[Jibajav]

I do like the different types of covert ops that this round offers, however I had the thought of re-tooling covert ops to mimic the standard fleets:

-Security centers would produce your security guards, similar to how we purchase ships now. Another construction would be created for agents to be produced. The production points would be proportionate to the current race's stealth rating, meaning that zik and etd would have a large bonus, cath would have small bonus, and ter/xan no bonus.

- Trained agents or security guards can be sent on missions that take a short amount of time, depending on how many are sent. For example, 1-10 agents would take 1 tick to travel to the target for their mission, 11-20 agents would take 2 ticks, etc. Guards could be sent in defense in this way too, probably in increments of 100.

-Create 3 covert op "fleets", which I'll call squads, for agents/guards. Each would have it's own stealth/alert rating depending on the investment, explained in the next point. These squads would be designated upon creation to contain agents or guards only. It can only be changed if the squad gets wiped out on mission or all units in it are fired.

-Alert would be changed with something that can be invested in or researched. For simplicity I'll call it "strength". The idea is that you may have 5000 guards, but if they are poorly trained or have little strength, they won't stop many agents. In other words, 100 highly trained guards would be as effective as 1000 poorly trained guards.

This could be a research branch of 3-4 levels. Maybe each race starts with a base stealth/alert around 30 and each research raises the maximum. An example would be terrans max stealth starts at 30, first research bumps the max to 40, second bumps to 50, third to 65. All races starting alert would start at the same level and be bumped up after research. Upon completion of the research, resources can be invested to train and arm these units up to a specified maximum. For instance, before researching an investment of 10k of each resource would max the stealth/alert. After the next branch of research an investment of 100k of each resource would max it at that level and so on.

The amount of strength versus stealth would determine the outcome of the cov op, or at least provide a % chance of success.

The more guards that are added to a "fleet", the more the "strength" drops to reflect the need for training them. Same thing for the agents. When agents or guards are killed, the strength would remain the same until more are hired in that squad and the rating drops accordingly.

-Stealth would still have the same maximum for each race, but again would need to be invested in before it is raised to the maximum.

-Agents and security guards would no longer have wages per tick since it would take an investment to make them useful.

-A new scan would be created or the current scans tweaked to show the different squads/strength and estimated outcome of the cov op.

-Incoming scans would show what was coming at the target, jumpgates would show any pre-launched. Most likely would have to give this a different name to differentiate between standard ships instead of the generic "hostiles".

As always, I'm open to suggestion. I just would like covert ops to be more of an investment option instead of annoyance so that people could actually specialize in it to make a difference in the game. Perhaps with this new system, the outcome of each mission could be changed to make covert ops more impactful too.