Covert operation

Description

Covert Operations are missions conducted by the underground societies of your planet. Each time you pay them, the cost is 1000 of each resource, per agent sent. Even if the mission is unsuccessful the cost will be deducted from your resources. Covert operations happen instantaneously with instantaneous results.

Mission Success

A mission's success depends on three things:

• The stealth rating of your planet
• The alert rating of your target planet
• The number of agents you send

The more agents that are sent - the bigger the impact they make.

Stealth

Every mission that is sent lowers your planets stealth rating. The higher it is, the more likely covert operations will work. If your stealth rating becomes too low, agents may refuse to work for you until it is better. Your stealth rating does improve with time up to a point however.

Alertness

The opposite is true for your planets alert rating. This decreases over time to a point. The higher it is, the better chance you have of catching covert operations conducted on your own planet. Each mission will raise your alert rating if it was successful. There are other ways to improve your alert rating however, Security Centres can be constructed to aid it, and your engineers can focus on security to help protect against agents.

There are many different types of covert mission you can send. Initially you are restricted to disrupting your targets research. Research of your own will allow other missions to be accessed however.

Mission Types

Please note, the more advanced the mission type, the more agents (and hence, higher costs) are required.

Basic Agent Training

This operation attempts to disrupt a target planet's research efforts. A successful attempt will set back the research of the target with

 ceil( agents / 10 ) 

ticks

Underground Network Charting

Train your agents to hack into covert-ops databases to reveal contact networks.

Portable Earthquake Generators

Train your Agents to plant small earthquake generators on asteroids, destroying them in the process.

Warp Core sabotage

Train your Agents to sabotage ships located in an enemy base.

Portable EMP emitters

Train your Agents to use the Portable EMP emitter to destroy Amplifiers and Reflectors.

Bank-System hacking

Train your agents to hack into central banking systems of a target and steal resources. Each Agent can max steal 7500 of each resource. The target can not lose more than 10% of its resources per operation attempt

Structural Integrity

Train your Agents to take out structures using explosives.

Note

You cannot do Covert Operations until your planet is out of protection.

Formulas

Covert op success chance is governed by two factors, stealth and alertness. They interact according to the formula:

random(25) + stealth - target_alertness - engineering_alert_bonus > 1 for success of covert op

(Whether the greater than 1 aspect is true seems questionable, as there seems little reason to add the 1 to the equation - greater than 0 seems to make more sense).

Stealth is determined by the planet initiating the covert op. Alertness is determined by the target of the covert op.

Stealth

The default value of Stealth depends on your race, Terran, Cathaar, Xandathrii and Zikonian have the relative max-stealth at 85,95,85 and 95. This is the stealth value your stealth will INCREASE TOWARDS every tick. The amount it increases with is relatively 4, 6, 4 and 6, PLUS 1, 2 or 3 depending on your engineering setting on Security. So a Terran player with Security on third priority, will gain 5 in stealth per tick if his stealth is below 85.

The maximum possible value for the stealth part of the forumla is the 95 racial base plus a 25 random 'roll', giving a maximum of 120 points.

Alertness

Alertness works a little bit different. All races have a default minimum alertness of 60. However the default minimum can be raised in two ways:

Security centers will raise the planets minimum alertness by the percentage of security centers * 2, so that with 20 % security centers , the bonus is 40% of the origonal 60% (this works out at a 1.2% base bonus per security centre). Which means the minimum alertness is

 60 + ( 60 * 40 / 100 ) = 84. 

With max bonus

 (30 % security centers = 60% bonus) 

the minimum alertness is

 96 (60 + ( 60*60/100 ) ) 

The minimum alertness is the number your alertness will DECREASE towards every tick if it is higher.

Security engineering can give alert bonuses of 30,20,10 or 0 if set to first, second, third or no priority respectivly. Added to the 96 maximum default available with 30% of your structures means that you can have a maximum alertness of 126.

So, with 30% security centers, AND first priority on Security with the engineers, you are immune to covert ops.

Infact, you don't actually need the maximum 30% bonus in order to be immune:

max stealth = 120
max engineering bonus = 30
-> max required from base + security centres = 120 - 30 = 90
90 = 150%*60

To gain a 50% bonus requires 25% security centres, so this is therefore the minimum you can have and be absolutely safe. This neglects the fact that your opponent needs to score more than 1 more than you do. Taking this in to account, the minimum percentage is actually 24 1/6%, however running at this level may incur the wrath of planetarion's rounding errors, so may not be wise.

Warning

The pa manual states that bonuses from engineering to stealth are not included in the 95 maximum for ziks/caths. If this is true the maximum achievable stealth rating is infact 135, which is more than the maximum alertness rating, which therefore means that immunity to covert operations is impossible. As this is anecdotally not the case it appears that some info somewhere is wrong.