Intel: I'm Stumped

[Stone Mill]

Hi guys. Love the forum and appreciate your help.

Playing a multi-player PBEM game for the Last few months, and I thought I had a grasp of how intel worked (by reading Messages in this forum). But I can't make sense of this:

I have a trade and research alliance with player #2. He snuck several fleets into my system, cloacked with cloaking armor. I detected them with gravitic sensors. I did not let on that I saw them while he clearly was staging for a sneak attack (the jerk!) Instead, I decided to pull a shocker and steal a fleet from him before he attacked.

My Intel: 40K
His Intel: 10K

I ran 5 simultaneous crew insurrection projects against a cloaked fleet, building points slowly to pop them off all at once. Only, after all those turns, to my aggrivation they all FAILED! How?!? It does not seem likely for him to be running 5 simultaneous Intel II defense projects, and his intel points were not even close to be able to keep up! I can see some projects failed due to defense... but all?

Any ideas?

[Suicide Junkie]

Perhaps, He has had the defensive operations in progress for some time now.

The defensive points are stored up, and the defense projects get depleted as enemy intel ops are attempted. He could have stored up 10K per turn in defence, and held off your intel ops using those reserves. If you have 4x his intel, you should be able to wear down his defences fairly quickly, but you'll have to keep at it, and the enemy will know you're trying.

[rdouglass]

Are you sure they get stored up??? I've been reading / hearing stuff to the contrary....

[Spyder]

....yeah, the manual says its a "use 'em or lose 'em" kind of deal.....?

[This message has been edited by Spyder (edited 26 February 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

What I mean, is that they are stored as a partially completed defense project.

If the enemy has one Intel defense III, thats 300,000 points to complete. Since the enemy in this case, generates 10K per turn, on turn #20, he has 200K out of 300K on his defense project.

When you try to hit him with a ship capture or whatever, you may spend 40K in one turn.

That 40K is subtracted from his defence.

On Turn #21, The enemy now has 200K -40K +10K
=170K out of 300K on his defense project. His defense held, and your attack failed.

After 7 turns of this, the enemy runs out of defense points, and your attacks start to succeed.

[Stone Mill]

Thanks for the insight, gentlemen.

Could you clear this up as well:

1. Does an Intel III defense project defend against Intel II and Intel I projects?

2. When Intel Projects expire, are all points for that project simply lost?

3. Does the defender see the point reduction in his Intel defense project?

It seems that if #2 is true, you should avoid letting your projects expire like the plague... You could start distributing your points among projects, then allocate your points into one project at a time (new projects), keeping the "held" project alive indefinitely. Anyone use intel like this?

[Spyder]

The way I do Intel is I set one defense project (my biggest), Puppet political parties, Crew insurrection & resource collection and then tell it to repeat projects & spread points evenly.

Then I just let it do its work.

------------------
Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

[Suicide Junkie]

1) I believe that an Intel I defends against any intel project.

3) Oh, definitely. I had 4 projects going, and they kept bottoming out cause I was MEE. I had managed to get them up to 25% each, and decided to go offence. The offence took away from my defence spending, and the projects dropped to zero. The enemy PPP'd one of my main Intel planets the same turn, and I had to drop 300 electron tanks there to get it back.

That seems like a good plan to start with, but when you get enemy offence happening, you may have trouble keeping individual projects from bottoming out. Micromanagement will do it, but the gain might not be worth it. It is easier just to add more projects, with repeat build on.

[DirectorTsaarx]

quote:

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Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
1) I believe that an Intel I defends against any intel project.

---

My experience has been that Counter-Intel is level specific. I've been running 2 Counter-Intel II's and 2 Counter-Intel III's for a while, and I occassionally see Intel I projects succeed (census records stolen, designs stolen, nothing that will help the AI very much). I have also recently seen my first Counter-Intel II succeed, the second fail (because it "finished" and there was no project for it to block) and both Counter-Intel III's succeed (obviously, because they HAD something to block).

BTW - I think Puppet Political Parties is considered a Level 3 op, even though you need to research Applied Intelligence 4 to be able to run it.

As a funny side note - I'm also running a Crew Insurrection op against one of my enemies (one I've never actually seen; we're at war because one of my other enemies ran a successful Communications Mimic before I had enough Counter-Intel running). Anyway, after failing three times, it finally worked! I captured one of their dreadnoughts! Unfortunately, it was part of a 20+ ship fleet, most of which were armed with Psychic weapons (except for two ships they'd captured from other AI's) and they took the ship back. Oh, and this was with Patch 1.19; can't wait to see what happens with the new, improved AI in 1.27...

[Suicide Junkie]

I belive that you need one defence project to block each attack.

ie. if you have 4 defence projects, and the enemy does 5 attack projects in one turn, you can only block 4.

Level I ops are cheap, so you can get more of them done in a single turn.