TOP SECRET (Please Enter)

SilentConfusion · Mar 23, 2010

AMAZONs are powerful warriors and unmatched on the battlefield, but AMAZONs can be pretty graceful and sneaky when we want to be.

As an AMAZON who is particularly fond of sneakiness, I thought I'd start up the Intelligence Division (ID), created to aid Team AMAZON in their efforts to overpower (see TOTALLY ANNIHILATE) our rivals.

If you'd like to take screenshots and analyze changes in score and demographics info and help us gather intel on our opponents using creative in-game methods please read this thread and make your interest known. Anyone can help or offer comments and suggestions at any time. If you'd like to help but feel a little overwhelmed and unsure of how to proceed try reading the second post as it will contain various methods of intelligence gathering with (hopefully) clear explanations to help you get a feeling for how this stuff works. Also please feel free to ask me or any one else who knows any questions related to intelligence gathering. We're a team after all. As a team we shall conquer. This division is TOP SECRET, but only from the other teams.

The intended goals of this thread are two-fold:
1. Provide a place for coordinating intelligence gathering activities and for analysis of gathered material.
2. Offer a clear understanding of what goes on here and answer any questions concerning intelligence gathering, so that all members of Team AMAZON can lend their effort to this endeavor if they are so inclined.

Please make note of what this division will not be doing:
-Team Espionage, which is defined as "using external forms of intelligence gathering against opposing teams." Examples: Joining multiple teams using different accounts, entering another team's private forum, actively petitioning other players for information, searching CFC (or a 3rd party) image databases for screenshots and save uploads, etc.
-Illegal Screenshot Trading, meaning we cannot trade, swap, gift, or receive screenshots with/to/from another team before at least one of us has researched Paper.
-Illegal Player Contact, meaning we may not contact another team until we have met in-game, although meta-game conversations in the UN (main BtS MTDG II forum) are exempted.
-Anti-Espionage Teching, currently stating that we "must wait 20 hours between major changes to research rate or currently researched tech" with the result that "if an admin determines that you are deliberately hiding your research from teams with espionage on you, they may reveal your research progress and income to those teams."

The above actions are forbidden in the proposed rule-set posted by DaveMcW in the UN forum and as such they may be changed or added to at some point. In the event that any of these things change or new rules are added this post will be updated. We AMAZONs are clever enough and sneaky enough to come up with plenty of legal, in-game ways to gather information about our rivals.

What to take screenshots of and how to take them:

Spoiler :

First of all, for those who don't know how to take screenshots:
1. Position the screen so that you can see the relevant information.
2. Press the Print Screen button which is usually somewhere in the upper right hand side of a keyboard (mine says "PrtSc" and is right next to the "Pause" button). The screenshot will automatically be saved in your Civ IV BtS folder inside the folder Civ IV>Beyond the Sword>Screenshots.
3. Open the destination folder and rename them if you wish, probably best to put the turn number on it if the date is not clearly visible.
4. Either upload the screenshot to an image hosting site, such as photobucket, or email them directly to me (silentconfusion@gmail.com) and I can upload them if you don't want to bother with uploading them.
5. Make sure in your post it has

. I would also put them in spoilers, just to save space and make it easier to scroll through the page.
6. If you are having trouble you can PM me or email me and I can help you out.

Suggested screenshots:
(note: too many screenshots is better than not enough screenshots)
1. Score: since CivStats is a good place to get the score as it shows the time of all score changes a screenshot showing the score is not strictly necessary, although CivStats could be down sometimes.
2. Graphs: These are somewhat tricky because to be useful they have to have a grid imposed on them in a photo editing program. I can try to describe how to do this if people are interested. Please PM/email me for directions. Obviously if we don't have enough EP on anyone, these are useless. We won't ever need the score graph, the Culture/Esp graphs will be of limited usefulness, and the GNP, MFG, and CY graphs will get less useful as the game progresses. The most important one is the Power graph.
3. Demo screen: a screenshot of this should be taken at least once a turn.
4. Top 5 city screen: only take a screenshot of this page if you think information can be gained by it. This screen is of limited usefulness.
5. Espionage Screen: This screen is only useful if you have met someone and you have made eye contact with at least one of their cities. In the event that you have made eye contact with several teams' cities then a screenshot of the page with each team highlighted is needed. Make sure you make a note of the opponents EP towards us if it is not visible on the EP screen.
6. Discretionary screenshot: if you feel we can gain information from some other screenshot go ahead and take it. As I said it's better to have too many than to few.

SilentConfusion · Mar 23, 2010

First of all I want to say that all of the work that has gone into the organizing of this information and the development of this thread is not done hoping to gain any kind of personal recognition, but rather for the glory of Team AMAZON and in the spirit of helping Civ players learn and improve their game. This is a team game, and that's what I love about it the most.

The second thing I want to make known is that most, if not all, of these strategies were not conceived of by me. I have tried to gather information from all available sources, but credit should be given to those whom I learned from. Robi_D deserves credit for his work in understanding the Inner Workings of the Demographics Screen and for various other tidbits I picked up from reading his multi-player game spoilers on CDZ.com. Unfortunately for us, Robi_D is playing for Team CDZ in this demogame, but hopefully we can use the methods he has taught to put us on an even playing field in terms of foreign intelligence. Also mostly_harmless, T-Hawk, Sullla, and the rest of the guys from the Realms Beyond team that participated in a recent Apolyton MTDG. The Realms Beyond team utilized Robi_D's excellent article and implemented many other aspects of intelligence gathering which you can read about in their now-public Cloak & Dagger thread. Some of the other stuff included here was found in the various intelligence threads from the last BtS MTDG, especially the intel thread from Team Cavaleiros, run mostly by Oyzar.

Now that I've posted those links, you can go there and see just how much material I sorted through, but you don't really have to because I have arranged the material for you on this page. I have decided to make use of spoiler tags for purposes of easy navigation. Maybe it also makes these techniques seem just a little more sneaky. If the spoilers make it more difficult to read in people's opinion then I can take them out, but it will be long.

Some numbers for this map:
map.pop# = 794
map.land# = 781

Various Methods of Intelligence Gathering and How They Work:

Score

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How it works:

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Intelligence Strategy:

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The Info Screen [F9]

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Graphs:

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Demographics:

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The measurements:

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GNP:

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Mfg Goods (MFG):

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Crop Yield (CY):

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Soldiers:

Spoiler :

Soldiers = pop factor + tech factor + building factor + unit factor

pop factor:

Spoiler :

tech factor:

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building factor:

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unit factor:

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Land Area (LA):

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Population:

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Approval Rating (AR):

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Life Expectancy (LE):

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Imports/Exports (I/E):

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Screenshot:

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Intelligence Strategy

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The demographics screen shows the actual value of the player and then the highest, lowest, and average values of the opponents, and finally the player's rank out of the players. One thing to note is that the demographics screen updates in real time, so if you switch which tiles your cities work the yield values will change immediately on the demographics screen. At all times you will know the exact value of two of your opponents (the one with the highest and lowest values) and your own value, but you will have to guess at the values of the other opponents. The averages are rounded down in the first three categories (GNP, MFG, and CY).

The best way to guess at the unknown values is to use the average. The total of all opponent values (not taking into account rounding) is the average * # of opponents. Once you figure this number out you can subtract the high and low values from it and you are left with the total of the three unknown values. From there you can try to figure out the combinations that would add up to that number.

For the first three categories (GNP, MFG, CY) the average rounds down to the nearest integer. If you had 5 opponents and the sum total of the opponent values was 10, the average would be 2. But because of the rounding down if the sum total of opponent values was 11, 12, 13, or 14 the average would still read 2. So there will be a range of possible opponent value totals. That range will be from (avg * # of opponents) to (avg * # of opponents + (# of opponents - 1).

A trick to narrowing down the possibilities for the unknown opponent values is to swap which tiles your city works, thereby changing your hammer, food, or commerce yield, then recheck your world rank. This can narrow down the possible values of the unknown opponents. This works because the demographics screen updates in real time.

By determining what yields your opponents have it is possible to deduce approximately when they will grow, when they will produce units, or when they will complete techs. Knowing their yields also tells you a little something about what kind of land they have around their capitol and early cities.

Once an opponent has a few cities up it becomes harder to analyze which yields each city would have, and therefore this method of investigation works best in the very early turns.

The Soldier values can be used to see whether a tech gained (can tell this from score changes) is a military one or not, and also what kinds of units they are building. It can be very important to know that one of your opponents is spamming warriors at the beginning of the game.

The LA values can tell you how many water tiles are in an opponent's cities and therefore whether it is coastal or inland, which in turn can help you decide the best possible way to try to contact them.

An Example:

Spoiler :

Here's an example start to a single player game in which Boudica was my randomly selected leader. I settled in place on the first turn, moved my scout, and hit enter. That first turn my worker worked a 1f2h1c silk forest tile. At the beginning of the next turn the demographics screen looked like this:

We're first in MFG with only 3h, but dead last with 3f, which could mean that a lot of folks are going food first. Our GNP is rank 4 with 17, which means that only 2 civs have lower than us. One of those we know is 16, but only one more could be 16. Now we switch our worked tile to the 3f0h unimproved corn and the demographics screen looks like this:

With our loss of 1c we drop to a tie for lowest GNP, but that doesn't tell us anything new. Dropping to 1h puts us dead last, but again that doesn't give us any further insight into the unknown values. With 5f we are ranked 5th. This tells us a lot.

What can we say from looking at these two turn one graphs:
-GNP: (18 + x + y + z + 16) / 5 = 17 --> x + y + z = 85 - 34 = 51. Let's assume one of the unknown values is the highest possible value, 18. That would leave y + z = 51 - 18 = 33. 33 can only be made if the other two are 17 and 16. So (x,y,z) = (18,17,16) is a possibility. Are there any others? No, however, since the GNP avg is rounded down to the nearest integer, x + y + z could also equal 52, 53, 54, and 55. If we take 52 first, doing the same things we did before we see that (18,17,17) is a possibility and so is (18,18,16), but that is it. If we do the same for 53 we get just (18,18,17). For 54: (18,18,18); and obviously none for 55. So to sum up the possible values for our opponents are (18,18,18,18,16), (18,18,18,17,16), (18,18,18,16,16), (18,18,17,17,16), (18,18,17,16,16). At this point we can't narrow it down further until we get more information.
-MFG: (2 + x + y + z + 1) / 5 = 1 --> x + y + z = 5 - 3 = 2. Obviously they must equal more than two, but because of rounding again the range of possible totals is from 2 to 6 (2 + # of opponents - 1). We can throw out 2, so for 3 we have (1,1,1) clearly. For 4: (2,1,1). For 5: (2,2,1). For 6: (2,2,2). So we have (x,y,z) = (1,1,1),(2,1,1),(2,2,1), or (2,2,2). Our tile switch doesn't help us eliminate any of these possibilities.
-CY: (5 + x + y + z + 4) / 5 = 4 --> x + y + z = 20 - 9 = 11. Again 11 isn't possible. For 12: (4,4,4). For 13: (5,4,4). For 14: (5,5,4). For 15: (5,5,5). So our opponents' values are (5,4,4,4,4),(5,5,4,4,4),(5,5,5,4,4), or (5,5,5,5,4). However, since we were ranked 5th with 5f and we know one person has 4, that means that everyone else must have more than or equal to our 5. Therefore, the only possibility is (5,5,5,5,4) because we'd be ranked more than 5th in any of the other possibilities. Here the tile switching allowed us to narrow 4 possibilities to only 1. We can interpret this as 4 of our 5 opponents are working a 3f tile like a floodplain or an unimproved farmable. They should grow in 8 turns if not building a worker. If building a worker it should take 15 turns.
-Soldiers: These are just the points people get for starting techs and possibly a warrior. If we knew what civs our opponents were playing (and we would in this Demogame) it becomes obvious who has how many points. But just for practice and since in my single player game my opponents were random, let's try to figure it out. With Soldier points the average is unique so we won't have a range like we did for the first three measurements. Here, (6k + x + y + z + 2k) / 5 = 4k --> x + y + z = 20k - 8k = 12k. Let's assume we have one value of 6k, which would make the other two have to add to 6k. Since all starting soldier values are even (2k, 4k, 6k, or 8k), we know that (6k,4k,2k) is the only possibility where the first value is 6k. If the first value is 4k, then (4k,4k,4k) is the only possibilty. So we have either (6k,6k,4k,2k,2k) or (6k,4k,4k,4k,2k).
-LA: Again the average is unique so no range. (9k + x + y + z + 5k) / 5 = 6.6k --> x + y + z = 33k - 14k = 19k. If one value is 9k: (9k,5k,5k). If one value is 8k: (8k,6k,5k). If one value is 7k: (7k,7k,5k) or (7k,6k,6k). The possibilities are (9k,5k,5k), (8k,6k,5k), (7k,7k,5k), and (7k,6k,6k). Since we are ranked 2nd with 8k, this means there can't be two 9k opponents, so we can eliminate one more possibility. The 5k opponent is coastal, and probably at least two other civs have coastal capitols.
-Pop: Everyone has 1k, and therefore 1 population, which is expected, although it does show that everyone settled on the first turn.
-AR: This doesn't tell us super much. We and any other charismatic teams have 6 happiness (6/7 = 85) and non-charismatic leaders have 5 (5/6 = 83).
-LE: We can see that one team has 92 LE, which translates to either 12/13 or 13/14 healthy people. If we know that that person is Expansive, and we assume that they have fresh water, and the difficulty level gives +2 healthy faces, then either 6 or 7 healthy faces are due to forests, which means 12-15 forests. This means that much of their capitol is forested.
-I/E: nothing can be seen at this time, except that no one has trade routes, which is obvious.

Top 5 Cities:

Spoiler :

The Espionage Screen [Ctrl+E]

Spoiler :

How it works:

Spoiler :

The espionage screen [Ctrl-E] can be used to change your EP distribution, which can be helpful in getting enough EP to see your opponents' graphs. But there are a few other features of the espionage screen that can give us information about what our opponents are doing.

-Treasury Analysis:
After either you or your opponent has researched Currency you can see how much is in your opponent's treasury simply by opening the trade screen. Prior to Currency there is another way you can get an approximation of your opponents' treasuries and that is by using the espionage screen. One of the many espionage missions that is available is the Steal Treasury mission. This mission attempts to steal a portion of an opponent's treasury. Because the cost of the mission is proportional to the amount of money in your opponent's treasury, we can do a calculation and work backwards to figure out about what the treasury must contain. Now the calculated value is usually not exact due to rounding errors, but it is close enough to give a good enough picture of what's going on with your opponent's finances. The formula is:
Treasury = (StealTreasuryCost * TotalPop * 2 (TheirEP + 100)) / (3 * CityPop * InvestigateCost), where the StealTreasuryCost and InvestigateCost can be seen on the espionage screen, and total pop is the population of their entire empire, and TheirEP is how much EP they have towards you. One note: you must have seen at least one city belonging to the opponent you want to analyze or the StealTreasuryCost and InvestigateCost will not be displayed. TheirEP can be seen by hovering over their score (you should see an espionage points fraction (TheirEP/YourEP). Remember theirs is the first one.)

-City Production Analysis:
Another espionage mission is the Sabotage Production mission. The mission cost is proportional to the total amount of hammers invested in the current city build. You need to have had visual contact with the city you want to analyze at some time, though it doesn't have to be currently visible. The formula is:
Hammers = (SabatageProducitonCost * (TheirEP + 100)) / (3 * InvestigateCost)

Example and Screenshots:

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Intelligence Strategy:

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Other Stuff

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Oh, and please let me know if you see any corrections that need to be made or any additions.

fireflames · Mar 23, 2010

SC: I'd like to enlist in the AMAZON clandestine services. I have only limited experience, but I am a quick study with an unmatched work ethic. Plus this'll give me an excuse to play a BTS game or two for preliminary research!

SilentConfusion · Mar 23, 2010

fireflames said:
SC: I'd like to enlist in the AMAZON clandestine services. I have only limited experience, but I am a quick study with an unmatched work ethic. Plus this'll give me an excuse to play a BTS game or two for preliminary research!

All are welcome. The more help we have the better job we can do. I have put up some info in the second post. I'm in the process of adding more, but you can look at what's there now and check back later. You can also browse the stuff in the links in the above post, especially the Realms Beyond thread.

I've been doing tests in single player for some of the methods. The only thing is that in single player the scores of your opponents are only visible once you meet them, so early analysis of those doesn't work so well, but demographic analysis still works well. I'm going to put up as much as I can today, so hopefully I'll get up everything in the next 8 hours.

Sommerswerd · Mar 24, 2010

This is a great reference :goodjob:

I will be checking back to this alot throughout the game.

remake20 · Mar 24, 2010

I'm a complete noob at analyzing, but I can take pics.

Loev · Mar 24, 2010

Is this something we can put into a spreadsheet program? I am pretty handy with MS Excel.

SilentConfusion · Mar 24, 2010

remake20 said:
I'm a complete noob at analyzing, but I can take pics.

Any help is helpful, as they say. You can just take screenshots, or if you wish you can learn to analyze them. It is not really so difficult. The math involved is all basic math, and it mostly comes down to sticking values into formulas. I myself was a noob at analyzing just a couple weeks ago. The second post above has a lot of explanation about the different kinds of analysis that you can do, plus you can also ask questions. If I learned all that in a couple weeks you could definitely learn some analysis without much difficulty, plus I am always glad to help people understand. If you do want to learn more, that's great, but whatever you want to put into it is fine.

Loev said:
Is this something we can put into a spreadsheet program? I am pretty handy with MS Excel.

Yes, we are going to want to store all the information we get for each turn. I have made a few of my own spreadsheets, but you might be able to do a better job, and it wouldn't hurt at all to have the information in multiple places. Feel free to build spreadsheets to keep track of all the information. If you have questions about building the spreadsheets let me know.

nabaxo · Mar 24, 2010

SilentConfusion said:
-Anti-Espionage Teching, currently stating that we "must wait 20 hours between major changes to research rate or currently researched tech" with the result that "if an admin determines that you are deliberately hiding your research from teams with espionage on you, they may reveal your research progress and income to those teams."

I honestly don't get why that's illegal...Maybe someone can tell me? I would think that mindgames would be fine in a multiplayer game of this scope.

Anyway, I will take the time to give input and see if you guys missed anything in your analyses, but I severely doubt it. What I just said is of course I will help!

SilentConfusion · Mar 24, 2010

nabaxo said:
I honestly don't get why that's illegal...Maybe someone can tell me? I would think that mindgames would be fine in a multiplayer game of this scope.

Anyway, I will take the time to give input and see if you guys missed anything in your analyses, but I severely doubt it. What I just said is of course I will help!

Technically it isn't illegal, yet. It is just in the proposed rule-set and there is even a suggestion by DaveShack to take that part out on the argument that so long as everyone knows you can hide your techs then you can use this to determine how much you're going to put into EP.

The reason it is there though is because this became an argument in the last game. At least one team was using that method of hiding what they were teching and arguing that it wasn't against the rules, while other teams suggested that this was a type of exploit that voided the money they had put into EP in order to be able to see what techs their neighbors were teching. That is my understanding at least. You can look at the threads from the last game to read more.

Also it has been suggested that this would be less of an issue if we were playing with simultaneous turns instead of sequential turns.

But I agree with you and DaveShack, that it needn't be illegal, but if it does stay a rule that's alright. We can use that to our advantage too. That means other teams can't hide from us. It just means more openness for those who are paying attention.

And as I've said before, any help is helpful. AMAZONs rule!

wideyedwanderer · Mar 24, 2010

I'll try to learn some stuff and help if/where I can.

Gingi · Mar 24, 2010

Umm....

That is so f-ing incredible! I had no idea you could know so much about your opponents this way! I mean, me being the biggest noob on the team I have never even looked past the last column on the demographics screen, I always just looked at the "rank value" that shows you how you compare to other civs. When I first joined Team Amazon I went back and looked through some intelligence threads of Team Kazakhstan but even they only used the "score" part of your second post (as far as I could tell). They posted demographics every turn but they never analyzed it nearly as in-depth as you showed was possible. Great work!

So yeah, I'm on the intelligence committee of Team Amazon. Probably just so I can use it against other players on multiplayer games. I don't see myself using this a lot on single-player games (for the reasons that you stated- this is most effective in the beginning of the game, but in the beginning of the game you can't see your opponent's scores and stuff). However, that is tricky because on multiplayer games you generally have turn timers so you can't always do all this analysis in the little time that the turn timer gives you. I see this the most effective in pitboss (long time to make your move, and you can see the different scores in the beginning of the game)

EDIT: Actually you said the Gold, Manufactured Goods, and Crop Yield parts of the Demographics screen worked best in the beginning of the game. So yeah, I'm going to be using this in singleplayer.

Wow, I have a lot to study until the team pitboss game that starts this Saturday. (Lol, that's like studying so you can make a hundred on a study session.) But in all honesty, I'm going to need all the firepower I can get just to survive until the AD era. :lol:

nabaxo · Mar 24, 2010

SilentConfusion said:
The reason it is there though is because this became an argument in the last game. At least one team was using that method of hiding what they were teching and arguing that it wasn't against the rules, while other teams suggested that this was a type of exploit that voided the money they had put into EP in order to be able to see what techs their neighbors were teching. That is my understanding at least.

(Beware, wall of text approaching...)

FFS! Excuse my language but that is as bad a reason as they come! You shouldn't make something illegal because of WHINE! Yes, that's what it is! This is a multiplayer game that we are playing at a high level, pretty much anything should go! This article comes to mind: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

Now, most of the time I think Sirlin is pretty ******ed and can be pretty narrow-minded on his way of playing games, but now we are playing a competitive game at a fairly high level and I think it applies. If we start to impose rules because some people think it's "unfair" as opposed to come up with new strategies to deal with them, it will take a lot of the competition out of the game. You don't see top level Street Fighter and Tekken players whine that certain combos are unfair. If such a combo surfaces, people instead try to find out ways to counter them. There is a lot of mind-games involved in all competitive multiplayer games, from fighting games such as Street Fighter, that demand split-second reflexes all the way to competitive Pokémon battling (yes, I have been and am involved competitive Pokémon

), and that's half the fun and two thirds of the competition!

I remembered a relatively recent story from EVE Online (bear with me

). It turned out that a very high-ranking officer of a huge player corporation (EVE's version of "guilds", but larger in scope) was an infiltrator to a rival corporation. When he decided to hit, he pretty much utterly destroyed the infiltrated corp. The surprising thing is, the company running the game thought that they would lose quite a few subscribers over the incident but it turned out that the opposite was true. That a whole bunch of old subscribers renewed their accounts to get their piece of the action. Link here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/02/05/internet-spaceships-super-drama/ (Sorry, couldn't found the follow up in-depth link).

My point is, mind-games is a great part of multiplayer games and in team games, even more so! We should not ever ban it.

SilentConfusion · Mar 24, 2010

Gingi said:
Umm....

That is so f-ing incredible! I had no idea you could know so much about your opponents this way!

...

So yeah, I'm on the intelligence committee of Team Amazon. Probably just so I can use it against other players on multiplayer games. I don't see myself using this a lot on single-player games (for the reasons that you stated- this is most effective in the beginning of the game, but in the beginning of the game you can't see your opponent's scores and stuff). However, that is tricky because on multiplayer games you generally have turn timers so you can't always do all this analysis in the little time that the turn timer gives you. I see this the most effective in pitboss (long time to make your move, and you can see the different scores in the beginning of the game)

EDIT: Actually you said the Gold, Manufactured Goods, and Crop Yield parts of the Demographics screen worked best in the beginning of the game. So yeah, I'm going to be using this in singleplayer.

wideyedwanderer said:
I'll try to learn some stuff and help if/where I can.

Yeah, I was amazed too when I learned about all the things you could do to figure out what other teams are doing. There are undoubtedly more ways that we just haven't thought of yet.

The more the merrier. I don't really think we're a committee, we're just AMAZONs trying to do what we can to help out the team.

The reason these strategies work best in these types of games is that we have a day or more to think about each turn. I wouldn't play this way on single player just because I wouldn't want to play that slowly, except to test these methods out or to practice for the demogames. And in MP the turns go too fast. You can use a streamlined version of some of these tactics, but certainly not some of them, which take calculations.

nabaxo said:
(Beware, wall of text approaching...)

FFS! Excuse my language but that is as bad a reason as they come! You shouldn't make something illegal because of WHINE! Yes, that's what it is! This is a multiplayer game that we are playing at a high level, pretty much anything should go! This article comes to mind: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

...

Don't trust my retelling of what happened as I only have cursory understanding of it. I don't really know what happened in that game. But regardless, it doesn't matter anymore. I don't really care what the rules are. We can adapt to whatever. Irgy actually gave a good argument for implementing a rule against it in the main forum in the rule-set thread, if you want to read it.

My opinion is that as long as the rules are the same for everybody that's fine. I don't care what the rules are, just figuring out how to best win with the given set of rules. If you feel strongly about that you can put your voice on the rule-set discussion thread in the main forum, but as for me I don't care what the final rules are.

wideyedwanderer · Mar 25, 2010

Perhaps we should consider electing an Intelligence Director. Someone who leads and teaches other team members clandestine ways, someone to keep things organized, maybe someone who can appoint people to analyze and keep surveillance over certain things.

SilentConfusion · Mar 25, 2010

wideyedwanderer said:
Perhaps we should consider electing an Intelligence Director. Someone who leads and teaches other team members clandestine ways, someone to keep things organized, maybe someone who can appoint people to analyze and keep surveillance over certain things.

If other people think it s a good idea I wouldn't be opposed to the idea. However, I am not sure it is necessary, as I intend to do help people learn and make sure everything gets done anyway.

The way I see intelligence gathering is this:

First, we need all of the in-game information that could help us. This is most likely simply a bunch of screenshots and can be collected by anyone so long as they know what needs to be captured. I will post somewhere just what screenshots we're likely to want to make it easier for us to coordinate getting them. Of course, if no one else can get them, I will make sure that I am always available to get what we need.

Second, we will need to make that in-game information available to all by posting it here and then analyze it to find out whatever we can. This analysis can be done by anyone who has the time. Others can do other parts or can double check what previous posters have done. Again, I intend to at the very least go over every bit of analysis just to make sure nothing gets left out.

Third, we will need to store much of the data we collect to look at changes over time. This is probably done most easily with a spreadsheet type system. If you'd like to try and design a spreadsheet system than we can use to keep all of this information, please talk to me and we can get to work on the project. I have already made some rudimentary spreadsheets that should at least be adequate (even if not efficient or graceful) so we shall not go spreadsheet-less in any event.

And fourth, the important information that we discover about the other teams ought to be added to the relevant threads we have concerning those teams. This will allow people access to the relevant information about another team without having to always wade through this thread, which I imagine will become quite long. As far as I'm concerned this is the most important part of the job, because if we're not going to be able to use the information discovered easily then it's value diminishes.

Also, for those of you who want to participate in this thread, think of the team pre-game pitboss as an opportunity to practice.

Loev · Mar 25, 2010

SilentConfusion said:
Yes, we are going to want to store all the information we get for each turn. I have made a few of my own spreadsheets, but you might be able to do a better job, and it wouldn't hurt at all to have the information in multiple places. Feel free to build spreadsheets to keep track of all the information. If you have questions about building the spreadsheets let me know.

Can you send me an example? I don't have a clue how those spreadsheets most work.

SilentConfusion · Mar 25, 2010

Loev said:
Can you send me an example? I don't have a clue how those spreadsheets most work.

I'll send you a message.

Loev · Mar 25, 2010

SilentConfusion said:
I'll send you a message.

Ok I will wait for that. I don't have a clue where to start building.

Gingi · Mar 27, 2010

So much to learn from this MTD and so little time to learn it. Aarrgh.

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