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

[Suicide Junkie]

I guess its going a little off topic, but it is about obfuscating plagues and intel projects...

For intel and plagues, it would be nice if it were planet and ship-based as well.

Spies should be something like a unit, possibly just a counter, though.
It would cost a lot of intel points to create a spy on an enemy world directly, but only a few to train one at home. Large populations should make it easier to find good and willing spies for your side, except for homeworlds, perhaps.

The difficulty of infiltrating spies from a ship to the surface should also depend on the population size.

The potential actions of spies on a planet should depend entirely on the facilities present. Sabotage would be limited to what is produced by the local facilities.
On a planet with research centers, the theft and sabotage of technology would be enabled.
On a planet with a spaceyard, tracking devices could be implanted into ships under construction. (They would reveal position and status of the ship to the spying empire)
On a planet with a resupply depot, ship bombs could be planted on passing ships.
And etc.

- The facility definition should probably specify which intel projects they make the planet vulnerable to.
- Some intel projects, like anti-population and unit storage info/sabotage would be specified as facility-independent.

The acutal spy projects should cost no intel points at all, but instead carry a significant chance of the spy being thwarted, a moderate chance of the spy being killed in the attempt, and a small chance of the spy being captured and interrogated to reveal who sent him.
Only when you run out of spies do you have to spend points to train more.

Intel points could be spent on maintenace, though, and would reduce the chance of the spies being discovered by counter intel projects.

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Plagues:
Each plague should have:
1) A specific incubation time.
- From 1 game turn to a year or more.
Short incubation times mean the plague is noticed early, and gives the player lots of time to halt ships and prevent it from spreading to other planets.
- After arriving at a planet, the plague will spread but not cause any effects until the incubation time has passed.
- After the incubation time has passed on the first infected planet, the disease will be discovered by the afflicted race. After discovery, all medical facilities and components across the empire will start to counter the plague, even planets still in the incubation stage.
2) A virulence rating.
- How many more people contract the plague each turn that it Lasts. Both a maximum % increase, and a maximum count increase.
3) A deadliness rating, separate values for each race in the game.
- The common cold may be rampant on earth, but causes mere discomfort and lowers happiness a bit.
When the Amonkrie visit and contract the plague, they could start dying after only 1 turn.
- Out of the infected population, specify what % will be incapacitated, and what % will die. The remaining amount are carriers of the disease, but not hurt significantly by it.
The effective population for use in production and research points is reduced by the number of incapacitated people.

Higher level plagues would have longer incubation times, spread faster and be deadly to more than one race.
Low level plagues would show their effects right away, not spread to many people, and be deadly to at most one race.

Multiple plague bombs would infect more people initially. Enough hits would overwhelm the medical facilities.

Note: The incapacitated % could very well be more than 100%.
At 300%, it means for each infected person, two uninfected people are forced to stop working in order to care for them!
A high level plague like that which incapacitates the population very quickly, but dosen't kill, would be perfect for just before a ground invasion. After which you go and cure the people.

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For medical bays and facilities.
Medical facilities on the planet could subtract from the virulence of any plague, while curing a set number each turn.
Medical components in orbit would probably just cure a set number.
Any ships in the same sector as a medical bay would be cured of the plague if the plague has been discovered already

If the medics get there early, the # cured per turn may exceed the new infection rates, and the plague would slowly be eliminated. Otherwise, the medics will only be able to slow the progress of the disease until more help arrives in the form of extra medical ships and facilities.

When a plague is discovered, a new research area could open up, and allow the player to study better cures.
Each level researched could add some amount to the cure rate and virulence reduction of the specific plague.
If dynamically generated, the tech area name should probably be "[planetname] plague of [gamedate]" or some variation on the theme.

[ May 07, 2004, 21:11: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Originally posted by Will:

quote:

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Originally posted by 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.

Simple. Have a toggle switch that draws a colored dotted line for the observed path of ships in the system. Select the sector with the paths, and you can pick one for more information on that particular ship/fleet that passed through. Have options to filter out based on various factors (eg. show only fleets of X ships, show only ships of X size AND Y weapon strength, hide ships greater than X size AND smaller than Y size -- show ships with Space Yard).

I think with the levels of fog, the biggest problem isn't going to be controlling the micromanagement, but making it so the AI isn't completely crippled by it.

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Or just show all the info gathered during the turn.
You should only lose info on a particular ship if it flies completely out of range to where you can't see the hull at all.

If you fly past a ship, and see a wave motion gun, you will know where the wavemotion gun is as long as you keep track of the ship. You may not see it be destroyed in a distant 3rd party combat, but it should still appear there with a question mark or partly grayed out until your info is updated.

If the ship warps out of the system and then returns, you can't tell for sure if its the same ship, so you lose the info until you fly close by again.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, I certainly agree that both 'natural' plagues and various 'bio weapons' (there should be more than one type) should affect different races differently. Each species needs a 'genetic code' as part of its definition. It could be something fairly simple like a 4 digit hexadecimal number, with each digit standing for a degree of similarity. The first digit could be for the 'type' of life chemistry, like carbon vs. silicon vs. some other wild ideas that SciFi has come up with like energy beings or whatever. The second digit could be a general 'class' thing like reptilian or mammilian or plant or whatever, and the third would be a species level code, leaving the fourth for very subtle differences betwen related species like Vulcan/Romulan.

Then your plague/bio-weapon could have a code of its own marking what life forms it affects and how virulent it is. Some weapons would affect only species that exactly match its code, some would affect any that match up to the 'species' code, and a few (very advanced) would match anything in the 'class' code. Would you want bio-weapons that could kill any and all of a given 'life form' (carbon, silicon, etc)? I wouldn't but I suppose some people would, so the game could allow it and people could mod to their taste as with so many other things in the SE universe.

As for 'types' of bio-weapons, you could have 'poisons' that are described as either chemical or biological that destroy immediately upon use but don't continue from turn to turn or linger after the population is gone, and you could have 'plagues' that are contagious and actually linger after the victims are gone, making the place unliveable for whatever they infect for years of game time.

Edit: Oh yes, plagues should travel between planets unless you implement quarantine which is the same as your planet being blockaded! All trade stops and whatever the planet produces is not available to your empire.

[ May 08, 2004, 03:08: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

As for 'types' of bio-weapons, you could have 'poisons' that are described as either chemical or biological that destroy immediately upon use but don't continue from turn to turn or linger after the population is gone, and you could have 'plagues' that are contagious and actually linger after the victims are gone, making the place unliveable for whatever they infect for years of game time.

Those could be plagues with a virulence of zero... They'll incapacitate and kill the people they've already hit, but won't spread at all.
If left untreated the incapacitated people would start to die and the unaffected people would become incapacitated, but no uninfected people would get the plague unless a ship was still up there dropping bombs.

Eg: 100 M people hit out of 500M on the planet, 10% fatality rate, 50% incapacitation, and no virulence.
turn 1: 10M die, 50M incapacitated, 40M infected but ok.
turn 2: 90M left... 9M die, 45M incap, 36M infected but ok.
turn 3: 81M left... 8M die, 40M incap, 33M infected but ok.

Edit: Oh yes, plagues should travel between planets unless you implement quarantine which is the same as your planet being blockaded! All trade stops and whatever the planet produces is not available to your empire.

Ooh, yeah. I forgot to add that ships not carrying population should count as 1M infected people after visiting a plague world and travelling to another planet.
Given a virulence factor of 2.0, you'd end up with 1M infected on the planet at turn 1, then 3M, 7M, 15M. (2,4,8,16 minus the 1 that are from the ship)

Minimum new infections for non-zero virulence would be 1M per turn, just like how population growth works in SE4.

[Suicide Junkie]

Each species needs a 'genetic code' as part of its definition. It could be something fairly simple like a 4 digit hexadecimal number, with each digit standing for a degree of similarity.

Rather than trying to make each digit represent a level on your taxonomy tree, why not just use it as a genetic code flat out?
The degree of similarity is how many digits match.

(binary for simplicity of example - decimal or hex would be better I agree)
01010-11010-10100 - Krill (5/15 matches)
10001-01101-00101 - Terran (control race)
10101-01001-00010 - Bobroba (11/15 matches)

Your plague could generate some semi-random codes, and the more differences, the less virulent and deadly it would be.
The randomness would depend on how high your tech level is... the higher tech, the closer you can get it to your target race.

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Perhaps the genetic code could be user-chosen during race creation, or even better would be if it were based on some function of the traits and characteristics you pick.

Then a race which chooses not to play the berzerker with maxxed aggression and defense and maint reduction would get a very different code from all the other copycat races...
The copycats would then all get thrashed by the same plague bomb

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Ooh, and the race using plague bombs should have to take extra care not to infect its own populations when the ships return home after an attack. The ships should be infected when they fire, and have to visit a medical facility for treatment or self destruct to prevent infection of the race that built it

[ May 08, 2004, 02:31: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Baron Munchausen]

I supposed the 'tapering off' model would be a good way to deal with chemical weapons since the chemicals would indeed tend to hang around for a while, just not 'reproduce' themselves. So a declining kill per turn might be better than a kill on the first turn and then no more for certain weapons. But we will still want a 'neutron bomb' type weapon that kills population immediately with no after-effects.

The genetic code thing is just supposed to be a simple way to represent the very complex factors of life. The longer you make this code, the more variation you can have, sure, but also the more complex the game code gets. I think that a few digits is enough for our purposes. If you give plagues and bio-weapons a 'range' of effect as well as categories I think you can create some fairly interesting interactions with 4-8 digits.

("Range" as in +/- a certain amount from the actual match but with less virulence. So you can have a perfect match suffer full effects while a species that is +1 or -1 would still be affected but less than a species that is a perfect match.)

I guess the bio-weapon would have to have its range independently defined at each 'code' digit. Messy but well worth the variability in use.

[QuarianRex]

I don't have time to read the entire thread right now, so I don't know if this has already been mentioned (or is even appropriate), but what I would like to see is starcraft style fog-of-war for previously visited systems. The ability to remember which worlds were alien homeworlds (and not possible colinization destinations) would be greatly appreciated.