Scan Costs

[nooboo]

The idea to have scan costs less due to the amount of amps you have has been interesting. But to me it would make more sense to maybe make the cost dependent on the difference between the amount of amps the scanner has to the amount of dists the person being scanned has.

Cost then would be cheap as chips if the scanner has 100 amps, planet scanned has 1 dist, but if scanner has 100, planet has 99 the cost is high, as its a 'harder' scan.

To me this makes more sense, that cost is linked more to the 'difficulty' of each scan, that said i am aware that me and sense are only occasional friends!

[Monroe]

The major issue I would see with this would be how would you know how much the scan was going to cost you before you tried it? If you don't have enough resources for the scan what happens? It would seem that if the guy you're trying to scan has too many distorters and the scan fails the game would be giving you information about how many distorters the target has for free.

[nooboo]

personally i would set it to always give the maximum cost, so any saving due to the scan being easy is just that... a saving.

by always having it state the max amount you also wouldnt know he dist amount any more than now, the benefit would just be finding many scans are cheaper than you would expect, you could even reflect this by stating how much of each the scan cost after it was performed, right at the top.

edit: though i guess you could still work out dist amount by the saving it would only be a rough calc, a lot quicker and easier to just do a dev scan!! if this is still too revealing you could have the res added a the end of each tick...a bonus for scan ease which would complicate matters due to the amount of scans often done each tick

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Monroe

the game would be giving you information about how many distorters the target has for free.

I don't think that's a serious problem. I have a solution anyway, though: allow people to choose how hard they'll try. By default, scanners would use the weakest possible scan, using only 1 amp, which also costs the least. If that doesn't work, they might choose to use 10 amps, or 20. If that doesn't work, maybe 50 or all of them.

[Will]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

I have a solution anyway, though: allow people to choose how hard they'll try. By default, scanners would use the weakest possible scan, using only 1 amp, which also costs the least. If that doesn't work, they might choose to use 10 amps, or 20. If that doesn't work, maybe 50 or all of them.

As a former scanner, I'd be against anything that increases the amount of work needed to get each scan done (work which would be trivial to add to those scan bots I'm aware of and yet would affect real scanners negatively).

As an alternative, maybe the cost could be decreased by a small amount for each successful scan up to a limit, a bit like the way stealth increases per covop success, with the bonus reset on failure.