I'm sorry to say I have to come down on the "negatory pig-pen" side of this. Stealth ships and being able to insert said into the enemy territory are two things which pretty much destroy a game. While it is a neat story thing when 3 DDs drop their cloak and attack the hapless convoy...why is it 3 and not 30 or 300? If the answer to that is "it is expensive" my reply is so what? Is there a worth to it? Lets say the answer is "Yes" then it will be done and it will not be done in limited numbers and restricted to small ships. Why not insert an unclassified titan scale warship this way?
Also if I know what is on the other side of a jump point exactly, which is what you would be able to determine....then I won't loose a regular assault. The fortune cookies of war isn't my favorite military text but "a general who knows himself and his enemy need not fear defeat" is for the most part true. The ability to scout jump points is a huge advantage. The ability to sow massive disruption behind enemy lines is potentially a huge advantage...but mainly is just annoying to the person it happens to.
So given the munchkin response to 0.1% improvement I'd imagine they would go whole hog for this technology. And I've learned in Starfire that money is not a barrier it just pushes things outwards...galactic starfire attempts to get rid of the 3rdR snowball by increasing maintenance costs and reducing incomes and all it does is push the turn when it happens beyond what most games that the creator liked ended at. If a technology was good what it cost was rarely a determining factor in if it was used.
Cloaking devices need very very hard rules on them to stop them from just becoming dominant in games...look at Eve online for example. Stealth and its use was critical to sec 0 fights...but they dialed waaaaay back the effectiveness of stealth ships as strike platforms. And still I think their biggest value was in recon. Knowledge is power.
I mean the idea is sound from a drama/book/show/whatever perspective but for a game it is just something I think is best avoided. hell Starslayer and I have just hit the point where one of the bug races revealed their use of cloak...having 6 SDs uncloak during a warp point assault I was doing...that was...like..."oh smeg" ....thankfully I had SDs of my own I could toss through the WP and more importantly several hundred missile pods...that had been planned to be used in the follow up battle....but which saved me from having my assault force hammered into scrap metal. Every one of those SDs I tossed through the WP had to be repaired, plus I lost 6 assault CAs and I'm fairly sure the BCs got hammered on too... So yeah stealth is a game changing system when you have it in a game it is best to think long and hard on if you want it.
I don't think you need jump points/warp point/hyperlane connections but if you don't have them then you face a very different sort of battlespace one where you have to do disperse your fleet something which gamers in general don't like due to the inevitable micromanagement it costs. I mean a naval warfare game with strategic level decisions (or a good WW2 simulation) forces you to decide how to disperse your fleet to cover multiple theatres this is the same as what a space game has...where every system is "basilisk station" or "midway" or whatever. But who wants to have CL/DD groups patrolling your space compared to having a big fleet or two? I mean there is a reason most real navies had loads of DDs and such ships and why most games focus on battleships...one is sexy the other is...mundane and useful...
It is also worth noting the 8th Squadron in Tau Ceti blundered into 6 wolver FACs while moving through the system and had a point blank range encounter with them so even in the older game such events are possible without adding in new tech.
I also didn't read every reply in super detail so if I misunderstood something that is my fault.
I think you understood thing pretty well so I appreciate your opinion on the matter.
When we talk about JP assaults it is not very hard to scout and get information on their strength even without cloaking devices so I think that is a moot point. You just have to probe it and get the information.
I might also disagree about cost not being a strong factor as it certainly work in general... you would NEVER be able to use large invasion fleets with cloaks for example, those ships just are far to big and making them into military instead of commercial simply is not viable. One of the limitation we spoke about was ship size for example. You also do not have to make the cloaks 100% perfect either.
Aurora already have very little in regard to stopping snowballing the economy other than distance to resources.
I think it is more constructive to discuss what you need to do to make cloaks work rather than discus if you want asymmetrical warfare or not. I clearly simply do not agree with that notion that asymmetrical warfare would not add to the game. The point of the discussion is to make it balanced in terms of making it very uneconomic to use only cloaked ships or simply some severe limitation to them that make it undesirable.
So... why don't navies today use ONLY submarines... well it is prohibitively expensive and they are not very good at transporting stuff in any quantity. They can't operate aircraft or helicopters... but they could potentially operate drones in the future at least.
In the game then range would still be a problem as would the cost of the supplies necessary to operate them on enemy territory... there always are the chance of them being detected as you can only use their cloaks periodically and are more like U-Boats not submarines. In order to make them truly stealth you would need stealth engines, stealth hulls AND they also all need their own jump-drive as squadron jumps don't work while they are using the cloaking system... these are ALL very limiting things and would make them very inefficient for combat purposes unless you have extremely high technology.
They obviously would be good for scouting mostly and for light raid... as combat vessels it would take considerable effort of research... research someone else could use to get ahead in other technologies instead.
So no.. it would take huge investments to be at a stage where you could operate a fleet powerful enough to do any kind of fleet operation of any substantial nature and you would need a huge tech and industrial advantage.
In my opinion you would probably be allot better off to invest all that time and energy into just building a proper fleet as that wold be way more efficient to win actual battles.
The idea is to use them for covert ops, raiding and scouting... there should be ways to find and neutralise them (without too much micromanagement), they would need to be much harder to find than regular ships as it otherwise would make very little sense to use them at all.
You need to view them as U-Boats rather than submarines as their capability to remain cloaked for long periods should be very limited.