SEV- Thread on Obfuscation (MM is involved)2weeks to post

[Atrocities]

I like my old idea of limited range scanners and sensors that can only see a sector around the ship on level one and 5 sectors by level 5.

Planets sensors arrays and or scanners would have a greater range of 5 to start out to 10.

This way a ship passing through a system may or may not see all the ships or planets in that system. They would have to EXPLORE the system.

[tesco samoa]

Some good ideas here... I would like to run this thread for 2 weeks and then send in the ideas... See the reply and run it again for 2 weeks... for fine tuning.

[Stone Mill]

tecso- Thanks for your work on this.

If you have an open ear listening on the development front, I would also like to know if we could take the same initiative with the topic of intelligence.

Do you think you can ask how the intelligence model will work?

That is the one area of this truly stellar game... that most recognize as disappointing.

I can volunteer to start up a second thread and collect all the great ideas previously posted regarding what we think could be contributed to an excellent intel model.

Or has this been done? or is it a waste of time?

[Suicide Junkie]

What would be nice is if each component had a visibility rating... two actually. One for intact and one for destroyed.

The visibility rating and the cloaking/sensors modifiers would determine how far away you need to be to identify the component.
Components which fail the visibility check would be fogged out.
Two ideas for destroyed components:
1) Destroyed components are easier to spot, but show up as the classic unidentifiable "broken" icons.
2) Destroyed components are harder to spot, but will be identifiable broken parts when they are spotted.
Perhaps even both ways could be done.
Note: Identifiable means when you right click, you can see what the component was before it got destroyed.

This would handle the silhouette idea, and you could intentionally make your ships similar in design to confuse the enemy.
"Hull size matches. Engine locations match. Active electronics match. That's all I can see from here, but it looks like their big minesweeper, captain!"
"Move to attack"
"Oh, no! There are antiproton beams where the sweepers should have been! We're all gonna die!"

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IMO, you should never see the enemy ship or class names unless you do an intel op, or the enemy chooses to show it, by painting the name in big letters on the hull or broadcasting it at every encounter like ST Federation ships enjoy doing
(checkbox per ship, and a racial trait/penalty which would force it to be checked for every ship)

Each ship could be tagged with your own personal name and suspected class independent of what others call it. So as you figure out what components are on the ship during your approach, you can provisionally assign a class designation.
If the enemy dosen't take the "Military Blabbermouths" racial penalty above, then you would lose that info when the ship leaves your maximum detection range.
The info you've collected would still be saved under a "missing enemy ships" list, and if you come into contact with the ship again, you could copy the stats back.

This could backfire for you if the enemy plays a shell game with cloaking and decloaking ships, or does quick retrofits. You will need to get close enough (or have a powerful enough scanner ship) to match up enough components to be confindent in your assignment of who's who .

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A "Homing beacon" component would be cool. Activated when your ship is captured by enemies, it will give you full stats on the ship so you can follow and try to recover it.
It would be integrated deeply into the hull, and only removable by retrofitting. Perhaps never removable.

If they were never removable, you could use the captured ship to provide misinformation about where your fleets are gathering.

[tesco samoa]

Stone Mill Great Idea. As it ties in with this area. But if the Intel thread gets too bothersome then break it down.

Go ahead and run with it.

If you want I can send in the email when were done. Or you can. Your choice.

One of my goals here is to keep things open ended... as I do not want to tell MM what the game should be... ( Thats what mods are for ) Just offer suggestions for areas that can be modded and or turned on or off

Intel will be interesting.

[Stone Mill]

Thanks Buddy, I'll get to work on it. I'll start a thread when I get my ducks in a row.

[spoon]

A lot of these ideas are neat, but I wonder if their impact on micromanagement would be too much? Having imperfect views of systems would mean having to play all the movement logs every turn to see if any ships crossed through your unfogged area of each system. (though I suppose something could be put in place where you could be notified with a message in the Turn Log, or something). Limited scanning range would mean having to go and park ships/drop sats all over the place.

That said, as long as it is optional, sure, go nuts. But I wouldn't want to see a lot of features that increase micromanagement beyond the level already present in the game.

[ May 07, 2004, 18:47: Message edited by: spoon ]