the dancing fool

Join Date 01/2007

Corporate Espionage

When only stealing the best will do

Just thinking…
The Trade Order was essentially competing/cooperating companies in a society based on ever escalating trade (and hence, prosperity). Implicit in this would be some degree of corporate espionage and reverse engineering of a competitor’s product in order to make your company more profitable. I imagine these same principles could be applied to galactic warfare. Without seeing all the different tech trees, I imagine there are many exclusive research options for each race; however, there are also probably many overlapping tech trees. Say, a TEC armada just got through pummeling a small Vasari fleet. It would make sense they would scavenge the remains in order to figure not only how their ships tick but also reverse engineer the technology. The same is also true for any other race (if their research is so directed).

I imagine it could work something like this: first you have to have the ability and knack to salvage and reverse engineer space debris (the beginning of a separate tech tree, which the TEC would have an advantage). However, the chance of finding a decent piece of workable equipment would be fairly small (say, 1-5% per battle). You could then use the level of found tech be the basis of how often you would find/recognize a piece of intact equipment (5% if levels of tech are somewhat similar, 1% if the tech levels are farther apart). Mind you, this would not open up the other tech tree to you nor would it give you that specific tech, just give you a boost in your research of comparable techs (or give you ‘points’ toward the research of a more advanced tech so it doesn’t take so long or cost as much). You could continue to research the ‘Corporate Espionage’ tree in order to make this number better.

I don’t know, it would just be another risk/benefit weighing: do I want to spend an ever escalating amount of time, research and resources into this tech in order to have a small chance of a payback in future research? It could also act as another leveler of the playing field. Just when the Vasari is about to wipe your inner colonies out, you get a boost towards the SuperBadBig Cannon. Just when you have the Vasari on their knees by your sheer numbers, they figure out how to mass produce their ships at reduced resource cost.

Like I said, just thinking…

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Reverse engineering would throw a very interesting twist into the game. Personally, I'm all for it. Perhaps it would be best to have (as stated above) a low "Drop rate" for reverse engineer-able debris, and once found you could use the debris as a sort of currency in a special tech-tree. If implemented it would throw something really into late gameplay, as well as possibly being able to turn the tide of a game.

More detail on the "tech tree" idea contained below.
The tech tree would probably be limited to upgrading a certain type of ship you currently have with the (more or less) stolen technology. Perhaps far up in the tech tree you could gain access to hybrid ships that blend some of the more characteristic techs of the captured technology with some of your own.
I suppose there could be some economic bonuses available in this tech tree, such as a new mining technique, or a better storage system. The economic aspect of this tree would likely be very limited, as you're probably reverse engineering warships.
By no means should this special tech tree allow you to be able to build ships that are as effective at a certain thing as the original, but it should allow you mimic it.

Edit:
I'm not too certain what benefit you would gain from pirates' debris, I suppose you could use the debris as blackmail to lower your bounty.

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Okay, the whole thing is a good idea. What you are talking about is not espionage, but rather reverse engineering. I think there should be some amount of both. The alien race is far more advanced right? So that means that at some piont in time, they could probably mimic human ships and humans themselves, for espionage missions, however, humans would not be able to mimic the phisical appearence of the aliens, due to less advanced tech, however, humans have an enoumous amount of ingenuity, and they could reverse engineer debris. Its a kind of trade off for the same outcome, the aliens infiltrate and steal tech, while the humans salvage and reverse engineer tech. Reverse engineering alien technolgy could be the major stepping stones in human advancements (like say graviy well tech, or reactionless drives). While at the same time as studying for something specific (like say Ion cannons), they will notice about 30 other things that they may not understand at the time, but when the time comes, they could look into their records and say, Oh yeah! so thats how we could make this reletively minor technology work! Basically in-game, reverse engneering alien tech allow leaps in technology, and slightly decreses research time for all other techs. Aliens would lack something that the humans have (like efficiency) and infultrate the human populace and find out how to moke their technology more effective and efficient (building ships and facilities faster, get more use out of your resources, exc.). By stealing, reverse engineering/infiltrating techs results in allowing both sides to know the weaknesses of other ships, making attacks and defenses more effective.

How about That? ^^^^^^

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I think the idea of superior hybrid technology would be mind boggling and awesome , tho would be hard to implement.

Imagine , if hybrid technology was superior to any non-hybrid technology.

So if you are Human , and you conducted a research salvage on Advent ships you gain access to secret research options which is hybrid of advent and human technology

forexample - Phase Missles

Missles are standard TEC technology , combined with the standard phase technology of advent to make something truly powerful.

The combinations would be
Advent-TEC
Advent-Cybran
TEC-Cybran

So there should maybe be about 3 secret hybrid techs for each combination.

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+367

This won't be in the initial release of Sins (not enough time left to add any more major features), but espionage is certainly something we may look at for an expansion pack.

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It would be great to have a chance at developing enemy tech left over from battles. Sorta like a x-com throwback, where after the first few battles the alien guns, grenades, even corpses would be available for research after being recovered. Espionage is a little skeptical, other than maybe abductions, just because learning a whole new, alien culture and fitting in while achieving a high enough place in their society to glean useful information from them is a little overreaching. While simple for intra species spying, Xeno spying would be a much much much more difficult task, especially for the poor saps who try to do it first and have to try to figure out the alien culture without much if any background on how it works.

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This won't be in the initial release of Sins (not enough time left to add any more major features), but espionage is certainly something we may look at for an expansion pack.

So when does that come out?!

I like the idea about reasearching corpese, okay this isn't brought up much but the idea of biological warfare could add a very much needed cheap way to destroy your enemy, but not every virus you have would work per species.

Say have the command crusier have the boarding option, instead of people they fire a virus onto the ship (when the shields have been pretty much destroyed), then you have a floating tech and bio thing for science vessels to come collect and do w/e with,

good idea for expansion!

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One thing that I think might be good to look into is planting spies into the general community of your enemy. Well, not nescesarily spies so much as normal "citizens" who are highly loyal to you into the general populace of the enemy. Then hopefully one or two of them get drafted into the military of your enemy and may eventually gain the right to pilot enemy military spacecraft. And then, when they are sent into battle, they turn on the other enemy spacecraft and attack, if ordered, or dock with your own research vellels to study intact, if ordered to do so. Wouldn't it be nice to plant about fifty people into an enemy planet at the beginning of the game, and then, in the middle of battle, realize that 4-5 of the enemy ships are actually within your controll? And I think it wouldn't be too hard to accomplish

. Just take one of the already existing transport ships, or trade rout ships, and make it "cloak" or otherwise make it extremely hard to detect, and just have it fly near an enemy planet, and "drop" the people in "pods" to the planets surface

And Yarlen, I was kind of afaid that there wouldn't be time to add much in the way of major changes to the game. I am curious as to whether or not this makes it into any of the upcoming games (SoaSE, the expansian, or a sequal).

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Well having never played homeworld, i really do think that spies and boarding are an important part of any space game.

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Well, not nescesarily spies so much as normal "citizens" who are highly loyal to you into the general populace of the enemy. Then hopefully one or two of them get drafted into the military of your enemy and may eventually gain the right to pilot enemy military spacecraft. And then, when they are sent into battle, they turn on the other enemy spacecraft and attack, if ordered, or dock with your own research vellels to study intact, if ordered to do so. Wouldn't it be nice to plant about fifty people into an enemy planet at the beginning of the game, and then, in the middle of battle, realize that 4-5 of the enemy ships are actually within your controll?

... Thats the most... I don't... I'm shocked speechless.

Do you really think that one person of low rank could cause a ship to defect? Depending on how security is set up (and no intelligent person would allow someone who had been drafted anywhere near a high-security post) you'd need, at a minimum the captain involved, and most likely all other watch personnel, in order to get a ship to defect and dock to one of your ships (allowing your security personnel to take over). Odds of trying to do it with anything less than that, especially on a ship with anywhere from hundreds to thousands of other (loyal) people on board, are less than good. Think about exactly how often, despite their no doubt best-efforts, our enemies have "captured" one of our naval vessels. Anything at all, ranging from a PT boat to a full up carrier or nuclear sub.

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