Cowabunga!

[Baron Munchausen]

Say, have you ever noticed the similarity in format between the EVENTS and the INTEL PROJECTS? I have, and it's made me wonder. I finally got around to an experiment and confirmed what I had suspected. RANDOM EVENTS and INTEL PROJECTS use the SAME ABILITIES! Yes, anything in the EVENTS file can be turned into an INTEL PROJECT.

I invented a 'plague' Intel project and infected an AI planet with it. It works!!! Needless to say, since the AI is too stupid to defend itself against plague, that this is practically cheating when used against the AI. But in human-only games it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Especially if the text Messages for 'random events' and 'intel projects' are copied between each other so you can't be sure which is which!

Now I'm busily editing my EVENTS and INTEL PROJECTS files to make as many parallels between Messages from events and intel projects as possible to make life confusing. Only when you see the 'We suspect the (name) empire of this act.' will you know it was an intel operation. Coolness!

Come to think of it... what if 'Planet - Destroyed' and 'Star - Destroyed' can be made into intel projects??? Eeep! We'll just have to have a convention against that. Read your data files before joining a PBW game!

[ July 15, 2002, 05:06: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Pax]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Say, have you ever noticed the similarity in format between the EVENTS and the INTEL PROJECTS? I have, and it's made me wonder. I finally got around to an experiment and confirmed what I had suspected. RANDOM EVENTS and INTEL PROJECTS use the SAME ABILITIES! Yes, anything in the EVENTS file can be turned into an INTEL PROJECT.

I invented a 'plague' Intel project and infected an AI planet with it. It works!!! Needless to say, since the AI is too stupid to defend itself against plague, that this is practically cheating when used against the AI. But in human-only games it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Especially if the text Messages for 'random events' and 'intel projects' are copied between each other so you can't be sure which is which!

Now I'm busily editing my EVENTS and INTEL PROJECTS files to make as many parallels between Messages from events and intel projects as possible to make life confusing. Only when you see the 'We suspect the (name) empire of this act.' will you know it was an intel operation. Coolness!

Come to think of it... what if 'Planet - Destroyed' and 'Star - Destroyed' can be made into intel projects??? Eeep! We'll just have to have a convention against that. Read your data files before joining a PBW game!

Coolness!

A san aside -- tie the project for detroying a star to the tech needed to BUILD that kind of SHIP ... andmake it bloody expensive.

Dittof or world-destroeyrs.

HEck, if you can buld such a device in a shipyard and strap engines to it ... makes sense you might make it "on the sly" somewhere.

[Q]

"Now I'm busily editing my EVENTS and INTEL PROJECTS files to make as many parallels between Messages from events and intel projects as possible to make life confusing. Only when you see the 'We suspect the (name) empire of this act.' will you know it was an intel operation. Coolness!"

I think you can easily make the differentiation in the log file: just select "intelligence" or "events" and you still can determine, if it was a natural event or an intel operation.
But besides that great idea and good observation!

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Q:
I think you can easily make the differentiation in the log file: just select "intelligence" or "events" and you still can determine, if it was a natural event or an intel operation.
But besides that great idea and good observation!

Awww, crud! I hate it when someone comes along with an inconvientent fact and ruins a perfectly good theory. I was really hoping this was going to work. Ah well, we could make a house rule that humans aren't allowed to sort their turn log.

Geo

[Baron Munchausen]

Or we could ask MM to alter the way intel attack results are displayed. If you succeed in 'disguising' your attack it gets entered into the log as an event instead of an intel message. Maybe it should be a settable flag/attirubte so we could distinguish between intel that is obviously intel and something that could be mistaken for an event.

[Rollo]

Hey great, I am glad that somebody is willing to take the stuff that we discussed on the other thread (don't remember which one... ) and do something with them .

edit: found the other thread, title didn't have anything to do with intel.
here it is <-- that's a link

Despair not, Baron. Intel attacks against you are already displayed as events. The only way to tell that they are intel attacks is that they have a prefix "Intelligence Minister: " before the actual text. So when you make matching pairs for events and intel projects, just put Intelligence Minister: before the text of the event .

Rollo

[ July 15, 2002, 16:27: Message edited by: Rollo ]