Yeah, but if ships consistently have non-zero stealth, battles will be a pain in the early game when detection is low. For example, if player A and player B both have ships with stealth 1 and detection 10, they'll have to get within 90 battle distance units of each other before they can see each other. If two ships come from opposite starlane entry points, they will be nearly 1000 units apart.Geoff the Medio wrote:Their size is irrelevant, but yes; ships with 0 stealth can be seen anywhere. This means having your ships have nonzero stealth is an important design consideration.
Of course the players always have the option not to fight, and there should definitely be an in-battle option to withdraw without leaving the system if you decide not to continue fighting (all players in combat would have to select this for it to do anything), but players are still going to want to destroy one another's ships in the early game, and the alternative to consistently having long, tedious stealth battles is to just let your opponent live all the time.
Another alternative might be to give ships a stealth penalty for moving in combat, so that even moderately stealthy enemy ships could be seen easily in combat. Actually, this is probably the only reasonable solution, since it is also a fact that if stealth 0 objects operate under normal stealth rules, the situation above wouldn't be helped much by making the ships have stealth 0 - they'd still be unable to see each other outside of a range of 100 units.