by Alfray Stryke
A staple of sci-fi that has long been missing from Stellaris is the ability to have fleets and stations capable of being cloaked and hiding from enemy sensors. With the addition of Awareness and improvements to interactions with pre-FTL civilizations, we felt that First Contact was the right place to explore how cloaking could be added to the game in a meaningful way, tying into warfare, exploration and espionage.
When we set out to design the cloaking and counter-cloaking systems our goals were that:
- Science ships should be able to equip cloaking devices to allow exploration of space regardless of if another empire has closed their borders to you.
- Observation posts should be capable of being hidden from the pre-FTL civilizations they were observing.
...