Intel Officer

Intel Officer

What is an Intel Officer?

In an alliance the Intel Officer is one of the most important and most sensitive positions. The Intel Officer is leads a group of underground players. The Intel Officer is the only one who people should publicly know works in the Intel area. The other players under the command of the Intel officer have to stay hidden/unknown.

What's the job of an Intel Officer?

Part of being an Intel Officer is to keep all eyes open and to "gather information". Selecting the most important information and forward it to the command (HC) of your alliance.

What for?

• First of all the Intel Officer will have to identify who is who in the universe. The alliance and the nickname of the players for every single planet in the universe. This kind of information is very useful to know for planning attacks. This is mostly called a Map of the universe and the information is generally stored in a mini-site called an arbiter which give you an overview of hostile/neutral/friendly planets in the universe.
• Secondly, the Intel Officer will have to make sure that if another alliance plans a huge attack on your own alliance, it won’t be a surprise attack and that the HCs and DCs are aware and ready for it. This is done, mainly by having enough "friends" around, people who will give you tips or people that share the same interest as you and might want to give you this information as well, but sometimes this is just down to a simple analysis of the situation.
• Thirdly, an Intel Officer will help the HCs when they have to make some decisions with the external affairs. The Intel Officer can tell the HCs if such or such an alliance is a good candidate for a merging or a non-aggression pact. The Intel Officer has to know the relations between all the alliances. It is sometimes crucial to know why an alliance is at war with another one if you don't want to make the same mistake or if you want to use this to weaken another alliance...
• Then the Intel Officer has to do some counter spying. Detect any spy in your alliance and report it to the HCs who will decide to either kick the spy out of the alliance or to use this leak to their advantage... This is done by monitoring your own members, but the art of counter spying is very wide in its use, this will be up to you or someone who will teach you how to do it.
• Last but not the least duty for an Intel Officer is to make sure that none of tools used by your alliance can be hacked. Indeed, some alliances use a giant database (DB) where all the planets are listed. Some advanced Database Management Systems (DBMS) got nice tools to add extra information to planets, such as alliance, hostile/friends. Run all sort of sql statements on the DB to get info on who did what over a certain period, etc. This information is priceless and even if it's illegal some will try to hack them and nobody will ask the Intel Officer of the other alliance how he got this information. Once they have found out nicks/alliances of certain people, they can be updated in their DB and they can attack them and notice where the defence comes from and get even more coordinate of your alliance-mates.

Which is why in most cases, the Intelligence Officer will be the one in charge of the security of the alliance with the techie, both will work on the best way to ensure that member list and other DB items are well protected, that channels are keyed or invite only, that members know what kind of information they shouldn’t give away and more... This is your duty to set up a list of standards to avoid a case of leak in the future.

What do you need to be a good Intel Officer?

As an Intel Officer you can gather a lot of information. You will have to forward them to the right people but remember: lots of information that is gathered can be false. You can choose to keep some information secret and you can choose to leak some information on purpose. For instance if you know (because a friend of yours told you so) that some alliance plans a big attack on your galaxy you can let this alliance know that you know and then they can cancel the attack since most of the time, attacking when it's expected is useless.

Sometime controlling what an alliance knows about you is way better than trying to avoid that the alliance will find out details about you, you will find out that leaking information to certain people can turn out some extent in your own favour.

One last piece advice, don't think people are 100% loyal to their alliance, this is not true, the real life friendships and sometimes the possibility to save your planet is far more important. There are few incorruptible players.

Where/How can you get some pieces of information:

As Intel Officer, your alliance-mates have to tell you everything they know about their galaxy. Who is in and what alliance they are in and who is active and so on. This is the easiest way of getting information.

You can ask your alliance-mates to get the same kind of information at a cluster level too by being active members of their cluster alliance.

Otherwise, you need loads of friends, who trust you more than their own alliance. Usually an Intel Officer can offer some kind of protection in exchange for the information. Loads of "friends" give you loads of "secret" information. Your job is to do something with it.

The way you can gather information is highly varied, you can also exchange information, when you work with another alliance, and having friendly relationships with them, you can always offer some information for some other information.

Avoid giving out your member list or that of your allies, even if this is a need to "protect" you against future incoming, people will generally sell these lists to get more and more information on other alliances as well.

Never trust other intelligence officer. They could play you to get the information they want, don’t be naïve, they play the game as well.

Avoid storing your member list on the alliance forums.

Avoid storing your member list on the same directory of a Galaxy's banner or in a site that can be browsed by directories and therefore allow download of files. Preferably it should be somewhere password protected, where only trusted people (yourself and HC perhaps) have access.

There are lot more issues, we hope this will give you short overview about the role of an Intelligence Officer and what he should do.

How he could eventually act and what he could do, the rest is up to your imagination and what you will possibly learn from your experience and from learning from players you will meet in the game.