Carrier Battles bug: Bezerker vulnerability

[Emperor's Child]

I just need to RANT. I'm in several carrier battles games, and have found that the Bezerker happiness type is very easily defeated with simple intel projects of repeated plagues. All an opponent need to is to hit you each turn with a plague and your planets will all soon be rioting. You can't defend against it since plagues damage planets for one turn before they are stopped. This means you can't stop the effects of this type of attack no matter what you do unless you prevent all your opponents intel attacks. In my view this happiness type has an unbalancing vulnerability that an opponent can take advantage of to easily knock you out of the game.

In Carrier battles #7, an opponent is just hitting me with successive intel-plagues, and since my turns always are processed after theirs I can never counter them (my turns process after his). I have no way to stop all my planets eventually going into riot, since I must invade and take over 4 planets per turn just to counter the negative effects of a new plague each turn, and must conquer even mor PER TURN to get things back in working order This is plain sucking the life out of what was an otherwise interesting game. I recommend this bezerker easy-kill vulnerability be toned down in future mods.

[Suicide Junkie]

Plagues are very expensive projects... the enemy must have a lot of planets dedicated to that effort.

That said, it is already clear that even the leaky intel system just dosen't cut it.
I'm leaning towards taking out all the sabotage and counter intel, and just making the system a purely informational thing.
...Perhaps making some minor sabotage projects racial traits.

[Atrocities]

Info based system is really the better alternative. I would make it so that players can turn off the sabotage as a technology. This way if they still wanted it, they could have it, but if they did not want it, all they would have to do is turn off the technology for it.

[Captain Kwok]

You could also boost up the number of random intel disruption events as well, which would make it a bit more difficult to get a project through.

[rdouglass]

Or the other solution would be to embrace Intel as part of the game and learn to work with it.

I hear so many people say that Intel is broke 'cause it doesn't work like real life. Well not all that much really works like real life in this game but we either adapt, accept, or go somewhere else.

My solution to this problem would be to research to Intel level III then all your CI points are 3 times as effective. That'll stop a lot of Intel if you have dedicated an appropriate amount of facilities.

Personally, I'd rather see these discussions talk about the ratio of facilities. IOW what should be the appropriate ratio of Intel fac's to others. I know personally in the beginning of games my non-resource facilities are about 80% research, 10% Intel, and 10% other but by the time I max out any important research tree, I've just about inverted the reatio to around 70% Intel, 20% Research and 10% other.

[douglas]

rdouglass said:My solution to this problem would be to research to Intel level III then all your CI points are 3 times as effective. That'll stop a lot of Intel if you have dedicated an appropriate amount of facilities.

This is in a Carrier Battles mod game, where, unless I am greatly mistaken, normal Counter Intelligence projects do not exist. The only defense against intel projects is to sabotage them before they complete, which is apparently proving impossible in this case due to the attacker's ability to finish the projects completely in one turn and the mechanics of how SE4 processes intel.

[Suicide Junkie]

Exactly.

As the mod author, I have accepted that the leaky intel system is broken, and have already taken steps.

[PvK]

I guess someone needs to research Applied Intelligence...

[Emperor's Child]

You don't get it: This is a situation that can't be defended against due to the order in which the turns are processed. Assuming that the opponent launching plague attacks processes turns earlier than the opponent that is receiving the attacks, and that the plague launcher has enough intel to launch one plague per turn (in this case he/she does), then counter-intel will never work since the plagues are released before any counter intel eliminates them by the subsequent player's turn processing. There is simply no defense depending on the order of turn processing that is decided by the order of how players signed up for the game.
In the case of CB#8, the game went from one of space combat to "spy wars" in several turns once this tactic was adopted, and in my opinion will just throw successive players out of the game with no recourse. That game in particular is being won by intel alone in a manner that can't be defended against. Personally I don't think was the intent of the game was to have intel as the game winning tactic... That's not the type of game I believe "carrier battles was intended to become.
My personal opinion is that the game is being won by a taking advantage of a flaw in the intel system that has much larger than intended consequences, and it poisons the gameplay. That is why I'm withdrawing from that game: the game is being won by cheap tactics and the ones who are doing it in my book are cheating.

[Suicide Junkie]

There is a difference between cheating, and exploiting a bug in the mod.
A difference which means little to the ones getting hit, of course.

Which is why the mod is going to be patched to fix the problem.