Rule Idea: Steal Research

[Daemonknight]

Okay, so unlike the Disrupt Research option, which is designed to slow down or halt ongoing research, what if you want to take research an enemy already possess? Currently this is an unlikely opportunity during the Disruption mission, but i think that is wrong: if your SF team is disrupting a faction's research, they are destroying lab samples, installing computer viruses, killing key staff members, things of this nature. They aren't going to take the time to search potentially hundreds of thousands of terabytes of data and stumble across a recent breakthrough.

so instead, submitted for your perusal, here is the provisional(an non-operational) Steal Technology special forces mission:

Special Forces Intelligence Mission: Steal Technology
Targets: Enemy Prestigious Facility
Cost: 15.00 RP

The team infiltrates the facility with a scientific specialist with the intent of stealing, not destroying, recently developed technologies.

Roll:
2-10: Mission Failure, roll on Escape and Evasion
11: Mission Failure, team escapes, nationality revealed
12: Mission Success, steal random completed technology from enemy tech tree
13+: Mission Success, steal random technology(choose category)

After a SF team steals a technology, they gain a (R&D) marker representing a memory core loaded with the theoretical and practical knowledge required for the stolen technology. They must return the core to a friendly PF(note that the enemy faction does NOT lose the technology- the SF team merely copies it). The faction targeted by this mission may attempt to prevent the enemy SF team from completing it's mission by capturing or killing it, at which time they destroy the copy and the mission is a failure.

If returning to a friendly PF seems unlikely, the thieves may risk sending the info from a IC hex element in friendly or neutral territory. ComStar may or may not agree to send the info, and they might also charge a special fee to become involved in the obviously illegal activity. Decisions about whether or not to accede to the request will be rolled against a hidden table of responses.

Once the team either reaches a PF, or transmits their data successfully, the initiating faction must have any PF spend one turn decrypting the memory core, which then gives the faction the stolen technology, without having to research it themselves(note- this is one way to unlock restricted technologies, although that means targeting Terra with your Special Forces teams).


thoughts you guys?

[Iron Mongoose]

It might be intresting to modify the target numbers and success rate for the type of PF being targeted.  A 3PF facility like the NAIS would be incaluculably more valuable as a target than El Dorado Bible Collage at 1PF.  But, it might (or might not) be trickier to access, or at least to access the really good stuff.  Of couse, as I say, it might not be intrinsicly harder, but the fact that New Avalon is crawiling with elite defenders and Rabid Foxes and etc might make it harder. 

Option one, make a mission against higher status facilities easier, that is to say success on 11s or 10s or so (on the assumption there's so much good stuff you can't keep from tripping over it) and just assume that factions will take individual mesures to guard their universities (rules for guarding specific hex elements by defenders other than SO teams would be itresting, though it would add possibly unneeded complexity).

Two, make a mission against higher status facilities harder, with TNs of 13 or even more, but make the success gained even grander (choice of tech as defualt, two techs, a random tech high on a tree, and all the lesser ones leading to it, whatever) on the assumption that big univerisites are intrinsicly highly secure with their own staff, but that if you can penitrate it, the rewards make up for the risk.

Similar modifiers might be applied to distroy reserch, too, by the way.

But, on the whole, I like the idea, and it seems like something that our factions would very reasonably be thinking about.

[Daemonknight]

the intent behind this, and the other modifications I made to the SF rules, is to make intelligence work more valuable to the game. Before, we rarely saw SF teams doing much unless it was directly in support of a military operation, even then was not often worth the risk.

This way, waging a shadow war against other factions because a useful tool: blowing up their coms, stealing or disrupting tech, all is designed to make players decide where to focus their budget: do I increase my infrastructure? do I build up my regular military? do i sink it into research? or do I beef up my intelligence agency and play with other factions from behind plausible deniability?

I think that making the intelligence game more robust just adds another level of flavor, without complicating the rules overly much.


Now that I've said that, on to your suggestions.

the idea of making bigger facilities hard but more valuable in terms of take is interesting. As a thought, how about this

*take mission above as targeting Tier I and II PFs only

Target: Tier III PFs

Roll:
2-11: Mission Failure, roll on Escape and Evasion
12-13: Mission Success, steal the next 2 technologies above the one you already possess in a random tech tree(SP in these techs is immediately applied to the next technology in the path)
14+: Mission success, steal any technology(your choice)

[Fatebringer]

I'd like to make a recommendation that a successful steal research could lead to a bonus in the following turn if the unit chooses to stay at that facility (With their token) and destroy that research so the faction they took it from loses that bonus.

The risk is obvious, you're sitting there with your token, if the other guys come and stop you, they can either stop you or recover the date therefore have a double chanch to catch / stop your team.

A risk for the ballsy Maybe a +2 on the Distrupt Research.

[Daemonknight]

For right now, I'm not sure I want to incentivise downgrading technological progress. This is supposed to be a time of technological advancement. If we were playing the 1st or 2nd Succession War, that'd be perfect. Perhaps in a later update, but for now I want to keep Disrupt and Steal seperate missions, requiring different tactics and such. Plus, I don't think anyone is going to risk a chance at stealing a technology just to deny it to their enemy. Too much risk at having what WAS a successful mision turn into an embarassment: not only did you complete the initial mission, but you lost the R&D and an expensive Special Forces team, which will take 6 turns to replace, even more if it was Heroic or Legendary.