Demo Tiger
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Posted - 2011.08.15 15:30:00 -
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Here's my two cents.
Intel comes in four flavors.
1. Ratters/Miners (in 0.0) wanting to know what's coming their way
2. Fleets looking for fleets to engage
3. Massive battles wanting to know incoming ship types and numbers
4. Keeping your information secret
For 1.
This needs to be reasonably feasible, or the income of ratting/mining needs to be boosted, in order to pay those on intel/security detail. As prices are right now, a miner that has to split their cut 2 ways would be better off mining veldspar in empire. (bistot at about 200 isk/m3, veldspar around 100 isk/m3). Of course, alliances will need to figure their own way to pay the "day-to-day" intel gathering pilots.
My biggest concern with this is that first, only dead-end systems will be used for ratting, and they will be "secured" by a series of large mobile warp disruptors and one cloaky ship watching it. (although several alliances already do this, it makes all non-dead-end systems harder to secure, and these are typically less lucrative)
For 2.
Intel needs to be gathered on a larger basis than local system. Perhaps constellation level. A lot of details in this is really unnecessary, perhaps be able to detect raw number of pilots in space and what system.
For 3.
The location and time of a fight is known (there's a sov piece coming out of reinforced at a known time). Usually a covops ship watching the incoming gates handles this. (or watching their titans) This doesn't really need to be changed.
For 4.
This is a tough one. It needs to be feasible for counter-counter action too. A good intel pilot should be able to gather that intel has been disrupted and be able to find where the disruption is coming from, and a small gang (5-10 BC's) should be able to undo the intel disruption. I can see this being great for small gang bait tactics, but some mechanic has to be in place to prevent abuse.
With all of these, I see a great way of creating a role for the Black-ops class of battleships. (that currently have one small niche role, making them the least flown ships in new eden). Or the entire line of covert ships (covops frigs, recon cruisers, and black ops battleships)
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