This thread will be expanded momentarily

Disrupting Fleet Calculations
There are ways to hide fleet or make it seem like it is a different fleet makeup entirely.

Hiding fleet A HF on a banker hides 100 units. The down side is the NW of the units and the HF add to you NW in a way that is harder to hide. To counter this, reduce the number of tax offices you hold by 30 and add 5-10 cash factories to boot. Now you have nearly the same NW and not as dramatically cut income. Do not go overboard with this. Science can also help hide some NW differences. A science level just barely over a percentage mark has to be assumed as filling a low to high range. This sometimes means ten million research points 'might' be there. This is a spare 10,000 nw you can hide unit NW behind. Of course trusting cience can be hard... sometimes it will hide nothing. In this case it is altering your units (see belowl.

Attackers who make resources find hiding fleet both easy and annoying. Science helps only so much, and cash factories only hide .4 units per use. There is one more way. Get ALL 50% or better planets. Then per 1000 infra it would seem you have 71 more infra per planet. This successfully hides 71 gc per 1000 infra per planet. Additionally it hides about 40 figs making them look like droids/solds/wiz/agents. While not much it can be useful. If 100 planets at 2k infra each this conceal about 14k total units and converts about8kfigsto ground. This shouldbe a peacetime2-4% of your actual fleet.

Altering Fleet Altering your unit line up is far easier. For a banker having adding an HFonly makes it seem like you have more figs. Each Hydo farm hides 100 ground and alters 48 more into figs. A thousand hydro farms therefore makes it seem you have 148,000 less soldiersand 48,000 more fighters. Nedlss to to say this is a huge change up for a banker! Research Centers and Lasers also can help modify units from ground to air. Each one takes away 2 soldiers and adds 2 fighters.

Attackers must use either the high planet bonus, or a low planet bonus to alter unit line ups. A low planet bonus makes it seem you have more fighters and less ground..

Now there is more 'sophisticated' means to hide units. One is detectable, one is not. One method is to aid gc or food a minute before the tick to everyone. Not a huge amount, but enough to alter each persons fleets (or hide it) by 10%. However infiltrate can easily detect this.

Alternativelyifyou are online you can cancel bids just before the tick. Food sell bids for bankers and endu buy bids for resourcers/attackers. This is not detectable if the bid are properly made and can be tailored by the player for how much they will alter/hide.