Raiders Spy/Scout Mechanic & Interrogations.

[Kaben]

Hi,

Very excited about this game - have backed on kickstarter at the $40 level, looking forward to seeing what the final support total ends at. Cant believe its past $80k already!

Having watched many hours worth of lets play videos already (im hooked), i have thought of a potential mechanic that could be added to the game with regards to Raiders and traveller npc's. I'm sure you (Tynan) have plenty of ideas already to implement in future but this may be of interest.

I think that on occasion, before a raider party enters the map, perhaps even in the light season ahead of the Raiding season, they could send a scout or spy to view your base. At the moment you have wandering travellers who dont actively join the population, but wander across the map. Some of these could be re purposed into raider scouts.
If you are able to capture a scout you could interrogate them ( an extra option for the prisoner interface perhaps) to get a heads up of how many raiders to expect in the next attack wave and perhaps even which direction they will be coming from or what weapons they may have.

Perhaps some of these will be automatically identified as enemy scouts on the map, but the more difficult sneaky ones (spies), look like the standard traveller NPC's.

I cant think of an opposing result for if you don't manage to find/capture a spy without making the potential raiders even more difficult than they already can be (i.e the only mechanics i can think of are that there are more raiders as the result of a successful scouting mission, or that they manage to deactivate/sabotage a couple of your defenses etc before attacking) but i think it could add an extra layer of flavour into the raider side of things.
Perhaps if you didnt want the spy/scout to be able to bolster the defending population, they would die from the interrogation or maybe it could be a probe droid a la Star Wars ). It would definitely give an extra reason to have someone good at hand to hand skill so you can bring the scout/spy into custody for interrogation without killing him with gunfire by accident.

Anyway, thats my idea - im sure it could have been described more eloquently but hopefully you guys catch my drift.

What do you think?

Rob

[ManHuntingSquirrel]

Going to bring you back to the front page,you have a very good idea.