ship vanished outside of a very short radius (maybe 20-30ls? Totally a guess), while anything inside a nebula has its sensors completely dampened (as if everything was stealthed) - its a very inflexible and binary system which I'm finding hard to do creative things with.

It would be nice if stealth functioned on more of a gradient For example, if perception == stealth, the ship could be detected up to say, ~50ls. If perception < stealth, then the radius would shrink down in steps of 10ls except for the last step of maybe 5ls. If perception > stealth, then the radius would grow in steps of 10ls up to the default 100ls. - A stealth level of 0 is no stealth (so perception levels would be bumped up to 5 instead of the default 4)

nebulae would instead of having a flat effect as they currently do, would be able to jam the sensors in a radius, possibly by having a 'perception modifier' which could alter every ship's perception in the manner of effectivePerception = basePerception - perceptionModifier. Thus a nebula with a modifier of 5 would cause a pair of standard ships be unable to detect eachother outside of a 50ls radius, and a ship with a moderate level of stealth would be completely hidden in a nebula.

This sort of system would also make way for variation in playership base perception stats and possibly equipment that could alter the perception stat.

[JohnBWatson]

This is a very interesting idea. How would the AI cope with projectiles seemingly coming out of nowhere? Right now, AI ships seem to ignore nebulae and stealth completely aside from deciding at what range to begin engagement.

[Aury]

It appears that 'disappearing' into a nebula causes other ships in the nebula to start attacking your last known location (unless a very odd coincidence happened and something I missed happened to end up in the location where I was. I have not been able to conclusively figure out what happens when thips happens with stealth.

[Song]

I don't know if this has changed, but it used to be that once detected, the all-seeing AI would never stop seeing you until you got past the default "Ok, give up" range. For the playership, Stealth7 (on a projectile) makes it only appear on the scanner if it's less than 30ls away. Not sure how the AI handles it currently. But better stealth is always good.