An idea to balance out tech

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Arkcon:

Anyway, some of the current intelligence projects really seem uninteresting to me. Late in the game, cargo destruction really doesn't make much of a dent in the massed weapon platforms, for instance.

And what's with poisoning the population? Maybe this seems horrific to a human player -- but does it really dent production? Ditto for destroying one facility or damageing conditions or planet value.

Some people want more complicated intelligence, then a wise person pointed out -- if you want that, take out the ships and planets and call the game Intelligence Wars

Complicated isn't quite the right word. It's not that people want a more 'complicated' system with more micromanagement. It's that they want a better one. Subtle might be a better word. More sophisticated. Better adapted to the game world.

Your observations above are perfect examples of the crude level of interface between intel and the rest of the game. Would a saboteur of even average intelligence use the exact same sort of explosives or other destructive device against all of stored Satellites, Troop mechs, and Weapon Platforms? Shouldn't mines go up together in one big BOOM when sabotaged? Instead only as many get destroyed as the initial damage can account for, just like with troops. If the nature of the attack is to 'interfere with maintenance' rather than plant a bomb, then it ought to have some way of affecting large numbers of units even when the damage total of the units increases in the late game. But it doesn't. It's the same old trick from day one till the end of the game.

The other intel attacks suffer from the same trouble. Poisoning the population is the same attack regardless of the size of the colony. Shouldn't it be possible for the population to recognize that something is wrong after a certain amount of time and find the source of the trouble? In that case, only a certain proportion of the population should be poisoned, not a fixed number. A certain number of people would eat the poisoned food, for example, and then the civil government would put the clues together and find the source. Larger colonies would have more people eating on whatever regular schedule your race eats on, so it would be possible to do more damage at once, while smaller colonies would have fewer people eating on the schedule and the same amount of time to find the source (assuming the same level of 'cleverness' in hiding it) would result in fewer people being poisoned.

This is the problem with the intel system. It's not 'lack of complication' but lack of sophistication that annoys people. Our wonderful 'edumacation' system doesn't do a very good job of teaching us the subtle shades of word meaning these days...