First, the scan calculations, see http://www.galaxylegion.com/wiki/index.php/Scan_Blitz

Max possible scan is about 12k, practical max scan is about 8200 because 20% explorer it's not common for people to change race every scan run (expensive GP) and few if any high ranked players that purge and scan a lot are running it normally; 20% protogrid is a limited item so it's less likely to be used on many scan runs.

So my thought is this... v.massive gas + data optimizers or terraformers + plasma upgrade = 15x+ RP or AP Colossal planet. 75 spaces. Allocate 28 for highest tech cloak building, 4 x 800 = 3200 x 2(legion) = 6400 cloak. Cost: less or comparable to putting +1200 def/att buildings in the same spaces.

Scan success % = (1 - (Cloak/Scan), so: 1-(6400/8200) = 22%, and if you have the full 120% legion bonus from docks, it's about 6%. And we're talking about for high rank people to have a bit of a chance; anyone with lower scan tech than Continuum Analyzer simply isn't going to be able to find it at all.

that page is wrong the Bio-Signature Scrambler doesn't give any scan only cloak and defense

That page hasn't been updated in a while. I can think of a bunch of other scan modules.

OK.. still going to be marginal change vs. the main tech modules though.

feel free to add them in then

tag

Calculation sounds good. But I use a different context. There are over 23 million planets, so the chance to scan any one planet is going to be extremely low. That remains true even if you consider only known planets. Reducing it by a factor of 5 (22% instead of 100%) sounds great, but how can you tell the difference between 0.01% and 0.002% chance of scanning your planet? Imho thats why cloak is so controversial. Its hard to appreciate the impact. It's definitely there, just hard to appreciate.

Your last argument is stronger in my opinion. With 6400 cloak, you have the virtual elimination of the possibility of low and middle ranks to scan your planet.

I love cloaking
My planets before but the minute they are found they are goners. Lazuli fabrication gives 100 to cloak and its passive so its nice but I don't leave my planets defenseless because there are still chance to find them

actually it's 1236115 planets

Lazuli fabrication plant doesn't appear past rank 1000, so that's no an option for me.

"Your last argument is stronger in my opinion. With 6400 cloak, you have the virtual elimination of the possibility of low and middle ranks to scan your planet." -- yeah blocking low ranks and keeping flux at 0 is definitely a plus. Anyone that can scan the planet though at that point has a legion that most likely can fluxjack it regardless of defenses (like in the top 10 legions) with a coordinated attack, so defenses are almost pointless if you are using the space for cloaks (unless you want basically no production); a mixed defense/cloak is less effective than fully one or the other, so either you do like 6400 cloak, or 20-30k defenses. For 28 spaces, 1200 buildings yields 33600 att/def with legion bonus. However, given the invasion formula, and people with 10k plus attack in the upper legions, a similar set of ppl that could scan it with the cloaks could invade it with those defenses (except it's their entire legion potentially, including their sabs and cluster missiles and all that which reduces effective defense, nothing like that applies with cloak).

Basically the odds of having it taken are the same as with cloak, except a lucky invade from a mid ranked legion could take the planet. This cloak setup is probably an absolute defense against more than 90% of people, and most of the time they will still fail to find it anyway, so say 7-8% of the 10% remaining are going to be blocked by failed scan/cloak check (even less if you have a full 60 ppl in legion).

imo (and i have no math to back this up) when you colonize a planet its more likely to be found by other players. I have a very large ext rich volcanic. it has been colonized by me, and scanned by two other leigonmates on one of their normal scan runs. i am awful at math, but im sure one of the math whizzes in here might be able to figure out the calculation of how much more likely a colonized planet is to be discovered than an unoccupied planet. I think it makes sense, this being a pvp game after all, why wouldnt colonized planets be more likely to be scanned? but it might just be a conspiracy theory formed out of the extremely unlikely scenario that one of my planets has been scanned by two legionmates, and probably other players aswell.

I've noticed this myself. The odds that 2, 3, 7 people will have scanned the planet makes absolutely no sense in the context of how it 'should' work.

When you scan you get one of three things, a "fresh" planet with no flux from the "pool", an existing unoc planet, or an existing enemy planet. It is NOT a random # planet from 1 to universe planet count. Instead there are several planet ranges that move through the set, and you get one usually from this range. It is still mostly random for unoc planets as to what you get since they are randomly generated anyway, but the enemy planet portion is much smaller (most planets are not colonized, the set of those that are is smaller % obviously) and this causes some additional overlap of scans with actual players. I'll monitor my next run more closely to see if there is a pattern. I would just say based on observations that you seem to be guaranteed some % of enemy planets and some % of 0 flux planets.

I was under the impression that its a double roll. First, roll to see if you're gonna scan a new planet, unoc planet or occ planet. Then second roll finds the planet.

That would explain why once you scan a planet you have a few people scan it soon after. Especially since I expect players have found only a small fraction of all planets.

By the way - I thought that number of planets went from about a mill to over 23 mill last year with server switch. But either way my point holds.

First roll is whether you can find a planet at all, call it the scan roll. Then most likely at that point a planet is selected from one of the above categories if you succeed. There is a second roll -- scan vs. cloak roll, if it's occupied, where you can fail and it says "you almost locked on to the planet" etc. That's not very common though at higher scans. The basic first roll failure appears to be 10-20% regardless of scan for some reason, even when in the old system it would have said 99% (now says "very good").

I've rethought this strategy, and while my numbers are good, the concept is not. What I mean is blocking high ranks isn't worth the production loss. 14 space for 3200 cloak is quite enough to block most people , and at max scan it still blocks 40% of scans, but by volume, the massive number of scans are from lower ranks since there are more of them. 14 space on v.massive planets is about 20%, while 28 space for 4 cloaks (6400 cloak) is 40% resource losses, approximately. If you do this to all your good planets as a strategy, then do you really expect to lose 20% of ALL your good planets (the production difference) from not maximizing cloak (the difference of 4 and 2 cloaks) ? There is some evidence that 1 or even no cloaks (and maybe a couple defenses) is optimal because there are a lot of planets in the galaxy vs. your planets vs. number of scans done by ppl. But, most people would prefer to have reasonable protection on a 15x planet, so 2 cloaks seems a good balance to block mid rank and below, and you eat some random (but infrequent) losses from higher ranks that can beat the cloak.