How does cloaking work exactly?

[allmybase]

Like scouts have cloaking boost when helping each other?

My guess is that tachyon beams last a certain amount of time, and cloaking boost reduces how long that tachyon beam lasts. You still have to get out of range of the tachyon emitter because that constantly throws beams out, but is that how it works? That cloaker starship has like a 20x booster, so does that just reduce tachyon duration by that much?

And when scouts boost each other, I notice that they always pair up and when I hover over them, only one of them says cloaking boosted while the other does not. Is this just a display error - or does only one scout benefit from the pairing up?

[x4000]

The wiki has all that info, this time.  Let me know if it's missing anything that you still wanted to know, but I think it has all of it.

[allmybase]

Oh whoops I missed that info on the wiki, thanks. 

[x4000]

Np. 

[allmybase]

How would you use the cloaker starship properly? I just experimented with one and they get burned really really bad when the entrance is cluttered with units (which is usually the case on hard planets). And once they went down then so did the units they were cloaking :S

[x4000]

The problem there is most likely tachyon beam emitters.  Honestly I don't use the cloaker starships terribly much, but I know that some players have developed strategies for using them really effectively.  I am not sure what they do -- possibly pair them with lightning warheads?  Hopefully they will weigh in, but you may be able to find comments from them if you search the forums, too.  I remember it being discussed in the past as to what these players do, but I don't recall exactly what it was they were doing.

[FrostyThePyro]

send in a tachyon drone/scout starship/decloaker a handfull of cleanup drones and something with guns, kill whatever is launching tachyons at you.  Next wave is the cloaker ships (remember to low power anything with guns you want to stay stealthy) which should pass through with impunity.

[soMe_RandoM]

if your ships are having problems with being slow than other ships in the system use the all mighty power of low power that was an major part of the game as your ships cant decloak to fire if they cant fire in the first place