Intelligence

[Tycan Erah'lav]

Since warfare relies heavily on intelligence, what about a system for buying, selling, trading and falsifying intelligence in different systems. It could be a temporary bonus to a side if you're attacking a planet and have scoped it out first, or a bonus to defending if you've supplied bad intelligence for a while. Just a thought.

[Eaon]

Like the idea, just not sure how to do it.

[furionqeurel]

One idea could be that, by buying information you had become highly aware of the enemies numbers and positions on a certain world, your knowledge of their stations could make your own troops more prepared, resulted in (an example figure) 20% bonus to your troops resistance value for the purpose of working out causalities?

[Tycan Erah'lav]

That's pretty much the idea I had. Say having a few different types, but having them limited, so that if you buy intelligence on a system the benefit expires after say 48 hours or something. Or have different intelligence provide different reductions and time limits, like a spy giving a long term but lower bonus (difficulty of relaying the information) with scouts giving a higher bonus but only for a short period (as the opponent reorganises etc). That's just the idea I had, any other suggestions?

[Eaon's admin account]

What if we just set it so that if you get proper intelligence you can, in the event of a battle say know a few of the enemy's ambush spots (since we have a system that allows for us to do that). Or if they have a special weapon like Poison Gas they plan on using, first uses or so are ineffective due to the troop's preparedness?

[Tycan Erah'lav]

Originally that's what I thought of, it being entirely RP based and just helped overcome some obstacles or whatever, but that doesn't really seem to fit in too well with army size calculations etc.

[Eaon]

We'll keep it around and keep it open for discussion then to see if anything else comes up that might improve upon the idea or find a better use for it?

[Grahm]

Might I suggest that we should also think about counter-espionage to deal with this exact thing? after all, if there is no way to counter the spies, then everyone will use them to extreme effect and the battles would always be half-over with the attackers having the major advantage. How about we go with something simple, such as stating four uses for spies:

1) They can gather intelligence.

2) They can Sabotage production.

3) They can attempt to assassinate somebody.

4) They can root out spies in their area and kill them.

Here's where my idea would get more complex. Anybody can attempt to spy, but their base chance of success for gathering information would be rather low, say 50% at best with no other modifiers. A trained spy who knows the tricks of the trade, would have a base chance of say, 60%. Finally, a professional Bothan Spy would have the highest base chance, something along the lines of 70%. To find the chance of sabotage success, we could take 75% of that number as their chance, so a trained spy would have a 45% chance to successfully sabotage an installation. Finally, to assassinate would be pretty low, something like 25-50% chance of success, perhaps? Then, for counter-espionage, what you could do is take something like half of the spy's base chance and Subtract that number from any spy that would attempt to perform operations in the area, so a Bothan Spy working as counter-espionage would take 35% off an enemy spy's success chance in the area. Of course, anybody could be targeted for assassination, including the counter-spy himself, so you would have to keep an eye out for that as well. I could add in a bunch of other things that could affect the spy's chance of sucess here, but they'd mostly be training, equipment, different base success chance for different planets, and so on and so forth. That's my idea for this, any comments/concerns?

[Tycan Erah'lav]

I don't want to be jumping in too much on my own thread, but my only concern there is having too many numbers to work out while you're RPing. I thought of counter-intelligence too (see first post), the idea I had with that was more of a planetary defense one, ie. if you own a planet you can buy counter-intelligence for it, giving you an advantage against an attacker as they're operating under false intelligence that you provided. If both intelligence and counter-intelligence collide then they are subtracted and whoever has the positive number gets that much of a bonus.

eg. Attacker has spies giving 20% intelligence, Defender has counter-intelligence operatives giving 25% counter-intelligence. The Defender now gets a 5% advantage.

That's just how I imagined intelligence vs. counter-intelligence to work, not going to comment more the actual intelligence gathering right now.