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Author Topic: Military espionage  (Read 926 times)

Deno

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Military espionage
« on: April 21, 2021, 03:49:28 pm »

I don't exactly know what is planned for future army mechanics but I just watched a video about spies in the roman military and had an idea that could work for dwarf fortress and could relatively easily be done with already existing mechanics. The idea is to give armies the abillity to send out agents, similar to how squads can be send on missions. These agents could then perform a number of tasks, like locating enemy armies and estimating their size, gathering information about specific people like generals, assassinating generals, sabotaging armies to slow them down or destroy their supplies to make them starve.
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GumNut

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Re: Military espionage
« Reply #1 on: April 21, 2021, 05:53:41 pm »

This sounds like I great idea, I'd love to send a good liar and fighter to infiltrate an enemy fort for missions such as assassination, stealing (artifacts or high value goods), information gathering or general disruption. Sending a werebeast infected dwarf should be able to result in some fun, resulting in future attacks turning into an army of werebeasts if they attack at the wrong time. Spies should be able to defect, fail, be imprisoned, killed, injured, come back with a wife and kids or whatever else people come up with.

On the information gathering side it would be great to also get better news/rumor reports from caravans and visitors. Rather than just saying that the rumors have been updated it would be so much more useful and in my opinion immersive to directly get a list of what new information has been revealed.
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DwarfStar

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Re: Military espionage
« Reply #2 on: April 22, 2021, 12:19:37 am »

There’s clearly a need for the game to expose more information about the world than the game provides. And your idea sounds like it would be a perfectly reasonable design. It would work like the raid mechanic, right? But instead of only violent options you could choose information gathering or sabotage.

But what I would really love to see would be to play out a mission like that using adventure mode. It’s such a shame that there are all these detailed places all over the map but in fortress mode you never see them. I can see why we have the current abstracted raid mechanic, since it avoids the AI challenges of large scale battles at distant sites. But a solo mission like stealing an artifact, collecting intel, or maybe just going to the city to trade, could optionally drop us into adventure mode.
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Azerty

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Re: Military espionage
« Reply #3 on: April 22, 2021, 01:46:43 pm »

Another way would be to ask pilgrims and traders to ask for informations while travelling.
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