The cloak is very good at keeping Lyran ships fron hurting you too. You should always cloak when fighting Lyrans.
Ha! You can't fool me! I may be new to online play, and may have never played SFB, and may be awful, and so on, BUT I know the rules of the game... ESGs automatically hit cloaked targets, which is perfectly logical seeing as it's an energy field which doesn't need to detect objects to smash into. Of course, your wink implies you weren't seriously trying to fool me but those shifty Lyrans have done worse. Oh and if you didn't know, a special mod in AOTKII allows ESGs to block photons.
You of course are probably a lot smarter than I am, and probably didn't need the explanation.. but I'm old and its helps my fading memory to rehash old tactics.
I dunno, I've managed to tractor myself into an asteroid more than once in SFC1's techincals. It turns out that when the target dies, you immediately accelerate to the requested speed... I've managed to feedback myself to death resulting in a lovely draw. It turns out plasmas also have a feedback range... I've managed to smash directly into a planet with no prompting because it it turns out the graphics do not coincide with the real range... And finally, my most favorite of all: they put the stupid cloak key RIGHT NEXT to the stupid max defensive tractors key, causing NUMEROUS deaths to inappropriate cloaking vs. a point blank scatter pack. You'd think I'd just change the keys around.
Speaking of the technicals, one of the cruiser ones for Fed was impossible on Admiral level, you can only kill like 2-3.