Finding cloaked units

[Ramsar]

On 3 of my planets there are a number of idle enemy ships which are cloacked. What is the best way to find them? I've tried setting up a pattern of waypoints for a scout starship to cover the planet but to no avail...

[chemical_art]

Under I think "sup" you get tachyon drones. You only get two, they are weak, and they don't cover much area. You can spend knowledge to get much better tacyon drones or you can invest in scout starships. You can also take risks and provoke the cloaked units to attack by (re)building the command station.


For future defense, all military stations give quite a bit of tachyon coverage. Enemy stealth units can't sneak up on them, and if the cloaked units can't sneak up on the station, how much of a threat are they? MK III stations can decloak the whole planet.

If it's a "once a game" type situation (like finding ghost stations) you can drop an MK I tachyon warhead and light everything up for 5 minutes. It costs +1 AIP, so your usage will depend on how important AIP stability is.

[BobTheJanitor]

Research decloakers. Pretty huge decloaking range, and you can comb a planet with one in about 30 seconds. They'll find your hiding cloakers real fast. Alternately, if it's only a handful of them, you can ignore them and they will probably never cause you trouble. However seeing those red numbers on my planets, even if it's just one unit, drives me crazy. So I always invest in decloakers if I have any cloaked ships at all.

Edit: If it's a lot of cloaked units, be sure to keep your fleet near your decloaker, because as soon as they're revealed, they'll go into attack mode.

[Red Spot]

Dont even bother with decloakers/scout-starships/scout mk4, just build Military CCs. 
If you have the mk3 unlocked just use that, but even an mk2 does wonders, and by rebuilding it a few times if needed a mk1 covers a planet rather quickly when supported by some engineers. 

[Shrugging Khan]

Draw all your military units out of the system, then come back in when they reveal themselves to attack your harvesters.

[Sir t]

The only problem with leaving them there is that the computer wont auto build any destroyed harvesters as long as there are enemies in system, even if they are cloaked and not doing anything, so you have to manually tell it to build them. This can get annoying in maps where the AI is constantly raiding that world and can ultimately be a drain on the economy if you are not careful/ontop of things. Or, in other words, if you are acting like me. 

[Echo35]

You could Tach bomb a system too, if you don't mind aggravating the AI a bit.

[Shrugging Khan]

Why does the AI get aggro if you bomb your own systems, tho? o.O

[BobTheJanitor]

Why does the AI get aggro if you bomb your own systems, tho? o.O

The shockwave from the detonation reverberates through the wormhole network, alerting the AI. Or if you don't buy that, how about magic? I dunno, I got nothing here.

[Shrugging Khan]

I never buy technobabble 

[Sir t]

It says "No one would be crazy enough to nuke themselves!" *Watches humans nuke themselves* 

[Sunshine!]

What do you think a mk3 nuke is?  Why do you think its +5000 AIP, not counting everything it actually blows up?

[Frozen Critical]

What do you think a mk3 nuke is?  Why do you think its +5000 AIP, not counting everything it actually blows up?

"Well, so, we'd have conquered the huma-"
*MKIII Nuke*
"HOYL SHET TEH HUMANS HAS NUKES ALERT EVERYONE LIKE, RIGHT NOW!"