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Banner courtesy of Aleksandr Sidorenko
Welcome to my Cloaker Strategy Guide
The effective use of cloakers in battle depends upon whether or not you have explored your opponent's territory, so make sure you get that advantage as soon as possible. These tactics all depend on having a few cloakers in your opponent's systems before you actually need to use them.
There is a common misconception that cloakers are only good for their surprise factor. There are many ways to use them if you have explored properly in your opponent's systems. Some of my favorite Cloaker Tactics are:
The Surprise Party- The most common use for cloakers is to uncloak in an enemy's homeworld and hope you can surprise them enough to actually be awarded with the Nuke.
Blasting the Overbuild- When you see an opponent overbuilding, uncloak your handy cloaker in that system. By taking out their ships before they are full BR, you gain the advantgage.
The Scatter- Place a cloaker in as many of your opponent's Systems as possible, and uncloak them all at once (even br1 cloakers will probably work for this one...). This forces your opponent to either fall back to defend, or build like crazy :).
The Rush ("The Greon Trick")- This requires two updates. Place two or three cloakers in one of your opponent's systems. Uncloak one. The next update, when your opponent has only built one ship to defend against this lone cloaker (set to nuke), uncloak your other(s) to support the first one.
The Gate-Crash- Since most players build a gate at only br1, any cloaker above br1 can take this out easily. Even if your opponent has ships in that system, you can almost always take out their gate, forcing them to take two more updates to get their ships gated to the front.
The Annoyance Factor- Randomly cloaking and uncloaking a ship in enemy territory causes your opponent to become distracted with how many cloakers you actually have in their backfield. Renaming these ships periodically can increase the annoyance factor considerably, as this gives the impression you have more than one cloaker in their territory :). Sooner or later, your opponent will either ignore this annoyance, or waste resources to defend against what they assume to be a larger number of cloakers than you actually have.
Blasting the Backfield- An undefended backfield is like an invitation to Nuke Heaven for those players who like to use cloakers :). By failing to be prepared to defend their rear systems, your opponet's resources can be reduced dramatically by your presence in their unprotected systems.
Gaining the Balance- If you and your opponent have an equal number of ships at the same br, you can gain the advantage by uncloaking a few handy cloakers during the battle where all ships would normally be destroyed. Since your total number of ships outnumbers your opponent's, some of your ships will survive the battle (if all of your ships are full br before the battle).
The Miner- Use a cloaker to blast an opponent's minefield, allowing you to move the rest of your ships into their (now defenseless, hopefully non-building) system on the next update. If your opponent has failed to terraform, you may be able to use this twice in a row to take out your opponent's Homeworld.
Blasting the Engineer- When you see an opponent preparing to use an engineer at an important jump, you can uncloak and take out the engineer or weaken it enough to make it useless to your opponent. Ah has some words of wisdom about engineers at his site, also.
Note- For all you Cloaker haters the only true defense against a cloaker is a minefield.
Links to Other Stellar Crisis Information and Related Pages and Servers
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