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Playing as an exterminator means no cloaking

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Adaman5280

Adaman5280

Second Lieutenant
Jan 14, 2021
177
612
The enemy has no actual detection infrastructure but thanks to having 100% intel on me from getting refugees they can reveal my cloaked fleets anyways. Because you know, we gave them a full dossier and a guided tour before annihilating them just in case they ended up escaping.

why isn't intel gained from refugees capped? I get it they tell their saviors everything they know but realistically how much can they really know? I suppose they had plenty of time while fleeing the robotic death squads hunting them down to document the ins and outs of my entire operation including fleet locations.

I would just humbly suggest that intel from refugees be capped at like 50. After all what's the point of having high encryption if the enemy just needs to wait till i conquer my next planet to unveil all my secrets?
 
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Probably should be capped, yes.

I'd argue it should be over 50, largely because we aren't talking about a few hundred refugees. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. And societies that have actual working understandings of biological and non-biological brains to use as a part of analyzing the information.

On a game level. One of the reasons to give intel from refugees is to make it easier for the enemies of the exterminator to fight back. And in that situation, you need at least enough to make that effective. Clocking probably should still work at high enough levels of clocking, but I don't know exactly how clocking interacts with the intel system.

It definitely should be able to pierce the cloak if they are also spying on you however. And I don't know how the AI works with the espionage system.
 
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Newbee53 said:
I don't know exactly how clocking interacts with the intel system.
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A cloaked ship is not revealed by intel, even at 100%. To uncover cloaking you still need sensor arrays.

Edit: My bad, missed the tooltip for max intel indeed. AI does rarely use cloaking so i didn't notice.
 
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A2ch0n said:
A cloaked ship is not revealed by intel, even at 100%. To uncover cloaking you still need sensor arrays.
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Unfortunately this is not true. as i mentioned in the initial post, the empire in question did not have any cloaking detection infrastructure. Furthermore the in game tooltip actually specifically says that full intel does reveal cloaked fleets.


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Intel as a whole needs to be reworked. It is laughably easy to get 100 base intel.
 
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Cloaking is for disgusting organics that can't help but be ashamed by the way their oozing bodies look.
 
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Cloaking more generally is for weaklings who are not able to just overpower their enemies with sheer brute force.

More to the point, I find cloaking in the game just ... not worth the effort. It doesn't allow you to do anything truly sneaky like sparking wars with false flag operations or slowly destroying an empire while pretending to be their ally. It just allows you to make ambushes during regular wars you have to declare normally for the usual specific CBs. You're either stronger than your opponent and you don't need cloaking or you're not stronger and you shouldn't be declaring war in the first place.
 
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Dragatus said:
Cloaking more generally is for weaklings who are not able to just overpower their enemies with sheer brute force.

More to the point, I find cloaking in the game just ... not worth the effort. It doesn't allow you to do anything truly sneaky like sparking wars with false flag operations or slowly destroying an empire while pretending to be their ally. It just allows you to make ambushes during regular wars you have to declare normally for the usual specific CBs. You're either stronger than your opponent and you don't need cloaking or you're not stronger and you shouldn't be declaring war in the first place.
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true enough, but I find it adds a fun vibe to certain builds and playthroughs. clocked torpedo fleets are good for destroying starbases without 'requiring' a way to deal with fleets. Its not great. but its a little better than not having it.
 
The current best use of cloaking is to spawn storms in other empires with the galactic weather control ascension perk.
 
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Dragatus said:
Cloaking more generally is for weaklings who are not able to just overpower their enemies with sheer brute force.

More to the point, I find cloaking in the game just ... not worth the effort. It doesn't allow you to do anything truly sneaky like sparking wars with false flag operations or slowly destroying an empire while pretending to be their ally. It just allows you to make ambushes during regular wars you have to declare normally for the usual specific CBs. You're either stronger than your opponent and you don't need cloaking or you're not stronger and you shouldn't be declaring war in the first place.
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I enjoy using cloaked science ships to map out other empires' hyperlane structures and key planets, do active recon for intel, get a look at their fleets while my fleet is still at home where I can refit to counter, keep eyes on their fleets so that I know when I can split up mine to take many outposts in parallel vs staying stacked up and beelining for a fleet engagement, that sort of thing. Setting myself up for a quick, decisively-won war, rather than winning the war with cloaked military fleets.
 
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jedavis said:
I enjoy using cloaked science ships to map out other empires' hyperlane structures and key planets, do active recon for intel, get a look at their fleets while my fleet is still at home where I can refit to counter, keep eyes on their fleets so that I know when I can split up mine to take many outposts in parallel vs staying stacked up and beelining for a fleet engagement, that sort of thing. Setting myself up for a quick, decisively-won war, rather than winning the war with cloaked military fleets.
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Personally, I enjoy using cloaked ships for stuff like that and also for amplifying torpedoes because I no longer need to camp the hyperlane - I can just close to torpedo range cloaked. Also nice to wait for reinforcements cloaked, if necessary.

In any case, the obvious answer to me is that refugees should provide system-only intel. I can understand them knowing about my fleet in the system they had to flee, even cloaked given enough of them, but not one further away and the same is broadly true for other intel categories. There's no mechanism for intel to give information selectively per system, but there should be.
 
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Thiend said:
In any case, the obvious answer to me is that refugees should provide system-only intel. I can understand them knowing about my fleet in the system they had to flee, even cloaked given enough of them, but not one further away and the same is broadly true for other intel categories. There's no mechanism for intel to give information selectively per system, but there should be.
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That would only work with an intel rework. Would be cool, but it's not coming for quite a while, I think.
 
I suppose another partial solution to OP's original problem would be to switch to Extermination purge instead of Chemical Processing, which would cut the fraction of generated refugees from 20% of purged pops to 5% - a 75% reduction. Pretty energy-expensive though.
 
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jedavis said:
I suppose another partial solution to OP's original problem would be to switch to Extermination purge instead of Chemical Processing, which would cut the fraction of generated refugees from 20% of purged pops to 5% - a 75% reduction. Pretty energy-expensive though.
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I mean, should an Exterminator be relying on chemical processing anyway? One day the organics will run out and you can't get energy that way, it seems like a crutch.
 
Kataclyszm said:
I mean, should an Exterminator be relying on chemical processing anyway? One day the organics will run out and you can't get energy that way, it seems like a crutch.
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I do get nervous when I'm playing exterminators and I'm purging. My energy income is plentiful, but there's that nagging feeling that when this batch of organics runs out, my science will have grown enough that I will be in the red and have to rebalance things. I might have more fun if I were using Extermination instead and knew that my economy was growing stably, without imminent problems masked by a temporary credit boom.
 
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jedavis said:
I suppose another partial solution to OP's original problem would be to switch to Extermination purge instead of Chemical Processing, which would cut the fraction of generated refugees from 20% of purged pops to 5% - a 75% reduction. Pretty energy-expensive though.
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I did actually try this funnily enough and it seemed to help somewhat. Of course with the sheer amount of pops I'm purging some empires do still get refugees regardless, and unfortunately the amount of intel gained from a single batch of refugees is still pretty high (10 i think) So its still pretty easy to get enough.
 
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