I cant see a way to counter this, And surely this is a exploit as its literally giving an unfair and unbeatable advantage. People are raising ESS values, Then sitting inside with cloaked marauders at 200, waiting for someone to come in, Decloak and volley.
There is no way i can see a way to counter this, And its makes ESS pointless to the point we may aswell just remove it, Cus everyone can just do this and never loose their ESS again.
The simple solution is to send in only one or two ships first of all to start the link. That way you’re only getting surprised with a small proportion of your fleet - whether it’s cloaked sniping BS or recons or whatever - and can decide to re-ship or withdraw with the main force before you whelp the whole lot in one.
These tactics were pretty well worked out and talked about within a couple of weeks of the first introduction of this ESS system. We had a lot of fun taking out over-confident Nightmares and such as people thought they’d come scoop some goodies.
With that number of folks in local and unaccounted for in docked structures, you can carry around a mobile cloak inhibitor before hitting the ESS to make sure that it is as actually clear as the d-scan showed. They whined and whined about cloaky afks, and now you have the opportunity to make them whine about those things being used against them… though that does mean more time for them to watch you on intel and get a counter fleet ready.
Otherwise, even then, it is heavily one-sided in their favor. Either they win the grid, or they warp off before tackle turns out enough to hit them. like the garmur in the t1/t2 plex, either they win or they get away and no options of counter play or anything removely close to them losing being on the table if they play their cards right.
Arguably, this is better than uncloaking a cyno and titan jumping a fleet of super capitols, though even then you could take advantage of that by diverting the supers to one area and hitting another ESS while they wait out fatigue (in theory…would take a substantial amount of coordination to work everything out)
First time I hear of it, that sounds like a fun strategy!
My first idea to counter it is: if they’re set up for sniping from far away, I can imagine a Celestis with remote targeting range damps could force them to come closer or to be out of the fight. Bastion will have some resistances to it, but they will still be affected. With their targeting delay after decloaking and bad targeting speed due to the cloaks you would have plenty of time to damp them before they can shoot you.
With 8 of their ships you would need 2 Celestes to give them all one damp, but more could be better.
Also what Oskar said, sending a single ship ahead as scout to start the link would lose you one ship at most.
The number of folks in local that are unaccounted for in docked structures is indeed a good indication they may be elsewhere in system. But a mobile cloak inhibitor may not be that useful I think.
The mobile cloak inhibitor is meant as tool against afk cloaky ships, which it does pretty well, but has downsides that make it less usable against players that are paying attention:
a decloak ping only has a 40% chance to decloak ships
it takes 10 minutes in between decloak pings
The decloak chance means that even after a full 1h40m duration of the mobile observatory there is a 1% chance the ship is still cloaked without any interaction. So it’s not really a reliable way to check if a location has no cloaked ships, unless you intend to wait for hours or use multiple observatories at the same time, which aren’t cheap.
Granted, a 40% decloak chance for a cloaked fleet of 6 marauders has a good chance of decloaking at least one after the first 10 minutes, but it is a bit strange to require people to put down a 40m mobile inhibitor at any ESS and wait at least 10 minutes (which allows defenders to ship up) just to have a chance of making a ship inside the ESS show themselves.
