Aliens' happiness types

[Ed Kolis]

I've noticed that you can see anything about another race but their Happiness Type. Perhaps this should be available as a spy mission - Discover Happiness Type?

[Baron Munchausen]

No. This is another 'out of bounds' situation like whether guessing passwords is cheating or not. While it's not as blatant as password cracking it's using factors external to the game within the game. There are a couple of unimplemented intelligence operations in the executable at present, "Combat Logs - Steal" and "Log Reports - Steal", which I hope don't get implemented. While you might argue that a combat log is a 'report' that you could get access too, it's such a total record of a combat session that it really shouldn't be available in a single location where it would be 'stealable'. It's the equivalent of reading all the officer's battle reports and reviewing all of their sensor logs. The same goes for log reports. While some of the information owuld be stealable, the log represents the sum total of your incoming information about your empire. Intelligence operations should have their frame of reference within the game and not be able to access the player's own information.

I am a bit ticked off that 'Covert Recon' doesn't report the current happiness status of the population, though. If your agents can run around and count Troops and WPs on the ground, assess facilities, and report this back, why can't they notice if the people are rioting or grumbling or happy?

And it should be possible for any operation to succeed so totally that the 'victim' dosn't know it occured. Instead, you are informed of every single intelligence operation that succeeds against you.

[ July 10, 2002, 23:33: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
And it should be possible for any operation to succeed so totally that the 'victim' dosn't know it occured. Instead, you are informed of every single intelligence operation that succeeds against you.

Couldn't you change the intelligence file to do this?

code:

---

Num Target Messages       := 1

---

Change it to zero and the target empire gets no message of the intelligence operation.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
And it should be possible for any operation to succeed so totally that the 'victim' dosn't know it occured. Instead, you are informed of every single intelligence operation that succeeds against you.

Couldn't you change the intelligence file to do this?

code:

---

Num Target Messages       := 1

---

Change it to zero and the target empire gets no message of the intelligence operation.

Geoschmo

---

Sure, but then you NEVER know when that intelligence operation is used against you. This is the same 'all or nothing' problem that plagues so much of SE. Mines, weapon damage (no variability), etc. We need some sort of check for relative capabilities and a determination that allows either outcome.

[Rollo]

You could add a message like "Sir, we *think* that we have been hit by Intel operations, but we are uncertain about the damage or the source."

If you copy that as message number 2 to all intel projects, there will be a 50% chance that the target will have a hard time to figure out what actually happend .

Rollo

[Fyron]

And, add that as some random events, so that there might not be any intel operations when you receive that message.