Espionage Redesign

Totally agree that we need to work on documentation here.
We're also struggling with the really bad BTS espionage UI, however. It frustrates me to no end that a spy doesn't display any of the missions it can perform unless you have the espionage points to do so. I wish that all the missions this unit could perform were always visible but greyed out, and would display how many EPs you needed to be able to perform them in that tile.

TomChick said:

Right now you have to sift through the espionage units' promotions to figure out the basic concept, and even then, there's no description of what the different missions do. At some point, I hope espionage will get more thorough documentation and its own entry in the Dune Wars Concepts section.

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That is a good point. It is easy enough to add a new entry in the "Dune Wars Concepts" section. Would anybody like to write 3-4 paragraphs which can be inserted? Basically it would need to list the UU for each faction which has it, and one line about the custom missions allowed for that UU. Vanilla missions could optionally be listed but the user ""should"" know what those do anyway.

ahriman said:

I wish that all the missions this unit could perform were always visible but greyed out, and would display how many EPs you needed to be able to perform them in that tile.

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That is a good idea. That change should be possible; but there may be multiple reasons a unit cannot perform a mission. For example, "sabotage unit" is not possible in a plot with no units, etc. If we do this, you will see lines which are greyed out despite having enough EP, and then there will be a ""bug report"". So to be complete, the greyed out lines should have a hover help which shows the reason. *That* will be hard, since the function which draws the dialog box just gets a true/false reply from the subroutine about whether the mission is possible.

It is easy enough to add a new entry in the "Dune Wars Concepts" section. Would anybody like to write 3-4 paragraphs which can be inserted?

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I will. Though its possible I might get some of the missions slightly wrong.

So to be complete, the greyed out lines should have a hover help which shows the reason. *That* will be hard, since the function which draws the dialog box just gets a true/false reply from the subroutine about whether the mission is possible.

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Fair point, but even a "Mission not possible at this time" mouseover would be something. Or maybe "Mission not possible: target not available or insufficient Espionage Points".

It would be even better if Espionage Missions had their own section in the pedia that listed them all out, but I think this might be too hard. Plus it seems the EspionageMissionInfos is not fully loaded until you start a game.

Ahriman said:

I will. Though its possible I might get some of the missions slightly wrong.

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If you have a go at it I can do any corrections.

Deliverator said:

it seems the EspionageMissionInfos is not fully loaded until you start a game.

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I found the same thing. It is weird, but probably this is because espionage did not exist pre-BTS. Even though it cannot be done "properly" in the pedia, we can certainly add hardcoded text.