The problem that we have is that scanning keeps going up and up and up where as planetary cloaking stays the same. The more you spend to protect, the less resources you get.

To me, the answer is scaling planetary cloaking. Dan should come up with some arbitrary number of spaces he thinks it should take to cloak a planet to almost invisibility. For ease, lets say 24, currently, this is 4 Anti-Tachyon Satellites. This is our base-line.

Current scanning:
Continuum Analyzer - Mark II: 4475
Subspace Seeker: 150
Stryll Transponder: 20
Tachyon Cylinder: 50
Prejor Beacon Sensor: 80
Sha'din AI Core: 140
Stryll Prey Tracker: 150
Co-Align Signal Processor: 320
AI Supercomputer: 5
Flux Ringdisc: 30
Tachyon Router: 25
Subtotal: 5,445

Continuum Beacon: (15%) = 6261.75
Protogrid Access Console: (20%) = 7514.1
Stryll Seeker: (10%) = 8265.51
Explorer: (20%) = 9918.612
Fudge (5%) = 10,415

So you normalize the planetary cloaking to just less than the current max scan (9,500) allowing an almost negligible chance of finding a planet (1-[cloak/scan] or in this case, 8.78% chance of having your planet scanned by the maxed out players and almost no chance by anyone else). Now you work backwards to get the cloaking constant.

9500 cloak
4750 cloak (halve to include legion bonus)
1188 cloak (divide by 4 to get the per Anti-Tachyon Satellites)
1188/500 (what cloak needs to be divided by what cloak is)
2.376 = cloaking constant

This says that all items with planetary cloaking ability should be multiplied by 2.376 to be where they need to be to be able to mask a planet. As scanning goes up in the future, the cloaking constant would go up to match it. This constant would be against any planetary cloaking building so Jammer Satellites would give 59 cloak instead of 25 and Spy Uplink Chassis would give 95 cloak.

As I said before, there is a small chance your planet would be found and this is where the other items come in, making them still worthwhile to have.
4752 cloak: 4x Anti-Tachyon Satellites
190 cloak: 2x Spy Uplink
Total cloak with legion bonus = 9884 or down to a 5.1% chance to be found.

These other items are also the ones that will be allowing you to get more resources from your planets since they tend to take up less space per cloak. It also allows for more efficient cloaking of smaller planets. At 24 spaces, you would be hard pressed to cloak a very tiny planet and would be using up 35% of the spaces on Very Massive so it scales pretty well (which is the point of a constant).

More info on cloak per space, check out the Planetary Cloaking on the wiki.

not bad, good work there lol. We call constants fudge factors lol. The max scan is about 11k though just for reference.

What am I missing from my scan list that accounts for 1100 difference in what I say scanning is and what it actual is?

Mark III - Continuum Analyzer's. I think thats it. Don't know for sure because I'm still behind on scan but thats what I see missing.

That makes sense. I was going by the wiki but since they usually come in sets of 3, that makes sense.

Either way, it just makes the constant a little higher (and would remove my 5% fudge factor). Simply to the simple math again and you get a new constant that makes planets mostly invisible.

The nice thing about it being a constant is that Dan could just insert it and change the constant in one place rather than change it everywhere every time there is new scan tech.

I find it funny that people are too focused on planet cloak vs ship scan argument.. Did you realize that planet attack/defense vs ship attack/defense is also a problem? Invasion gets easier over time simply cuz planet strength stays flat while ship strength keeps growing over time.. Easy solution: Introduce legion defensive star base as blanket defense over all members' planets to keep planet strength growth to stay relative against ship strength growth..

Cloak shouldn't be the only item to be fixed.. Invasion defense, planet attack/defense, etc should be upgraded too.. Lot of work involved.. Legion star base is easy fix and will upgrade all components requiring less work.. Upgrading planet attack, defense, and cloak on every planet is extremely consuming while upgrading ship is soooo easy.. Upgrading planets should be equally easy.. Ah! Legion star base!

It's not that hard to imagine an attack/defense/invasion constant based on the above.

Yeah, I made a thread talking about increasing the speed at which planetary attack/defense/cloak scale, but not many people supported it, and the ones who did ignored attack and defense.

Good points, although the Continuum Analyzer should be matched to the Inverse-Flux Satellites, which provide 800 cloak for 7 space.

William is correct: planet defenses can't keep up with module technology. If the structures took up less space, and provided a higher bonus per tier, it might provide a worthwhile shorter term solution. The fact that most players don't use these types of structures is an indication of how valuable they think they are

Biggest problem that planet has over ship is fixed size.. Planet size cannot increase beyond mega colossal size while ship deck size has no hard cap and can easily fit any modules if players feel like by investing into deck size.. Planet hard cap size forces players to decide which structures to choose but as ship gets stronger over time, planet would have to have all cloak structures leaving no resources to compensate against ship scanning but that will make their invasion defense useless as a trade-off.. Passive attack/defense/cloak is a good start but it covers just one planet and it'll be very time- and resource-consuming just to outfit all planets of similar defense.. Legion star base is a good way to provide small blanket defense bonus to all planets to help to off-set ship strength growth..

I agree with everything you said. Fixed planet size means you have to sacrifice resources and a lot of them to be able to effectively cloak your planet.

Another reason why planet moons would be extremely effective. it would be a way to increase the planet size for cloaking and defence whilst not actually sacrificing the planets resources.

Dan I think you've sumed it up, speaking for myself and everyone I've asked for advise since I started the planetary att/def structures arent worth the space they cost. I'd bet 90% of the players over level 200 depend on cloak as there primary defense on planets.

I don't understand why you want to use up 24 spaces ... are you really serious about this or is this just a metaphor ? I don't know about you but I need all of the spaces I need for production and it's not my fault that cloak is nullified now. I did my best researching the highest cloak available to stop my planets from being detected and using 2 tachyon sensors should be plenty enough using up 12 spaces so we can have at least some production on our planets geez .. What's the point in having and keeping a planet if you can't get any production out of it ?

William you may have a quick solution there hopefully that might save the day and months ahead ... I've been sitting here waiting to see what planets are going to get attacked .. it's really not making this game fun lol

It was an example based on current specs. Dan could choose 10 spaces as the number and the constant would be different. However, that being said, I was also being realistic and not greedy. If you want your planet to be invisible (or as near as possible), you are going to have to give up something and in this case, that something is resources. Plus, part of the point is to deck out your planets with minor cloaking/resource artifacts so you don't have to spend 24 spaces on just cloaking.

Dan I think you should do with planet defense structures what you did with relays. The size of all teirs of planet structures should remain the same size irreguardless of tiers. Only the effect increases as you get higher teirs. I think this would solve a big headache for you and allow you to much better fine tune the amount of defenses a planet will most likely have, and as an off shoot, will also solve a big headache for us. Having to re-juggle my planets defenses and production after upgrading defenses is time consuming and very costly. This way I know if I want 2 cloaks on a large planet, I can build 2 cloaks at teir one giving 50 cloak and taking 10 space, and by the time i'm rank 300 and have all of the cloaking tree researched, i'm still only building 2 cloaks on a large planet and still only taking up 10 space, just with much better cloak.

You can already figure what most people are willing to put on a planet with the 500 cloak satellites. Figure one on a large, 2 -3 on a massive. A collossal you can probably figure 3 with some artifacts thrown in. Then all you have to do is adjust the cloak for another teir as you see fit. This solves the problem with planet size not scaling.

I think that's a good idea, although if that happens they might want to increase the attack/defense/cloak of some of the artifact structures, because otherwise those would be a lot less useful.

subspace seekers are also 175
prejor decrypted data adds 350
mark 3 scanners are 4800
genetarr transmitters are 220
stryll transponder is 40

So I get 6385 as a base total.

multiplies by the % boosters gives you 11,455 scan.

I think it is a great idea to have all the cloak, attack and defense structures have a base size and their strength grow as your research does. It would allow players to set the planets up better to protect them and make taking planets more challenging.