Birth of the Federation

The recent talk about Romulan fast attack groups not being cloaked in another thread makes me ask, in the vanilla unmodded game, what is the advantage of NOT cloaking your ships?
By default, the ships are not cloaked, and after attacking they don't cloak again unless you manually cloak them. This has caused me no end of frustration where I forget to cloak one task force and lose the surprise advantage.
Why would you want to have the ships uncloaked? What advantage is there? Why does the game default to having them decloaked and decloakes them at every opportunity if you don't watch it like a hawk?

Note:

- no cloak ability is not the same as not using a given cloak ability (point of the other topic)

- the issue you are referring to is a single byte code error (simple fix)

Due to rushing out the game many features are unfinished and some progammers didn't know about code specifics of the other team members' features.

- also there is special cases where you want to have an uncloaked ship when fighting a cloak capable enemy fleet

What are those special cases? I don't even remember what happens when both sides are cloaked as it's been a while since I encountered that scenario. Only the Klingons and the Romulans can cloak, and the Klingons have relatively few cloaked ships.

Also again you never said what the advantage of having ships decloaked is, and why it would be the default state and make the player work to keep them cloaked.

I think it's something along the lines where if you have 2 cloaked fleets go against each other, the cloaking of both cancel the other out and both get to fire on each other at the same time. But if you leave one ship uncloaked for your fleet then the enemy can choose to un-cloack and blow that one up but then on the next turn, they sit by and do nothing while your whole fleet comes out of cloak and shoots. So basically you get your whole fleet to shoot first against their fleet - a huge advantage.

Atleast I think that's how it is. Don't quote me on this.

jlberner13 wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 11:01 pm I think it's something along the lines where if you have 2 cloaked fleets go against each other, the cloaking of both cancel the other out and both get to fire on each other at the same time. But if you leave one ship uncloaked for your fleet then the enemy can choose to un-cloack and blow that one up but then on the next turn, they sit by and do nothing while your whole fleet comes out of cloak and shoots. So basically you get your whole fleet to shoot first against their fleet - a huge advantage.

Atleast I think that's how it is. Don't quote me on this.

That is, indeed, precisely how it works. A cloaked fleet with a single uncloaked vessel has a major advantage over one that is completely cloaked, as it forces the latter to either waste their "free" attack on just one ship, or to retreat.