Is the intelligence in SE(?) ok?

[President_Elect_Shang]

Right the freighters, true. But I still don’t think my point is made clearly. How did the spy get into my system to bribe the captain in the first place? Also lets consider a race with a hive mind, how do you bribe one of their captains to dump radioactive waste on the nearest colony?

[Parasite]

Originally posted by President Elect Shang:
How did the spy get into my system to bribe the captain in the first place?

How can you talk with ships in different systems, even when possibly cloaked and separated by enemies? IMHO, Once you have communication, you can have lies, hypnotism, greed, promises made and kept or made and broken. If you are talking a billion people, there are bound to be some that are dissatisfied, mutated, dumb, or something. In fact you could be talking to me

[Alneyan]

I didn't answer to your post in particular, as I was writing my own answer when you have posted your point. It gets somewhat complicated.

Contacting a captain can be done, or cannot, depending on how you think communications is handled within the game. And likewise, you may consider there are a lot of ships going in and out, or merely a few, making travel much easier or harder. So on this peculiar area, your mileage may vary. However, it does raise a problem when dealing with Psychic races, Hive races or something along these lines. That I will leave to the attention of someone roleplaying one such race.

I admit the fact that a few spies can make it behind your lines doesn't bother me too much, but I gather we have quite different conceptions of how a stellar society would be built, and so it would be much easier to be a spy in my own Empires than in yours. Or perhaps I am not yet cautious enough...

What does annoy me is that you will *always* know who performed an Intelligence action against you when it fails. Is Counter-Intelligence so efficient all spies are caught red-handed alive? (It might be hard to know who was trying to assassinate your ruler if the ship ferrying this spy was blown out "just in case" by planetary defences) I am also wondering if you could recruit spies from another race to confuse things all the more. If you happen to play the EEE, your spies might be quite easily identified.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Ok, I follow you now, good point. I think we are driving at the same thing just that you have touched on it in another way. Also in doing so you covered some ground I was waiting to touch on, when the topic had fleshed out a little more.

Parasite: The communication thing is really another aspect that bugs me, not as much as the Intel subject mind you. It would kill the game to have a structured system of timed communication where you had to write orders for your admirals and ships and wait for a message drone to reach said ships. I have just come to accept that instant communication is a necessary evil part of the game. But I don’t really want to cover that, maybe in another thread.

[ December 16, 2003, 19:00: Message edited by: President Elect Shang ]

[Alneyan]

Sorry then if I have unwillingly disturbed one of your Posts to come.

I can think of two other means to explain why spies would manage to get behind the lines that easily. If you are a very mean race, you might send these operatives when both your Empires are trading and your relationship is good. You would then check all the entries within the Empire, but as the spies would be already in, it would be much harder. Unless the target is a most paranoiac and isolationist Empire, or unless you are yourself a warmonger that is.

The other way would be to disguise spies as "political refugees" if you do feel like generous. It could even be some famous scientific team looking for leaving the corrupted Empire in which they live, and who were working on some special weapon of tremendous power. You might be tempted to allow these disguised spies to enter your worlds, and then...

Obviously, these ways would never, ever, always work, and that's why I don't quite like the current system "all or nothing" linked with Intelligence. Do you only need to bypass Counter-Intelligence to successfully plant a bomb on a given ship without any chance? Or to kill these hundred million settlers? And then you fail to pass Counter-Intelligence, not only you don't have the slightest chance of succeeding in your project, but you will be immediatly detected and the target will know you were attempting some actions. That can unfortunately led to some infelicitous diplomatical incidents, especially when the target was only looking for a pretense to declare war. But I seem to digress.

[AMF]

But this entire discussion seems to illustrate that the SE4 system is an abstract representation of how it all works. Most of the actions in the game are not really abstractions (you see the ships cruising around bLasting stuff) but a lot of it is: what are resources? just an aggregate measure of what your economy produces. What are "research points"? Just an abstract measure of how much effort your scientists are putting into learning new and practical things.

Intel I would posit is the same: it is such a complex system that the only way to effectively model it and make it playable and enjoyable is to abstract it out.

One way to do so is to use the "points" and "projects" that it currently does.

I would argue that if you tried to make a more specific system (specific agents? taking geography into account? Needing ships to get the agents there? etc...) then you would suddenly find yourself faced with the need to "explain away" a whole lot of contradictions or weirdnesses - all the things that you are mentioning.

By keeping the intel at the abstract level, we avoid the need to deal with lots and lots of contradictions.

What I mean is, I guess, that for every example someone can make about how the intel system is screwy I can make a counter example explaining how it can be accomodated. This is a good thing.

Did that make sense? Probably not...

Originally posted by Alneyan:
Sorry then if I have unwillingly disturbed one of your Posts to come.

I can think of two other means to explain why spies would manage to get behind the lines that easily. If you are a very mean race, you might send these operatives when both your Empires are trading and your relationship is good. You would then check all the entries within the Empire, but as the spies would be already in, it would be much harder. Unless the target is a most paranoiac and isolationist Empire, or unless you are yourself a warmonger that is.

The other way would be to disguise spies as "political refugees" if you do feel like generous. It could even be some famous scientific team looking for leaving the corrupted Empire in which they live, and who were working on some special weapon of tremendous power. You might be tempted to allow these disguised spies to enter your worlds, and then...

Obviously, these ways would never, ever, always work, and that's why I don't quite like the current system "all or nothing" linked with Intelligence. Do you only need to bypass Counter-Intelligence to successfully plant a bomb on a given ship without any chance? Or to kill these hundred million settlers? And then you fail to pass Counter-Intelligence, not only you don't have the slightest chance of succeeding in your project, but you will be immediatly detected and the target will know you were attempting some actions. That can unfortunately led to some infelicitous diplomatical incidents, especially when the target was only looking for a pretense to declare war. But I seem to digress.

[Alneyan]

It seems like I wasn't too clear as well, no wonder now that I look back on my Posts.

I didn't advocate setting up a really... how to put that... detailed intelligence system, but rather adding agents to perform the tasks. The other areas you mentioned (that is, geographical areas or the need for ships) wouldn't work in a game with such a scale as Space Empires. The same could apply to my suggestion as well obviously. So I will try to develop a bit what I have in mind when I speak of making operatives into the game.

You would have to "recruit" these agents by spending these intelligence points, which will remain as a very convenient abstraction. Then you would have to train these agents, by spending the same points, or you might send them to enemy systems for "learning the hard way". Obviously, all projects will cost intelligence points, so you would have to choice where to spend the points. And then you could consider giving the agents basic abilities, something along the lines of "Counter-Intelligence, Spying/Sabotage and Loyalty/Combat" (That is, defence, offence and escape)

As this may (or may not, I guess it depends on your own taste) be too complicated, why not adding some training program to improve the efficiency of either (both?) offence and defence projects? The point would be to give something else than Counter-Intelligence to plan when Intelligence isn't needed. As for now you will put your points into Counter-Intelligence when you cannot do anything better with these. It might be a bit different if you actually had to spend Intelligence points to improve the efficiency of your projects, or even to gain access to new projects.

It is only a random idea, but I would definitively like to have a choice between CI and something else when you don't have to try your luck at launching a few projects. For now choosing CI in such circumstances is usually a no-brainer, unless you are actually plotting to send a few operatives all at once against a single enemy in three years or so. Who knows with all these scheming minds around?

[President_Elect_Shang]

I think these are all very good points and counter-points. But I also think that we are straying. What I wanted to know, changed from what I first asked, is what types of projects can we submit to Aaron that are more realistic in a game context. What ideas and suggestions can we come up with? For example some of the intel projects I would think need to be dropped, but can we replace them with something else?

[AMF]

Which projects do you think need to be dropped or modified? (throw up a list and we'll debate it)

Also, I am not a modd'er but are intel projects open to modding? That would make a lot of this a moot point, since we could just come up with a better intel mod...

Originally posted by President Elect Shang:
I think these are all very good points and counter-points. But I also think that we are straying. What I wanted to know, changed from what I first asked, is what types of projects can we submit to Aaron that are more realistic in a game context. What ideas and suggestions can we come up with? For example some of the intel projects I would think need to be dropped, but can we replace them with something else?

[Roanon]

Originally posted by alarikf:
Which projects do you think need to be dropped or modified? (throw up a list and we'll debate it)

All of them

I think, the problem is intel is black or white. Either it is totally wasted money and utterly useless, because your target has developed counterintel some gazillion years ago and happily has kept storing these otherwise unusable intel points into triple-effective counterintel since then. Or you manage to succeed, and because of exhausted counterintel from there on continually, where nearly every combination of intel projects has the ability to destroy the targetted empire more effective than large fleets of huge warships.

A totally different design, which I admit am too tired to think about now, would be needed most - then even the current projects may become balanced and useful.

[ December 17, 2003, 16:55: Message edited by: Roanon ]