AI War:Cloaking
How Does Cloaking Work?
A: There are three states of cloaking:
- Fully Cloaked (ship is invisible, and unshootable except by the very rare "Counter Spy" ship that AI players sometimes have).
- Partially Cloaked (a lilac halo is all that shows for the ship, so players can't tell what kind of ship it is, but they can still shoot at it).
- Decloaked (same as any other ship without cloaking).
When a cloaked ship fires its weapons, it will have to decloak for around 8 seconds after its last fired shot. When a cloaked ship is tagged by a tachyon beam emitter, it will become partially cloaked for around 15 seconds.
The main benefit of cloaking is of course the surprise factor, but it is also an excellent way for ships to slip past otherwise very-difficult defenses. Even ion cannons can't fire at fully-cloaked ships. This makes cloaked ships great for deep raids, or gate-raids on planets that are otherwise troublesome. All scouts also have cloaking, which is useful for helping them to slip past enemy defenses.
Of course, the enemy will very commonly have tachyon beam emitters in place at key junctions, so this makes your job harder. To properly defend your own wormholes if the AI is using cloaked ships, you'll also want to include some sort of tachyon beam emitters at your wormholes. Otherwise your tractor beams and turrets are pretty useless, since they can't see the enemy ships to grab/shoot them.
No Auto-Attack
Why Aren't My Cloaked Ships Auto-Attacking Enemies?
A: Unlike ships without cloaking, your cloaked ships won't automatically open fire on enemy vessels unless they are in attack-move mode or free-roaming defender mode. They will still attack targets that you explicitly assign, but that's it. This takes a bit of getting used to at first, but it is incredibly useful once you are accustomed to it. Since the cloaked ships act to first preserve their cloak (unless you tell them otherwise by putting them in one of the two aforementioned aggressive modes), this helps them slip right past enemy ships without having to go the long way around.
Cloaking Booster
How Do Cloaking Boosters Work?
A: Mark I through III scouts have a "cloaking booster" ability, which lets them work better in groups. When scouts are traveling in groups, some of them will boost the cloaks of the others, which protects the boosted scouts from being revealed by tachyon beam emitters. The scouts doing the boosting cannot themselves be boosted, which means that some of the scouts are likely to be picked off or at least damaged at every tachyon beam emitter that is passed. Higher-level scouts can boost multiple ships at once, and also have a bigger boost range.
In short, this lets some of the scouts in a group provide "perfect" protection to other members of that group, taking all the incoming shots on themselves until they are destroyed (at which time other members of the group start protecting each other). This prevents all scouts from being destroyed at once when passing through highly-defended planets or wormholes.
