Unit idea: energy thief

I think scythe should lose the auto regeneration perk and get life-steal instead, like 75HP on hit.

it could also show up in the color of the energy grid, so people carefully looking at which parts of the grid seem to have an off color, might help them spot it.
To be useful, it should steal more energy than required for its cloak to work, maybe 2x-5x its cloak cost. This could also ramp up with time; the longer it stays embedded in the grid the faster it will be able to siphon energy.
We could call it Leech and put it in the amphib factory, they don't have (land-)cloaking stuff yet.

Well as Vermind already said, the grid could change colour where the leech is. Alternatively, the leech might not cloak at all but cost very little to make. That way you could try to sneak swarms in and crash the enemy's eco at vital times like just before bombarding shields, for example. The solution would be to patrol gridlines.

It would be cool to experiment with it to see how it pans out. It could add an interesting dimension to the game I think.

Aside from whether it's worth it, how do you balance this? I think, to be worthwhile for its primary (draining) mechanic, this unit needs to have higher energy(stolen)/cost than the energy sources it steals from have energy/cost. Otherwise:

1) If you are using it to sabotage the enemy, It's cheaper to send in a glaive or a scythe and permanently destroy however many energy sources you can get to. This causes their energy to be drained permanently.

2) If you are using it to power your own economy, it's cheaper to build the usual energy sources which are cheaper.

Of course, maybe you are using it to create a difference between your economies. Then it only needs to be half as good because "stealing" a solar is removing one enemy solar and adding your solar, for two solars worth of difference.

However, then comes the problem of counterplay. If i have a solar which because of the energy thief is powering my enemy, and i cannot kill the thief, i can self-destruct the solar, halving this difference - a blown up solar is no longer powering me, but it's also no longer powering the enemy. This is perverse.

(Alternatively, as the attacker, i can instead send in a Dominatrix and steal an unlimited number of energy sources, while preventing their self-destruction. Perhaps this energy thief is just a different capture unit?).

If i can reliably kill the thief, then its high killability needs to be factored into its price and again it's better to just honestly build/raid energy?

That all aside, it could of course be just an energy-draining siderm on an otherwise useful unit. Like the AA gun on gremlin scouts. This seems like to be the case because it's suggested it have a leveler sidearm, which would let it permanently sabotage an unlimited number of energy sources.

I don't like the cloaking stuff, but in general stealing is a mechanic that ZK doesn't have yet (sans domi) and can be amusing.
Having a unit siphon metal or energy from an enemy building as an alternative to destroying it may have interesting results.

I really like this idea, but finding a balance of effectiveness (otherwise it would make sense to build conventional combat units and just destroy the enemy eco) while not making it be completely broken (as it easily could become) is tough.