I know how many science you have, how much ships you make, what firepower they have.
And imo the game would be more fun if I didn’t know that, with such great certainty.
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Without any information on other player’s state of resources how are we supposed to inform our choices of strategy and tactics?
I’d like an “Intelligence/Counter-Intelligence” technology to represent spies and other ways of gathering information and spreading misinformation.
Say each cycle other players’ info (ships in fleets, tech levels, E/I/S on stars, etc) is distorted by a random amount between +10/-10 (unknown by how much or in what direction). For each point of Intel higher than theirs, the random distortion is reduced until you know exactly what they have. If you have less Intel than them, that random variance is increased so you have less accurate info.
I think it’d be Awesome.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t know anything, just not everything and not with absolute precision.
There’s an interesting article about what can be known through intelligence and other resource gathering: Point estimation - German tank problem - WikiEducator
How about we only have information on people in scan range, and the accuracy of the information increases the more of their empire you can see?
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Unfortunately, there’s what works in a “feels right” perspective, and what works on “long-term enjoyable game” perspective.
I like the idea of limited intelligence. It “feels right”. But I strongly suspect that the what it means is that players who have been lucky in the early game now go from being favoured to win to almost impossible to lose, because players never have a chance to band together to defeat or slow down the leading player.
Intelligence can mitigate this somewhat (“feels right”), but I think the net effect is that at the end of the game most players will feel “they never had a chance”, significantly decreasing their overall enjoyment of the game.
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If you only had stats for what you can see it would make diplomacy more interesting as you could ‘pool’ your intel with other players.
I suggest an inaccuracy of maximum 400%, so if you think you see 4 ships, that might be 8 ships or just 2 and any number in between. But the accuracy would increase the longer they stay in scan range, 300% the next hour, 200, 100, 50, 25, 10%.
Intelligence on another empire outside scanrange could be something similar, perhaps with a huge increase in accuracy if you exchange tech
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I think that sounds really cool. I’m not much of a programmer so don’t know how hard it would be to implement?
I like very much that we don’t depend on luck when planning an attack or defense. Randomness on ship count on visible stars/carriers would be just the same as randomness on battle results.
But to have some uncertainty on total numbers is really interesting.
If it was out by a certain percentage you would just allow for the upper limit in your calculations.
I think it would just randomly award or penalize the bold.