Special agents
In Beta 5, the only possible way to interfere with other empires is to launch an attack fleet towards it and to take over one or several planets. While this is quite simple, this system presents some drawbacks. First of all having only one way to achieve a goal is quite limited. Moreover a small player can never do anything against a bigger one since his fleets get killed immediately.
In Beta 6, we will introduce new ways to take actions against a foreign empire. One of them is the introduction of special agents, or more basically spies. So, how is the system going to work?
Special agents are considered as individual characters. Like any individual character, agents have a name and are members of a species. They are recruited on a planet, which is considered to be their planet of origin and which influences their initial loyalty to their empire. Wages are paid to them and after some time they retire from service.
The efficiency of a special agent is determined by several characteristics. While most of these characteristics are static values, they are affected by both the agent’s loyalty to his employer and his experience. Among these characteristics, we can consider abilities (such as stealth, bluff, physical condition, weapons, hacking), loyalty and experience.
A special agent is a powerful tool. It can be used to infiltrate another empire for various purposes or to prevent foreign agents from infiltrating his own; additionally, special agents can help with internal propaganda.
Among the various missions a special agent can perform, are considered training missions (to gain experience), internal missions (counter-intelligence, rebel assassination, etc) and foreign missions (government infiltration, technology theft, sabotage, founds theft, incitement to unrest, etc.).
Each mission implies the use of a set of abilities, lasts for a certain amount of time and might have several kinds of outcomes, depending on the agent’s characteristics compared to the difficulty of the mission: success, partial success, agent spotted, agent captured, agent killed, etc.
What do you think of this special agents concept?
Do you think it can bring new ways to interfere with other empire?
Do you think we should put limits to their use except their wages and availability on various planets?
Do you think it could help smaller players compared to big ones, or that it will make bigger players even more powerful?
Lemorsa:
I think that it will be cool. I don’t think that we should limit them either, simply because some players may want to totally focus their researches on their agents, I know i might be tempted to do that myself. Plus having players like this in an alliance would become an essential to counteract other alliances. I think it would be amazing, and it would add a totally knew factor to the game that would be awesome!
I think that to counteract the bigger players, just make it that the bigger your empire, the easier it is for you to be infiltrated… Ugh, you just got me excited!
March 6, 2008, 7:05 pmju:
Well if your empire is big, you have plenty of planets which might be infiltrated and you may not have the resources to have agents on counter-infiltration missions everywhere, so I guess it should do the trick
March 6, 2008, 9:59 pmDav:
its not really true that smaller players cant do anything to larger ones, me and cyliis are quite small compared to some of the alliances and to a few of the players on top of the rankings but we still do quite a bit of damage.
i love the idea of agents, i dont think there should be limits on them besides wages and experience because some members will want to concentrate all their efforts towards the agents and and a player like that could be a useful tool for a alliance to have…
can you chose what planets have the most anti infiltration? so you could have like your government planets or whatever they are called in the next beta nearly impossible to infiltrate but your rim planets are easy to infiltrate
March 13, 2008, 8:21 amju:
On the choosing which planets have high counter-infiltration, I think things have to remain logical. If you want one planet to get very difficult to infiltrate, you send several agents with high experience and skills to that planet on a counter-infiltration mission, and that’s it
March 13, 2008, 8:38 amLemorsa:
makes sense… yeah, i like it a lot…
March 20, 2008, 2:55 amYuckwitte:
I am sorry for posting out of context but there was nowhere to post it…
TRADE!
Will you be able to get trade revenue? Also, if you do (which I think you should) it should be automatically (as in no special ‘Trader” units) based on the population, amount of goods, links to places without those goods and distance to/from the places without the goods
Granted, for this you would have to make 30 or so resources that do nothing, except be trade but they could also affect happiness. Also, you should be able to give/sell trade right to other people, meaning that you could trade with them as well.
Also, trade/getting goods should affect happiness a little bit, not a lot as there are a lot of different goods, but if you manage to get say 75% of the goods, each planet would recieve like 5% happiness. The reason it is so small is because trade is mainly to get money
Also, this would facilitate the construction of market/port facilities which would allow for a greater amount of goods to enter/leave the port.
Also for goods, I dont know if each planet should have a lot of goods or only a few. BUT some goods can be created/discovered by science and a base ingredient. (for example, you have the good ‘Gold’ then you research Transmogrification and you have both gold and hover boards (OK bad example but I wanted to say ‘Transmogrification’))
March 25, 2008, 1:30 amju:
Managing various goods and trading them becomes too complex if you rely on a micro-management by the player. If you have a system which calculates production and trades for you for ease of play, it doesn’t bring anything compared to the current system where all this goods production and trade is virtual and where in the end factories make money.
March 25, 2008, 10:01 amTSeeker:
To add to what Ju said, we actually considered resource “creation” for quite a while - having a whole chain of production where obtaining resource Z needs you to process resources X and Y inside a specific factory. However, the complexity added was simply too much: we already plan on having quite a few types of “natural” resources, and the list would have gotten enormous, not to mention the fact that you’d have ended up managing how much of a resource you want to turn into another (as you might still need the original resource for some other stuff).
As for actual trading - Hyperiums. Meh. ‘nuf said. :p
March 26, 2008, 10:19 am