| How to Hide my PRT |
Sun, 16 January 2011 02:50  |
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| neilhoward | 
 | Commander |
Messages: 1112
Registered: April 2008
Location: SW3 & 10023 | |
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SO, I need to avoid combat, WMs, and detection. How do I do that?
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| Re: How to Hide my PRT |
Sun, 16 January 2011 08:26  |
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| neilhoward wrote on Sun, 16 January 2011 08:50 |
SO, I need to avoid combat, WMs, and detection. How do I do that?
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Why?
In combat you can't identify the stealthies except the ships are equipped with components available only to them.
Same about WM.
Detection is a difficult thing: As a matter of fact it is the non-detection that gives away the stealthies. The 75% standard cloak leads to detection only quite far into the enemy's scanner ranger. When I detect a ship far in my scanner range and I can't remember seeing it before, I recheck my previous m-files... if the ship should had been on the scanners: PRT=super stealth.
But with planet hopping you can avoid this kind of detection.
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| Re: How to Hide my PRT |
Thu, 20 January 2011 05:27 |
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If your question is about fleets and fleets only, then the answer is simple: stay away from enemy scanners - which means planets known (or believed) to have planetary scanners, and enemy fleets known (or believed) to have onboard scanners.
How far should you stay away? Since your fleets have 75% inbuilt cloaking, the enemy needs to close in to 1/4 of normal scanning range to actually see you. Just stay farther away than 25% of known (or believed) enemy scanner range and you're on the safe side. If you have cloaking devices on board, you can stay even closer without being detected. If you know the enemy has no penetrating scanners, planet-hopping is also helpful.
This way you avoid detection, combat (you cannot be attacked unless detected first) and WM espionage (if they don't scan you, they won't learn your design), all in one.
However, as Altruist wrote, hiding your PRT is more than just avoiding detection. You can start by applying some tips found in this article. More on top of that:
- don't equip your ships with PRT-specific technology unless necessary, and avoid detection of such fleets at all costs.
- if you have any pre-built ships with default names (i.e. Shadow Sleuth scout which is a giveaway for certain SS races), scrap them ASAP and build more "generic" design in their place.
- if you want to keep your planet locations and hab ranges shrouded, try to fight enemy scouts before they enter your territory. Your cloaking ability should serve you well to set up ambushes on unsuspecting enemy scouts and vanish before the enemy can react.
- watch out for packets flung by a PP race; they have a penetrating scanner worth the distance they travel per year, and while ship cloaking works normally against these, planets can be scanned at full range. Try to "rob" these packets clean of minerals before they enter your domain.
Sooner or later, though, the other players will wise up on you. Once they do, your strategy should be modified - from "avoiding detection at all costs"
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| Re: How to Hide my PRT |
Fri, 10 June 2016 01:58 |
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 magic9mushroom |
| Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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Think about what your opponent must see to deduce that you're SS, and then avoid him seeing that. Unfortunately, in some cases this is Catch-22; your attempts to stop him seeing X that implies you're SS will result in him seeing Y which also implies you're SS (e.g. ambushing a JoaT's penscanner scout, to prevent it scanning your homeworld, involves moving within its scanner range).
SS is one of the harder PRTs to hide, and in some cases it's not even possible (the obvious case is if you start within 300 ly of someone's homeworld with Elec 3+NAS and the universe is too sparse to planet-hop). It's not the worst, though; CA and AR are basically impossible to hide since any scan of their planets will give them away, and IS *can* hide the freighter growth (by preventing it) but cripples itself by doing so. HE, JoaT and SD can be flawlessly hidden (at the cost of not using their toys, which HE and to some extent JoaT won't like doing), IT and PP have tells they can hide but early detection of the second planet can't always be avoided and narrows it down to one of the two, and WM is revealed the moment there's a space or ground battle but otherwise has no tells at all until they build Battle Cruisers.
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| Re: How to Hide my PRT |
Sun, 19 June 2016 21:33 |
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| magic9mushroom |
| Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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Okay, I'll admit I was being a little terse there. Let me elaborate a bit more.
The three situations which prove someone to be SS are:
1) You see a ship that could not have gotten to where you saw it without spending a year in deep space within your scanner range, but you didn't see it that year.
2) You get a penscan on a world and things that should be there (e.g. HW starbase, freighters on a world whose pop is increasing) aren't.
3) You see an SS hull, or learn a design (combat/WM) with an SS toy on it.
1) and 2) detect the SS's inherent cloaking, although when doing 2) you should remember that ISB also gives 20% cloaking. 3) is the basic giveaway which is common to all PRTs with toys.
The difficulty of avoiding 1) is basically dependent on universe density. If the universe is dense enough that you can planet-hop every year, this is no real hazard (penscanner races will probably be able to tell when they get Elec 10, but that's quite late). In a sparser uni, though, you really have to work to avoid it. Fortunately, sparsity works both ways, and if you have NAS not only your HW planetary scanner but all your scouts have 300 ly scanners of their own - this means you'll be able to spot nearby homeworlds (apart from other SS, of course) very early. And to be able to reason out your PRT, they have to detect you first - either by chance encounter at a planet, or by you going within 25% of their scan range and being seen through the cloak. So, you just need to avoid those. To be completely safe, you'd want to avoid scouting inside 300 ly of confirmed homeworlds until you've got Chameleon Scanners, but if you're confident you've spotted all their scouts you can just manually avoid running into them. And obviously, stay outside 75 ly from homeworlds and 25 ly from the scouts (Scoper 150 and Rhino Scanner with NAS).
The only races with early penscans are JoaT and SS itself, so 2) isn't going to apply to everyone. If they're also SS, you can pretty much forget hiding your PRT; you won't know they're there
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| Re: How to Hide my PRT |
Thu, 23 June 2016 07:36 |
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| magic9mushroom |
| Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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The wiki needs a LOT of work, tbh. Enough that I'm somewhat daunted by the prospect. It's third on my list of "Stars stuff to do", after my current testbed (replicating a test Jason Cawley did a long time ago on how the various ways to boost mining compare) and testbedding if and how cloak% is rounded (should have done this before posting that essay, but better late than never).
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