Cloaks?

[Tor Cha]

Agreed.  ECM Doesn't hide you, it it makes you harder to hit.  Not in a direct reduction of chance-to-hit way like extra speed, but by forcing your enemy to get closer.

You could almost lump Microwave beams under stealth tech, though.  Blinding your enemy is a good way to avoid being seen.  In one of my current games, one of the races I'm playing relies heavily on stealth - including the use of Microwaves to disable enemy sensors.  So far their doctrine seems to be to close range stealthily via cloak/thermal reduction in the hopes of getting close enough to shut the enemy down with Microwaves and then bypass defenses entirely with Mesons.  Not far enough in the game to declare the doctrine a success or a failure yet.  As a slight tangent here, I'll say that one thing I would be *very* interested in seeing is some way to specifically disable enemy engines.

Could you give some Examples?

[Mor]

When you think of Cloaking its best to think of modern plane construction technique, than startreck invisibility cloak.


There are 3 ways by which you can be detected:

* Active sensor work just like radar, they gather info by bouncing radio waves instant gravitational pulses from crafts. Cloaking is a passive method that allow you to reduce the pulse reflection from the craft (thus making it appear smaller), similarly to how those oddly shaped dark Stealth fighters or even modern ships does it.

Presumably ECM allows to actively counter the active pulses by adding noise that will confuse the radar reducing its precision.

* Thermal sensors, allow to lock on your Engine plume, which can be countered by developing various "thermal reduction" techniques.

* Em sensor, allow to lock on energy sources like radar or shields. Once you go active everyone will know where you are.