Stellaris Dev Diary #289 - Hide and Seek

[Harkinian's Dinner]

This is what I'm talking about....I dislike this. It completely makes an entire portion of the diplomatic interactions and war planning irrelevant...and it is very exploitable...

You can't get your transports past the blocking empire, so any war you wage this way likely won't have huge consequences.

 

[Masked Ermine]

Of all 4X cloak mechanics i have seen so far this is the least powerful in itself. No combat bonuses at all. It's mostly about picking engagements of your choice.
If cloak also has a cooldown like jump drives (though preferably a bit shorter), i really don't see how it will be the default go to for everyone.

Your fleets are a tad weaker, they are (mostly) limited to smaller ships and all research spent getting cloak is not getting your more firepower.

The only genuine benefit they provide is the strategic advantage, which can even be nullified with one strong detection array in your core sector to protect what's most important.
I don't think they'll have much more impact than jump drives to in late-game.

I think it's mostly larger empires that are more vulnerable to cloaking until they have the resources (and time) to plaster gateways everywhere to shorten their response time.
And i quite frankly welcome anything that is more of a threat to bigger targets.

Honestly I want to see cloak cripple fleets, not just minorly inconvenience them. I want to see a cloaked fleet be able to infiltrate and then not be able to do anything about it, because they'll have to go to some small area to decloak, and wait for a year to get their stuff back together. I'd also like to see cloaking devices have time limits, IE you only get a year to get their cloak work done before it needing to be shut down for maintenance for four months (all the while with the crippling drive/shield/weapons debuffs).

 

[Mcgan]

Another thing i have not seen yet:
Does cloaking have a cooldown? Or can i snipe a starbase in the back and immediately re-cloak? If it has a cooldown, how long is that?

They said there is a cooldown of 120 days at the moment. But they might change it before release. Or after, depending on feedback.
And the cooldown is the same no matter how good your cloaking tech is.

 

[Masked Ermine]

You can't get your transports past the blocking empire, so any war you wage this way likely won't have huge consequences.

I don't want to deal with cloak ships destroying infrastructure and messing with trade in my borders at all....period...it's not fun....

 

[Calvax]

I don't want to deal with cloak ships destroying infrastructure and messing with trade in my borders at all....period...it's not fun....

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.

 

[Muellhaufen]

Active Recon is a separate category of intel.

Is it? I don't see anything in the diary to suggest that AR works differently to normal intel. In the dev stream they even showed it off, while they had the ship performing AR their base intel on the other empire was raised by +10 (their capital was only tier 1).

 

[grommile]

Honestly I want to see cloak cripple fleets, not just minorly inconvenience them.

I'm firmly on your side over cloaking and espionage (so this DLC is joining Nemesis on the never-buy list) but, like.

A useless feature is worse than a non-existent one.

 

[Muellhaufen]

- Most importantly: no combat while cloaked. Which is my main gripe with those kinds of stealth systems. Cloaking will be all about getting an alpha strike and hitting your enemy's weak spots, rather than becoming invulnerable unless your enemy has detection. This makes dealing with cloaked ships much more doable, and it will also encourage you to spread your fleet: you might not have unlimited detection, but you can always have fast-reaction defensive fleets ready to pound weaker infiltration mono-fleets.

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.

 

[Ixalmaris]

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.

You think having to manually hunt cloaked fleets would be less infuriating? Especially after jump drives come online?

 

[Muellhaufen]

You think having to manually hunt cloaked fleets would be less infuriating? Especially after jump drives come online?

Manually hunting is better than not being able to hunt them at all

You have to give up a slot in your Starbase for just ONE detection level... so you do you think it's going to be reasonable to protect most of your territory from cloaked fleets passively? Just sacrifice anchorage, economic benefits, etc. so you can nullify cloaking in the area surrounding your one Starbase, but you've still got a larger territory unprotected from stealth attacks. Unless you want to turn half of your Starbases into detection posts, but that's not going to go well either.

Having some way to actively hunt at least allows you to make up for areas of your territory unprotected by a Starbase with detection modules. So again: Manually hunting is better than not being able to hunt them at all

 

[SeraphAscending]

Honestly I want to see cloak cripple fleets, not just minorly inconvenience them. I want to see a cloaked fleet be able to infiltrate and then not be able to do anything about it, because they'll have to go to some small area to decloak, and wait for a year to get their stuff back together. I'd also like to see cloaking devices have time limits, IE you only get a year to get their cloak work done before it needing to be shut down for maintenance for four months (all the while with the crippling drive/shield/weapons debuffs).

As @grommile said, a useless feature is always worse than a non-existent one.

I completely understand the fear of not wanting stuff to randomly blow up in your face with no measure against that, but i really don't think that is what we got with either espionage or cloaking.
They are rather timid and just allow a different avenue. (espionage even too timid)

I even think that cloaking is better in that regard, because as the defender, you can actually do something against that with detection arrays and stuff.
In my opinion there should be something similar for espionage that you invest into stricter surveillance (via policy or edict) and will be significantly less troubled by espionage and only hardcore subterfuge focussed empires can even break through that at all. That combined with slightly stronger operation effects would be a good change.

I think a lot of the criticism of espionage and cloak here is not directed at Stellaris' implementation of it, but every other 4X game that did it wrong.

 

[Ixalmaris]

Manually hunting is better than not being able to hunt them at all

You have to give up a slot in your Starbase for just ONE detection level... so you do you think it's going to be reasonable to protect most of your territory from cloaked fleets passively? Just sacrifice anchorage, economic benefits, etc. so you can nullify cloaking in the area surrounding your one Starbase, but you've still got a larger territory unprotected from stealth attacks. Unless you want to turn half of your Starbases into detection posts, but that's not going to go well either.

Having some way to actively hunt at least allows you to make up for areas of your territory unprotected by a Starbase with detection modules. So again: Manually hunting is better than not being able to hunt them at all

If you have such a large realm that you cant cover the important stuff with 2-3 sensor starbases with 4+ sensor range then there is no way that you could find anything by manually searching.
Unless you make cloaking useless by having 1 corvette in each system already provide maximum detection.

 

[Sylmyn]

Honestly I want to see cloak cripple fleets, not just minorly inconvenience them. I want to see a cloaked fleet be able to infiltrate and then not be able to do anything about it, because they'll have to go to some small area to decloak, and wait for a year to get their stuff back together. I'd also like to see cloaking devices have time limits, IE you only get a year to get their cloak work done before it needing to be shut down for maintenance for four months (all the while with the crippling drive/shield/weapons debuffs).

And… what’s the point of cloak then?
If it’s striclty better to just go stomp starbase, why bother researching cloak at all?
Cloaking is already pretty tame imo

 

[Yurichenko]

I keep seeing examples of cloaking being significantly more useful in defending your home turf than offensively outside it, which saddens me immensely. In the same way, the countermeasures to cloaking seem too weak to me, making them only defensive, limited and extraordinarily weak.
In short, we have a mechanic that could be more useful when defending than when attacking and that barely has any methods to effectively counter it.

 

[Muellhaufen]

If you have such a large realm that you cant cover the important stuff with 2-3 sensor starbases with 4+ sensor range then there is no way that you could find anything by manually searching.
Unless you make cloaking useless by having 1 corvette in each system already provide maximum detection.

> If you have such a large realm that you cant cover the important stuff with 2-3 sensor starbases with 4+ sensor range

I'm sure you could cover most of the important stuff, but what about the rest? If you literally cannot detect ships elsewhere and cannot do anything about stealth attacks in certain systems, that's going to be annoying as hell in warfare, especially with the way war exhaustion works with claimed systems, imagine trying to end a war but the guy is holding out for another few decades for status quo because of unconquered systems, which whenever you reconquer the stealth fleets just appear elsewhere and unconquer another random system. And there's nothing you can do about it because you can't build detection modules in the nearby captured Starbase unless you are in total war. NO THANK YOU to that.

> Unless you make cloaking useless by having 1 corvette in each system already provide maximum detection.

That's why I said "some" ships should be able to mount detection modules, definitely not size 1 ships... and it should come with further drawback, like requiring a lot of power (therefore forcing you to underequip that ship in other ways to not go over the power limit).

 

[SeraphAscending]

That's why I said "some" ships should be able to mount detection modules, definitely not size 1 ships... and it should come with further drawback, like requiring a lot of power (therefore forcing you to underequip that ship in other ways to not go over the power limit).

Devs have already stated that for performance reasons detection is static and not bound to moving entities. If anything something like a triggered scan pulse of a science vessel might be doable.

 

[CometBliss]

I am only scared of cloaked ships skipping over ftl inhibitors during a war… any specific reason to add this change? Because in theory a fanatic purifier could just sneak by if you by chance also live in a nebula or a place that increases cloaking strength and Armageddon your planet from orbit. Once they take your station of course.

 

[Pancakelord]

New AI component. Modders can also specify that AI should prefer a given ship role for certain ship types now.

Interesting. I'm looking forward to figuring out how this works.

• So is there a way to say 'prefer artillery corvettes (missile corvette) if AI has missiles as it's preferred weapons type in its AI personality profile?
• If so, it might be possible to script up AIs actually building missile/energy/kinetic heavy fleets (and combining this with them prioritising those weapons in tech draws) for moderately distinct enemies ('Yaldar republican love energy corvettes, Blorgs love kinetic destroyers' etc) - at the expense of AIS not being as militarily flexible -- but they already aren't much of a challenge, ship-design wise, *shrug*.
  • A variation of this would be to focus on shields, armor or 'stealth' for defence, too. Rather than Ais picking whatever has the highest energy draw, weighted against personality type (as currently seems to be the case).

I also see there's a new ship_limit = N, property for non-core components - it applies to weapons too? Might be an interesting way to limit certain things with combat script effects.

 

[Calvax]

I am only scared of cloaked ships skipping over ftl inhibitors during a war… any specific reason to add this change? Because in theory a fanatic purifier could just sneak by if you by chance also live in a nebula or a place that increases cloaking strength and Armageddon your planet from orbit. Once they take your station of course.

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.

 

[Flanelman]

at this point youre basically just asking me if i'm the ai dev for stellaris

No I'm not. I am asking you to justify your argument. They claimed that Frigates are useless as Cruisers are better, and you claimed "only way to beat +8". My question is when are you ever going to be in a situation where you need to beat +8?