Just as the title says the recent changes buffed Corneas instead of nerfing them especially when it comes to cloaking the front line.
Why?
Simple the OP part of cloaked lances was never that the lances were cloaked and the best part of cornea was not that it could cloak units. It was the radar jamming.
The thing about cloak is that in order for enemies to see units normally they already need to be nearby and the condition for decloaking a unit is... be nearby; granted you do need a unit to be closer, but the truth is that it probably doesn't matter that much because shortly after you would normally see then the second decloak condition kicks in... they start firing. The units that probably won't be firing on the unit that saw them? usually they either have built in cloak and are unaffected by area cloak or have burrow.
But even if you want the cloak itself the ability to push the bubble forward makes it harder to find and eliminate the cornea as well, to people building multiple to obscure a front line the radius nerf is probably completely offset by this extra utility.
Even if the smaller cloak radius sufficiently offsets the ability to move the center the jamming radius got buffed and that is actually more useful, most of the time radar can give a fairly accurate picture of the battle field but the cornea strips all this away. For starters normally scouting is not really used to find enemy troops its used to identify them, radar finds exact locations and then scouting is used to identify units, and radar holds on to those ids until a player decides what to do next. But when the scouts die when a cornea is nearby all the info the scouts died for is immediately rendered useless.
But jamming also presents another problem it makes it harder to commit to an attack requiring more thorough more expensive scouting and then this scouting provides valuable intel to the side being scouted, this also allows the side with cloak to use less units to defend because they can react in secret to the side without cloaks troop movements and can preemptively reinforce areas that are scouted without alerting their opponents. they can also leave areas barely defended or completely undefended secure in the knowledge that their opponents will need to scout them to ascertain that and if they do they can move troops there in response, which radar jamming will hide from the side that just expended metal determining that the defenses are down, without cloak the low density of radar signature gives weak points away much earlier and much cheaper even without identifying targets. This all combines to a massive defensive advantage to cloaking all or large parts of line and encourages the opponents to try to batter the side with cloaking down with artillery.
Lances: The previous thread that got area cloaking "nerfed" had a lot to say about cloaked Lances, however I don't think that the ances being cloaked was the issue, for one thing I think usually the radar jammers did more to hide the Lances than the cloak did, for one because Lances spend a ton of time revealed because they just fired. But also because they have a high range and should not be visible to enemy units in the first place. Lances uniquely good for this role though because they are mobile and hitscan. As a matter of fact I don't think there are any other units like the lance most artillery can only hit large formations of units or slow because of the projectile travel time but lances are not like that they hit instantly and in most units cases one shot this causes high nearly unavoidable attrition, which in turn forces either deep entrenchment or attacking. The other options for this role have downsides serious downsides. Tremors must stand still making them easy targets for counter battery fire and have lots of travel time although the huge inaccuracy and volume of fire sort of makes up for that. Emissarys have a ton of travel time and lack the sheer ruination of Tremors. Impalers are unsuited to targeting moving targets. Slings, have less range, travel time, are less durable, and lack burst damage. Crabs lack range Firewalkers sort of work but not as well.
So put Lances together with a cloaked front line and it literally forces an opponent to either endure unreasonable attrition or risk everything on blind attacks that feed metal if they fail. And this is where the problem with Lance plus Cornea came from forced ambushes and to lesser degree that's the problem with area cloaking as a whole. Eventually you need to attack and area cloaks/jammers hide to much information than to ever get enough of it back with scouting.
If you read all the way through my novel congrats and thanks for coming to my TED talk.
PS: Snitches probably should not be a thing don't @ me
