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Spy Trader!


sphyrth
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Coming from a Red Alert 2, I'm assuming that it works like this:

Spy Trader right clicks on any enemy unit/structure - Disguises as a Trader for that player.

He steals X amount of [Random] resource from an enemy player's Market once he touches it. He can't steal from the same Market until he steals from another Market (be it the same player or his ally).

His vision range is very small. Otherwise there's an imbalance.

Enemy units don't automatially attack him, but players can "right-click" to attack him without the help of any "Force Attack" keys.

War Dogs can sniff them out, and auto-attack.

The above will be quite the challenge for AI programming.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Uh, so a spy feature is implemented. How the heck do you use it? I can't for the life of me figure out how it works. When you guys add a new feature, it would be good to make a post explaining it. Here or on moddb, doesn't matter. Promote your work.

 

EDIT: I figured it out regardless. It's, uh, unteresting. I definitely wouldn't have done it this way at all, but hey it's not my game.

 

EDIT2:   @Lion.Kanzen After researching the tech, go to the Diplomacy window and choose an enemy player to bribe. It will choose a random unit of the player's to bribe and give you their vision for 15 seconds. At the least, the tooltip for the bribe button should give you the cost of the bribe. 

Edited by wowgetoffyourcellphone
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Should add "Bribes" to game stats screen under mischellaneous.

 

Another extension would be to have levels of spy craft. Researching each level adds more classes of enemy units --and maybe even buildings at high levels-- to random bribery. Or the more bribes you buy, the higher the level of spy craft.

Edited by wowgetoffyourcellphone
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2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

How the heck do you use it?

 

EDIT: I figured it out regardless. It's, uh, unteresting. I definitely wouldn't have done it this way at all, but hey it's not my game.

 

EDIT2:   @Lion.Kanzen After researching the tech, go to the Diplomacy window and choose an enemy player to bribe. It will choose a random unit of the player's to bribe and give you their vision for 15 seconds. At the least, the tooltip for the bribe button should give you the cost of the bribe. 

Any suggestions on improvements are welcome (3 or 4 of them have already popped up after the commit, it was mostly committed to prevent endless rebases and rereviews of the same code).

Core spy functionality with some heated arguments was added in https://code.wildfiregames.com/D117

Focusing on the spy after a succesful bribe was added in https://code.wildfiregames.com/D169

Testing code to prevent devs from adding hidden bugs is proposed in https://code.wildfiregames.com/D170

Keeping the diplomacy window opened after a successful bribe proposed in https://code.wildfiregames.com/D171

Some code cleanup following the commit https://code.wildfiregames.com/D172

Displaying the cost in the tooltip of the button https://code.wildfiregames.com/D173

I personally want to see a spy function for the wonder / hero in wonder victory / regicide gamemode, if the gamesetup option doesn't prohibit spies.

Lobby players, including some devs are skeptical whether the price is too high and whether it should be restricted to traders, but the feature is still useful in some situations and it should be really expensive as we don't want it be used frequently.

Summary screen extension proposed in #4498

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Hehe, I already modded it. ;)  Made the cost 500 metal and 500 glory, instead of 900 metal as in vanilla. Here is my suggestion:

 

Make the first bribe very cheap. 50 metal. Each new bribe is more expensive, but increases the duration and adds more classes to the randomization. by the tenth bribe, hero class is added and you're looking at 60 seconds of duration, but now each bribe is like 500 metal or more, and you can't bribe another unit until the duration of the previous bribe is completed.

 

Also, guys should think about the UI more. Do you want this feature to be a relatively useful and widely used feature or just a throway feature hidden in the diplomacy screen with a teeny tiny button? Think hard about my "commands" idea, where when you train a hero you get some macro/meta commands that you can execute. Next to the hero button on the top left you get a series of round command buttons --like toggling all your soldiers between capture/attack priorities, the bribery button, etc. Need a live hero. Promotes training heroes and also promotes some meta commands, like this new bribery feature.

Edited by wowgetoffyourcellphone
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I agree that the diplomacy screen seems to be the wrong place, since the bribing a spy is not directly related to diplomatic relations.

The diplo screen is only used everytime when we need to pass a playerID argument, as in this case.

The spy request could become a button in a special building, like the techs, production queue and upgrades, but that needs some rewriting as we can currently have only one of these button types per row. Also it would require some kind of popup box where you select the target player in a dropdown.

Interesting concept for sure to link features to heroes, they shouldn't just be the strongest military unit with some strong auras but enable new qualities.

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Few things I like about this dynamic, I like how the spy is chosen @ random - this gives good balance.

Not sure it belongs w/ the market - the only reason I say this is because it doesn't give up any of the market stats (F/W/S/M or P) on the enemy (or does it?) ... it would be great if it did this just because some people like myself sometimes play w/ maps revealed so those stats% would be helpful.  

The strategy of it being incremental is a good idea, or even worth making it discrete, such as if you pay X for time Y.  Or having multiple levels (not based on phase but level of spies), etc.  Great addition + work by implementers.   

 

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I recently used this spying feature ingame and it was one of the most unprofitable thing I did <_<

900 metal itself is already too much in my opinion, but also you need to research the technology which adds an extra 500food,wood and 300stone,metal!!

Much more profitable to send a suicide cavalry which will even see more than a trader.

The only imaginable case in which Spying would be useful would be if you are interested in seeing the defences of a person with 3 layers of walls and bristling defences (aka TURTLE). :)

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1 hour ago, Hannibal_Barca said:

I recently used this spying feature ingame and it was one of the most unprofitable thing I did <_<

tThe only imaginable case in which Spying would be useful would be if you are interested in seeing the defences of a person with 3 layers of walls and bristling defences (aka TURTLE). :)

 

Yes was very unpractical, when I started  to use them, my army was stomping enemy base. You need infiltrate to do that.

cavalry or nearby outpost.( both will be destroyed/captured)

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Especially in team games on "normal" maps where there isn't too much metal - maximum 3 metal mines for a player if you are VERY lucky but more likely 1/2.

For the total metal cost of the tech and 1 espionage(1200) you can currently get 16 spear champs or 12 sword ones. In a game where military is important everyone sane will choose of course the champions.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I hope a unit bribing spy would be available somewhere in Phase 2 or immediately after reaching Phase 3. TBH i really don't care how much it costs as long as it can bribe enemy units especially all military units. I hope after upgrades/promotions the bribed unit appearance would just look like the same as the faction would make it to any different levels/upgrades. 

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35 minutes ago, Servo said:

I hope a unit bribing spy would be available somewhere in Phase 2 or immediately after reaching Phase 3. TBH i really don't care how much it costs as long as it can bribe enemy units especially all military units. I hope after upgrades/promotions the bribed unit appearance would just look like the same as the faction would make it to any different levels/upgrades. 

You can only bribe merchants, you can't control them.

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