Cloaking, or Hiding from an Opponent's Scanners

More about Scanning

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Cloaking devices allow you to reduce your opponent's effective scanner range in detecting your cloaked fleet or planet. Cloaking devices do not make your fleet or planet invisible: no matter how strong the cloak, the object will always be visible to another fleet at the same location.

Cloaking reduces your opponent's scanner range by a specific percentage. The higher the percentage, the more the range is reduced.

The maximum cloaking is 98%.

Cloaking is shared by the entire fleet. The cloaking percentage of a fleet is displayed in the Fleet Composition tile, except when in small screen mode.

Uncloaked ships are also hidden in a cloaked fleet, although they do reduce the cloaking percentage. For a description of how cloaking is calculated, read The Guts of Cloaking.

Tachyon Detector Defeats Cloaks

A Tachyon Detector reduces other player's cloaks and allows you to target cloaked ships on the first pass of targeting. The Tachyon Detector is described in the Special section of the Technology Browser and in Detecting an Opponents Fleets.

When you add a Tachyon Detector to a hull design, the Hull Designer displays other player's cloaking effectiveness on the scanner information line.

Advantage of a Second Cloak

Cloaks are completely additive. Additional cloaks reduce your fleet's visibility.

Types of Cloaks

There are several types of cloaking devices. If your race is based on the Super-Stealth primary trait, you also have access to cloaked armor—the Depleted Neutronium, a cloaked shield—the Shadow Shield, and one ship-based cloaked scanner--the Chameleon.  Multiple cloaks on the same ship can all be of the same or different strengths. You add one or more cloaks when you create the ship design. To learn more about a specific cloak, open the Technology Browser (press F2) and view the Special category.

Cloaked Starbases

Adding cloaks to a starbase hull cloaks only the starbase, not the planet.

Learn about:

The Guts of Cloaking