[raynor]

It sounds like Intel in SEIV was thrown in at the Last minute, and the code was just copied from Research and made to 'sorta' work.

I liked the way it worked in MOO2. In that game, you manufactured spies for use on either offense or defense. Periodically, you would receive Messages that a defending spy had been killed. Once your number of defensive spies reached zero, you were open to any and all attacks.

The great thing about this approach is that you know you are pretty safe from attacks if you have a large number of spies on defense. This is much better than SEIV's approach where the empire with the most Intel points can complete more and greater offensive intel projects per turn but is wide open to attack if s/he is hit by more than twelve projects at one time.

Although... I wonder if you might not be better off spending your intel points on the 'Disrupt Intel Operation' Intel project. If you targeted each hostile empire with one of these and had 10x your enemies Intel points, then wouldn't these projects finish fairly quickly and 'knock' out the enemy Intel projects? The Intel setup seems to favor offense over defense. Still, it would only disrupt one project per turn. If more than 24 enemy projects completed in one turn, you could only disrupt one per offensive 'Disrupt' Project.