Probes and intelligence.

[t78]

I had an idea concerning intelligence units. I have been fiddling around with ICW, and I noticed that probe droids are always accurate in their assessments of what units are where. Unless the Ai does its usual fiddling around, moving units, then there generally is little by way of guess work- sending a cheap, easy to use, expendable probe, generally reveals everything for minimal effort.

I wondered if there was a desire for a greater challenge in using intelligence units. What if probe droids only revealed a certain number of units- leaving the rest as question marks?


Taking this further, I thought of ways to make intelligence a little more 'interactive'. I am not sure what is happening with 2.3, and I am not sure what is possible, so anything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt in that context.

An intelligence unit might show an imperfect picture of an enemy system- crucially, certain units might not be shown (even as a question mark), and some might be shown but not be there. A Tector might be shown, but its actually a Dominator.

Nevertheless! It would be a fairly accurate picture more than 70% of the time. You would not be wasting your time with a probe droid, and annoying surprises should be kept to a minimum.  It just increases the guesswork a little.

However, if you think something is incorrect, you might invest in another intelligence unit to show the system again. Once again, it would show something more correct 70% of the time, and less correct, 30% of the time. (provisional numbers here) On average, you improve the picture with more probes sent. Maybe probes should be a little more expensive?

Thus intelligence is no longer sending a unit to scout things out with a single click. It is a game in itself- an investment. Generally, you would see a fairly accurate picture. VERY rarely, you might find that you have a worse picture after sending multiple probes to a system than when you started.


All of this means that your choice of units (your reserves?) have to take uncertainty into account. You can't just blindly jump everything. To be honest, that would be the entire point of what I'm suggesting.


So... would anyone find that interesting? Might it be Fun?

If not knowing where things are is annoying, then why not just show everything in an enemy system adjacent to a friendly system? *shrugs* Just some thoughts. Pick and choose if anything sounds good.

[Corey]

Intelligence is fairly binary in EaW, there's unfortunately nothing we can do to change how that works in terms of partial reveals and that sort of thing.

[t78]

Thanks for responding so quickly! Ah, hardcoding again...   

Just out of interest, was there any organised pattern to what was hardcoded by the EAW dev team, or was it all random?