There have been a lot of talk on the forum and in the dev feeds about cloaking (and its absence in GalCiv3) therefor herewith my proposal for a workable cloaking system within the game.
Premises.
- Every ship has a cloaking factor (default zero);
- A fleet has the cloaking factor of the lowest cloaking factor of the ships in it (corrected by any fleet cloaking components that are installed on the ships in the fleet);
- Every planet and star base has a base sensor strength (greater than zero);
- If the sensor strength at the location where the ship/fleet resides is stronger or equal than the cloaking factor then the ship/fleet is visible, else it is completely invisible.
Of course the player should be able to influence the sensor strength of planet and star bases and the cloaking factor of ships. This can be accomplished by introducing:
- planetary improvement that strengthen the sensor strength;
- military star base modules that grant sensor strength to the star base itself;
- military star base modules that amplify the sensor strength of bases and planets within it sphere of influence;
- ship components that increase the cloaking factor for the ship itself;
- ship components that increase the cloaking factor for the entire fleet.
Reasoning.
The game already includes the functional infrastructure for a distance bell curve projection (as used by the influence system), so the actual calculation is done by feeding sensor strength instead of influence strength into said function.
Pros.
Cloaking is implementable (Yeah 
) and military star bases now have an actual useful purpose. This will open the game up to a lot of additional strategic depth.
Cons.
The calculation for the sensor strength at a given tile will take (possibly significant) cpu power and increased memory requirements. 
Let the cloaking (tech) wars begin. 
Any comments are welcome.
