Xael said:
Neutral. Wizards. No backwater slums to take care of. Sold!
It's like designed just for me...
Great! You might need a couple of little backwaters somewhere, or we might set you up as a covert organization.
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I've been thinking a bit about espionage and infiltration. Everything has a cost in my IR, but everything that has an expence will also have its rewards.
To place a spy in an enemy territory you have to pay an amount in PL that's based on the value of the territory. Once you have placed a spy you will gain information about important occurrences in the territory or organization you have infiltrated. Your target has a small automatic chance to discover that there is a spy in their territory and if they don't find out they can nevertheless conduct a routine search for a small fee. Once they know there's a spy they have an option to find and remove it, for a cost that's slightly lower than the base-value of the amount of PLs that the agressor payed to have it placed there in the first place.
One spy gives you important intelligence about your target, but nothing else. To gain influence over a territory you must pay a greater amount of PLs, because it's naturally a lot harder and more expensive. (I'm still mulling over just how expensive this will be) Influence translates into PLs, and once you have gained influence over a territory you will automatically gain a percentage of the PL of the territory as your own (the same amount will be takes from the owner of the territory, who will automatically know he's being robbed, though not by whom).
There are seven different degrees of control over a territory: Spy, minor (10%), considerable (25%), significant (50%), Normal (75%), Overwhelming (90%), Total (100%). Once your influence (and, if you wish, the influence of your allies) over a territory exceeds the influence of the other factions in that territory you will take over the management of the territory and it will be officially yours (though other factions will still be there they are then considered infiltrators). Infiltration is incremental, you have to have 10% control before you can get 25% control, etc. Though the owner of a territory can target several different infiltrators in his territory in the same month he can only reclaim one increment of control from each of them in that time.
Once a territory is considered yours you will get a decrease to the cost of further infiltration and anti-infiltration. The same mechanic is used to get rid of foreign influence in your territories as you use to establish your influence.
Some races will be harder to inflitrate, it will require more PL to get them under your control and they will get a bonus to getting rid of infiltrators in their territory. Celestials, Devils, Dwarves, Formians... etc. Also, the more totalitarian a regime is the harder it will be to get control over its territories and especially cosmopolitical regions will be easier to get into.
I'm thinking of giving some of the factions a special trait,
Infiltrator, that will reduce their cost for all infiltration with between 25% and 50% (but the reduction will only work for the player who controls the faction, it does not allow the allies of the faction to funnel resources trough it to reduce their expenses.)
This will give small factions that's specialized in working this way a way to become powerful at the expense of their big, powerful neigbours. Though if they find out the location of your headquarters they might make a little visit...
Eluvan's faction would almost certainly get this trait.
Please, don't be frightened by an apparent complexity of the rules. If you don't want to concern yourself with the details you can leave them up to me. It's like a computer game, there's a lot of calculations going on all the time that the player doesn't really have to care about unless he wants to be as competitive as possible. I need the rules to be fair to you all, without rules I would be arbitrary and might easily be manipulated by your fellow players.