Stellaris Dev Diary #289 - Hide and Seek

[Flanelman]

No combat bonuses at all.

You get an attack speed bonus coming out of Cloak.

Your fleets are a tad weaker

Not meaningfully. Even in 3.6 weapons outscale defenses. Paradox made a big deal about setting up attack ranges and Cloak effectively removes all of those changes.

they are (mostly) limited to smaller ships

I'm not convinced yet. We will have to see where/how it fits in the tech curve. At worst you will just have a time band of effective big ship usage. The AI doesn't beeline techs, even with their bruteforce, and all around you should be ahead enough anyway that it shouldn't be a massive difference.

and all research spent getting cloak is not getting your more firepower.

Again, not meaningfully. Still need to see where exactly it fits in the tech tree, but right now it's ~5 additional techs, and maybe some slightly different routing. It sets you back maybe ~3 repeatables, and that is pretty minor.

 

[Flanelman]

You could not buy the DLC. But given how cloak works it doesn't seem to hard to defend against it. Cloak detection works along the entire length of a starbase sensor range, which can be boosted quite significantly.

So it's reasonable to give up ~5 other features because this one thing is kinda bullshit?

 

[Mcgan]

You get an attack speed bonus coming out of Cloak.

What? Isn't that only for the "Quantum Ambush" (or something like that), which, as its name suggests, requires using a Quantum Catapult?

 

[grommile]

So it's reasonable to give up ~5 other features because this one thing is kinda bad?

It's reasonable to do so (why I haven't bought Nemesia).

It's not reasonable to be asked to do so.

 

[Calvax]

So it's reasonable to give up ~5 other features because this one thing is kinda bullshit?

That's entirely up to the buyer to decide

 

[Flanelman]

What? Isn't that only for the "Quantum Ambush" (or something like that), which, as its name suggests, requires using a Quantum Catapult?

No, they said that it's 35% normally, 50% for cloak, as 'ambush' is tied to cloaking.

 

[Yurichenko]

I might have missed it in the dev answers but have they confirmed cloaks bypass FTL inhibitors? It seems likely they will but not too sure.

I think it hasn't been confirmed yet, but I already said that it doesn't seem very logical to me because the inhibitors don't have to be affected just because the ship is camouflaging itself and being stealthy so as not to be seen.

Now that I think about it, I realize that living in a nebula will be more of a disadvantage rather than an advantage, since enemy fleets will have an easier time hiding within your own territory and already weak detection systems will be even more useless.

 

[NilsFabian]

Psi has the most flavor, but isn't really the strongest. More flavour for other paths would still be appreciated.

Hmm, have to disagree here, the amount of flavor translates into advantages. It makes you immune against the contingency saboteurs, you get flat boni and what not.
Still. Yes the other ascensions are now in dire need of more flavor

 

[Ikael]

In a game where Alpha strike is 90% of the battle...being able to get easier alpha strikes unimpeded is the problem. It doesn't help that the Stellaris universe is designed for chokepoint utilization which is almost completely nullified by cloaking tech...and yeah you could either build weaker chokepoint bastions or build a support station nearby to give the chokepoint station visibility, but both of those solutions are imperfect in my opinion.

Static defenses in Stellaris are kinda subpar if you ask me (unless you become a bulwark). Diverting starbase firepower towards detection is not going to make that much of a difference, since fortified chokepoints are relatively easy to overpower past the early game already. Alpha strike meta got a bit less dominant with the latest adjustments, but if it is too much of a problem, there is always the option of giving temporal debuffs to cloaking ships if it becomes a too much successful strategy again. We will have to wait and see how it goes, I guess.

And give us passive cloak detection (even in Star Trek there were ways to 'detecting cloaked ships' without being able to target or know exactly where they were)....without having to spec into something special until late game techs....or give us more ascension perks. I don't want to feel like I HAVE TO TAKE Espionage pathways and Enigmatic Engineering just so I can see when I'm gonna get slapped. And if we're going to HAVE to take it then just give us the extra perk to facilitate that....rather than make us play worse versions of our playthroughs to accommodate some people's Romulan/Klingon/Hunt for the Red October fetish play....

As I understand, gathering enough military intel about an enemy empire will allow you to pinpoint their cloaked fleets, which is a great workaround for those empires unlucky enough to lose the sensor tech lottery (still, I would love to hear more from the devs about how espionage interacts with the cloaking mechanics).

Importantly though, hit and run attacks will be still viable. I assume there will be a cooldown between decloak and recloaking, and if that cooldown is not too long, you can attack and run to safety before the enemy can organise their response, then appear somewhere else in their territory and do it all again.

This I very much like the idea of doing, but at the same time, I can see it potentially being infuriating if you just don't have the tech for detection, you'd be playing whack-a-mole with a fleet that will cloak and slip right past you.

I know it has to be this way for performance reasons, but I could see a superior gameplay solution where Starbases have weaker detection per module but it applies to all of their sensor range, whilst some ships could be capable of mounting modules that have much stronger detection but only for the system their are in. Giving you a tradeoff being low-quality far-reaching detection, and then you could have "hunter" fleet with excellent but very short range detection capabilities. Feel free to roleplay as the Red October.

Yeah, Being able to use hit-and-run tactics could be great! I am not too sold on the idea of mobile detection, though, basically because you can always cheese it by dotting your empire with, say, spaced-out single corvettes stacked with sensors. I think that tie-ing detection to static defenses is the right approach, forcing you to chose between firepower and detection, and making it harder for big empires to defend against sneaky attacks. And espionage helping you to avoid the need of playing whack-a-mole altogeter would be wonderful, but I would need to see it confirmed.

 

[Mcgan]

No, they said that it's 35% normally, 50% for cloak, as 'ambush' is tied to cloaking.

Where did you hear / read that? That's news to me. And doesn't fit with what I've heard or read.

For starters, I'd say this directly opposes what you're saying:

You're forced to decloak when you attack. Additionally bonuses were experimented with (and can be added back in by modders) but were deemed to be too strong during development.

That sounds like they are disabled now.

I'll try to find it again, but I'm pretty sure they said in their stream that the only bonus is from doing a "Quantum Ambush", giving +33% fire rate if you don't have... I forgot what, and it's +50% if you do have that something. Maybe the new ascension perk.

Edit: Found it. It's like I thought, but the +50% instead of +33% is from the "Slingshot to the Stars" Origin: Stellaris: First Contact feature breakdown with the devs! | Live Stream

 

[SeraphAscending]

Just looked at the subspace drives again. Can empires that did not start with this civic get them in any way? Like salvaging debris?

 

[Archael90]

I have two questions:
1. Will there be some changes with critters or resurrected critters at least, or "cordyceptic drones" will become solely roleplay civic with no gameplay usage? They already move extremally slow (especially with progenitor hive origin), cannot progress with game, cannot have shields, and now will not being able to cloak and detect?
2. So... Warp drive returns?

 

[Olterin]

Hmmm... hold up, normally starbase sensor detection range doesn't go inside nebulae, not outside their own system. Does this mean that living in a nebula will require a detection setup on literally every last starbase in the nebula? That's... a nerf to Ocean Paradise

For a second I thought, it'd be great to have a nebula home cluster, but then realized the above, so...

 

[Ixal]

Hmm, have to disagree here, the amount of flavor translates into advantages. It makes you immune against the contingency saboteurs, you get flat boni and what not.
Still. Yes the other ascensions are now in dire need of more flavor

A bonus to cryptography, while being a bonus, doesn't make you strong.

 

[Wendigo514]

• Will losing an ideology war remove Eager Explorer civics and render all your ship designs invalid because your entire empire collectively forgets how to make subspace drives?

Maybe I missed something from some recent patch, or probably I haven't payed too much attention to Ideology wars, but doesn't they only shift the ethics and authority of the losing empire towards the ones of the winning empire?

 

[Masked Ermine]

Importantly though, hit and run attacks will be still viable. I assume there will be a cooldown between decloak and recloaking, and if that cooldown is not too long, you can attack and run to safety before the enemy can organise their response, then appear somewhere else in their territory and do it all again.

This I very much like the idea of doing, but at the same time, I can see it potentially being infuriating if you just don't have the tech for detection, you'd be playing whack-a-mole with a fleet that will cloak and slip right past you.

I know it has to be this way for performance reasons, but I could see a superior gameplay solution where Starbases have weaker detection per module but it applies to all of their sensor range, whilst some ships could be capable of mounting modules that have much stronger detection but only for the system their are in. Giving you a tradeoff being low-quality far-reaching detection, and then you could have "hunter" fleet with excellent but very short range detection capabilities. Feel free to roleplay as the Red October.

I was thinking about this generally, but I think just giving bastions (any station that has 50% or more of its modules dedicated to weapons systems (torpedoes, batteries, hangers) a passive plus one cloak detection and then rather than making cloaking 100% just make it....imperfect would help and makes sense, a border bastions one job is to surveil and restrict system access. So level one cloaked ships wouldn't be able to get passed bastion stations, but level two and above cloaked ships could, but though the ships could get passed the station they aren't entirely undetected. You don't have to decloak and kick out the vessel(s), but having a level one cloak detection should allow the detecting player to at least know if something cloaked has jumped into your system, you can't tell if its a civilian ship or a military fleet and you can't target or maybe even know where in the system the fleet it is, only that it there is something in the system somewhere...

Also I thought maybe another thing to do is limit the size of cloaked fleets. Make it so that if fleet has any cloakable ships then that fleet's cap = 20. Regardless of the fleet cap of the player otherwise. Keep it so that cloakable military fleets can only be like a pirate fleet sized and no larger. Something that's manageable for a cadre of patrolling defense fleets to handle...in theory but with player designs and behavior could be something that isn't ignorable. At least then you don't get a doomstack of 1million corvettes/destroyers/frigates decloaking over your homeworld.... And I think that makes sense from an in universe perspective, a massive fleet of cloaked ships is going to throw weird exotic radiation....that even non-cloak detectors can see. So in order for the cloak to even work it has to stay in small fleet contingents. Now yes, you could still send in forty thousand 20 cap fleets to be an ass but that's a lot of micro...

 

[Getty]

This right here.

Even outside of Syndicates or branch offices, som sort of cloaked piracy would be nice to see.

Criminal Syndicates desperately need to have the hostile takeover casus belli over all other Megacorp Empires. That should solve a great deal of problems with them by allowing them to take over other branch offices.

 

[Wendigo514]

I'm already thinking of a fun build that goes psionic ascension and uses the chosen one to remove the bad starting civics, it's just the old inward perfection trick again.

One question: Can a cloaked fleet bombard a planet while cloaked? I'm seeing some interesting potential for shenanigans with barbaric despoilers or nihilistic aquisition... Invisible kidnappers might be fun and scary.

If I'm not mistaken the trick wouldn't work in this case, the Divine Sovereign event has been changed, it still switch the ethics towards Fan Auth and Spiritualist and the authority towards Imperial, but it only enacts the special civic with the same name instead of changing your government into Imperial Cult, Philosopher King and Aristocratic Elite. It's true that the event still removes the civics made invalid by the ethics and authority switch (so the strategy still works with Inwards Perfection), however the new civic doesn't have either any ethics or authority requirements so it would still be present after the event.

 

[Masked Ermine]

I think it hasn't been confirmed yet, but I already said that it doesn't seem very logical to me because the inhibitors don't have to be affected just because the ship is camouflaging itself and being stealthy so as not to be seen.

Now that I think about it, I realize that living in a nebula will be more of a disadvantage rather than an advantage, since enemy fleets will have an easier time hiding within your own territory and already weak detection systems will be even more useless.

Depends on how inhibitors work. That's never really been addressed. If inhibition is a blanket inhibition (IE it's always on) then the inhibitors should still work....because the station basically has access codes or special frequencies to moderate who comes in and out of the system...and if those codes/frequencies change and/or are personalized then enemy ships should no better be able to jump out of the system via new hyperlane cloaked than uncloaked...

If however the inhibition is acute (IE the bastions shut down access once an invading fleet enters system and otherwise the hyperlanes are freely accessible) then yes the cloaked ship should be able to slip passed inhibition, which makes inhibition kinda useless as a tech now....a major strategy in Stellaris warfare is the trapping of enemy fleets in system using inhibitors from fortress worlds to citadels....cloaking just makes all of that pointless now....more or less...

Maybe we need a second tier of hyperlane inhibition... Tier one being acute inhibition; tier two being chronic inhibition with moderated access....

 

[Yurichenko]

Hmmm... hold up, normally starbase sensor detection range doesn't go inside nebulae, not outside their own system. Does this mean that living in a nebula will require a detection setup on literally every last starbase in the nebula? That's... a nerf to Ocean Paradise

For a second I thought, it'd be great to have a nebula home cluster, but then realized the above, so...

Not to mention that the nebula itself will increase the cloaking strength of enemy ships as well, making it even more difficult for you to spot them.