Stealth Armor: Unbalanced

[Argh]

If y'all don't mind, I'm going to butt in. . .

This sort of back-and-forth about stealth has led me to what looks like a good compromise:

Every racial tech-tree should get. . . oh, I dunno, something like "Matter Detectors" or something. . . that is effective against *all* cloaking systems, but only at a limited range(say, range 2), and at a high level of expense. And they should get this tech pretty early. Ideally, this tech's maintenance requirements would make it impractical to use on ships, unless you *really* needed it.

All other cloaking systems should, ideally be set up in a grid of cross-effectiveness. . . so that, for example, Grav-Wave Detectors negate Gravity Cloaks, are able to detect ships with Gluon Flux Armor at a range of 4 spaces, and cannot detect ships with Phase Cloaks. I'd make it a perfect grid, so that, no matter *what* racial tech tree you picked, you'd have one race that was effectively invisible from you, if they chose to be so- all you'd have to do is trade for somebody else's technology, however, and you'd effectively negate their special advantage.

When designing a game system, I try to avoid unique or one-off systems as much as possible, unless I provide other ways to accrue a similar benefit. It'd very hard to design around a system where one race out of 8 has the unique ability to destroy stars, for example- it's such a potentially destructive ability that everything else would have to be cut back to compensate.

Stealth tech is definately one of those hard-to-balance items- not knowing with some precision where your enemies are is a recipe for disaster in a multiplayer game, unless you have an overwhelming advantage in terms of materiel and time. I can send a half-dozen smallish fleets around to your systems, and it's win-win- if I can't glass your planets, because you have sufficient(expensive) fleet cover, then I can get out of the system with minimal losses, because you can't see me. . .