Cloaking ships, sure. But planets? No way.

i would love some stealth tech for ships, and even starbases. it would be impossible to render a planet fully untracable, because the planets gravity would affect the wobble of the star in the system.

and i loved fight against Darloks, why not some cloaked Drengin?

If not cloaking why not Camouflage? I dont know how hard it would be to put that in, but AI wouldnt be as much of a problem and it could be more a radar (or whatever the tech is in GC2) scrambler kind of thing.

How about the cloaking of a ship or fleet can only last for X turns, while simultaneously limiting the speed to 1pc/week? Or at least, decloaking would use up all your remaining movement points. So you can sneak up to a planet or other target, but cannot attack it right away, without showing yourself to your enemy. I suppose this would be more useful against human players, who tend to concentrate defenses around border worlds, as opposed to the AI which puts armed ships everywhere. So against the AI it might be more useful for retreating damaged but otherwise valuable ships.

Well, you could use these to go along with rock-paper-scissors combat styles
You could have Matter-Energy-Thermal

Thermal Scanners detect ships with no Thermal Coolers
Radioactive Scanners detect all ships giving off energy, unless it has EFR (Energy-Field-Recycling)
Matterial Scanner would simply detect anything without Dynamic designs (B-2 like designs, Dynamic could be a seperate hull type)
Telepathy scanner (Matter) would scan for any ship with crews on it (good tech) unless the ship has Brain Crusher (evil tech) or was a Dynamic ship.

it could also branch off from the sensor techs.

Cloaking doesn't have to take up huge amounts of space you just have be able to counter cloaking. Limitations couldn't hurt, but for every type of cloaking tech you would have to have a tech to counter it. Alot of other games of this type have cloaking. Cloaking is also extremely popular in SciFi. In Star Trek the Romulans and the Klingons have cloaking and the other races do not. Do they control the galaxy? No, because the other races have discovered ways to decect thier cloaks. That is one example of many, if you watch alot of SciFi or play alot of space strategy games you will find some sort of cloaking.

I wanted cloaking devices too at first but I'd say that cloaking is not really nescessary if it could be made visible which areas of the map a race can see and which not.
Why? Because I had a case in which an area near one of my planets was fogged. So I didn't see what was going on there. Suddenly at the end of the computer's turn a drengin fleet dropped out of hyperspace directly beside that planet.
SOOO, if we knew which areas are visible to the enemy we could move our ships through that area near enough for the AI not to notice them till it's too late.

First off it just add more complexity to the tech tree (its hard enough to decide what to reserch next already thank you) .

Personally I think it's a good idea to give you headaches in deciding what to do, the more strategic options the better.

and basicly if your oponent gose for cloaking devices you would be FORCED to go down the Anti-cloaking tree and i dont like that

Maybe, but that depends on how you implent the cloaking devise. It's no worse, then being 'forced' to go down a certain weapon tech if the opponent has high defenses in shields.

I remember using "cloak" when I was playing Earth & Beyond (don't get me started on E&B..). In this game, however, you can build a ship that is so fast, that it might as well be cloaked. I am frequently attacked, seemingly out of nowhere, by other civs (whose ships just pop up on the screen from the ether). Make sense?

I think perhaps something better than a cloaking technology would be some sort of disguise technology. Such technologies would let you disguise ships as either being weaker or stronger than they actually are through new modules (one set of modules to weaken your appearance, one set to amplify them, and possibly one at the end of both branches to completely block the weapon and defence values). The sensor techs could be extended into scanner technologies which could cut through the disguises to some degree.

Thus, if you neglected the scanner technologies, you might know where an attack was coming from, but wouldn't know exactly how powerful the ships in the attacking fleet are.

The idea of cloaking could work.. but most of the theories ive seen are terribly flawed. I believe that it should be more of an extra defence rating and instead of a entire new tech tree add it in for like getting (example)-*Barriers and Miniturization*(not these actual techs.. i cant look at all the techs right now to see what looks best... but you get the idea) Since cloaking in reality is a possiblity and from what i understand by bending light on the hull of a ship would render it "invisible". Moving on i figure these ships produce enough energy for the amount of systems it implements you know.. cloaking would probly come around during or after large hulls and Warp Drive I or II by that time ships are implementing enough power to bend space X1.5-X2 considering Hyperdrive is simply being able to bend space and travel the speed of light. So what im saying here is i think around this time weak versions of cloaking devices would be able to be implemented on ships and nothing else. Im thinking of it being like a piece you add when building a new ship or upgrading them... So now people think like So ships will cloaked all the time? the AI wont be able to see me ever? LAWL sweet! ... no no... no. What these would do is add another roll to the battle since battles are predetermined and then you get to watch it if you want.. or skip it if you like, it would make it more difficult for opponets to hit you or.. perhaps give slight bonus to the armor modules on the ship already. So your saying wont the enemy sensors pick up on a ship with cloaking module? Well im not sure but I think that in order to bend light you would have to have an object that has some pretty powerful electro magnetic waves and i think the more advances the cloaking module the more electric interferance with enemies sensor ability but obviously when the enemy fired you would be able to tell where they are and there would be nothing stopping you from looking out into space and looking for where the stars are bent because of the light being bent around the hull of the opposing ship.... I suppose ill end here before i reach a point where i have no clue at all what im talking about im sure this will come under harsh criticism from people but it doesnt matter i thiought id say this because so many of you were talking like "ships should get a strategic cloak so i can swoop in a insane fleet on the enemy capital and capture it while they have cloaked ships all over which would cause nothing but random chaotic battles."

Y'know, instead of all-or-nothing 'cloaking', why not just define a 'stealth tech tree' of five-six levels... Stealth Plating I-II-III, Scanner Interference I-II, Cloaking Device. Stealth Plating would have a rating of 1, Scanner Interference would have 2, Cloaking Device would have 3.

So what would they do? Well, every point of rating would... act as an additional square of distance when determining if you showed up on scanners or not.

So, you're planning an invasion of the enemy homeworld. They typically have ships with a scanner range of 7. You slap two Cloaking Devices (or three Scanner Interference Networks or whatever), and suddenly, they can only see you if you're right next to them.

It would also let you build up fleets without triggering the "Hey, you're building up a fleet! We don't like you!" message.

Size-wise, the modules would need to take up, say, the same space as a weapon (or maybe a weapon and a defense) and would need to be expensive... and the AI would need to be tweaked so that it would occasionally build dedicated Scanner Ships when it believes cloaking tech may be in play... also, this way, cloaked ships aren't really good for defense, since anythign in orbit around your planet is visibl anyway. It's definately a dedication of the ship to offense... but it won't be as good at it as a non-cloaked ship. Once the novelty of it wears off, cloaks may not be useful, so you need to plan out where and when to use them.