Been playing a few games with family and have felt the detailed information you can see about other empires doesn’t make sense thematically. Somehow I can get an instant detailed inventory of my enemies ships and infrastructure but that planet just a little bit away I can’t see diddly until I research tech. It’s valuable information that I look over a lot. It should have a price.
I feel its a missed opportunity for a research tech tree and possible new empire function that I wanted to spitball. I also feel it’s addition will make Scanning more critical.
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Research tech “Counter Intelligence” - Start of the game the detailed data that we take for granted in the current game only refreshes every other cycle; i.e.stuff like Ships amounts, tech levels, infrastructure. As you level it, it makes the refresh faster by some arbitrary amount like 10%.
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Probes - Intended for mid to late game. On each empire screen where you see all the tech, infrastructure, etc of your opponents, you can purchase a probe or probes to send into that empire’s territory. Two hours later you will get an emailed report from the probe(s). The more probes sent, the more detailed the scans. One probe will tell you planets with armadas over 500. Two will tell you planets with armadas of 400. Three probes will give you 300. etc etc. Ships in transit won’t be counted, say thematically they can’t because they are moving too fast, but functionally it would be pushing into Scanning’s purpose. Behind the scenes mechanics of it, when you purchase the probe an hour later it will gather the data. Then thematically speaking the data takes an hour to get back to you.
*This is all based of my experience with Triton as I have not played Proteus. I think Triton is great and has this efficient elegance to it. Making that empire information less available is the only change I think is worth fiddling with.