So how about something to do with “hidden” movement or control…
A system has the three values - banking | industry | research…
Take the total value of those three indicators and create a new value that indicates the level of “sophistication” at that system. It could be 1 point for each or perhaps something like 1 pt for every 2 levels of banking, 1 pt for each level of industry and say 5 pts for each level of research… This new value represents the “viewable” sophistication rating for the system so a system with Banking 2 | Industry 2 | Research 1 – would have a viewable index of 8.
This could factor into if anyone nearby could “sense” if the system was inhabited… A new Technology Research could be something that would reduce these “emissions” so that neighbors would not no anyone had colonized the system or not. This emission technology would also reduce the effectiveness of scanners in figuring out how many ships were present at a system as well…
Scanning Tech vs Emission Protection Tech - some factor or ratio that would allow someone to overcome and see the through the deception either completely or at some reduced rate. This would allow everyone to keep all the other empires guessing at which systems were of any value or where ships were being hidden…
Greatest issue with this idea is, I at least,count on players behaving differently because a system is occupied, and get deterred by that fact.
People would be declaring war by pure ignorance if they didn’t even know the system was occupied. Also I’d say this would substract from diplomacy rather than add to it, which is Tritons greatest asset.
I was thinking about something similar the other day.
What about a tech item called Intelligence? The level of this tech would determine how accurate your scan data was. At the moment you know for definite how many ships are at a star etc but what if, depending on your Intelligence level, you only got a rough estimate. Obviously, the higher your Intelligence level the more accurate the estimate.
I think it would add a level of uncertainty that would be exciting.
There’s probably room for an espionage system in NP2. Since the design philosophy is broadly to keep things as simple as possible, maybe have the difference between your Intelligence and your enemy’s Intelligence determine how much of your stats they can see?
If I was implementing this, every day I’d generate a new random number between -1 and +1 for every star as its “fudge value,” and when you view an enemy’s star, their ship count appears to you as:
That’s just my first instinct, though, there’s probably a cleverer way of obscuring the actual value.
Another way to do this is to have Counter-Intelligence as a type of infrastructure on a star. The cost of buying Counter-Intelligence improvements depends on your Intelligence tech level. Then, the difference between the enemy Intelligence and your Counter-Intelligence on a particular star determines how accurately they can see your stats on that star.
Thee is a feature on the todo list for some infrastructure you can build at a star that will hide the ships and other infrastructure. I think it would be very expensive like a gate.