As you may have all noticed you all have something called INTEL, something that has until this time been pretty much useless or ignored, no longer...
You each possess an intelligence division with an appropriate amount of points assigned to it as you do have with research or production. The more points of intelligence you possess the better equipped you are to defend, spy or sabotage with your INTEL. having said this we naturally have 3 uses for INTEL strength, the first
INTERNAL SECURITY: Placing a percentage of your points on this protects you from Espionage and Sabotage.
ESPIONAGE: Placing a percentage of your INTEL strength here will allow you to gain knowledge of your opponent, examples include what they are researching, building, even locations of ships or fleets or intercepted transmissions between players privately... it can be anything information related and it will be random... unless you specify otherwise. This is were it gets a little more interesting, should you wish to do something major like blow up a shipyard or other structure, steal a vessel, frame a enemy commander or leader, kill of part of a planets population with nukes or virus bombs etc etc then this is were espionage begins to shine. Coming up with an elaborate espionage action setting up a future Sabotage from the ideas i listed or anything you can think off will grant a bonus to the eventual sabotage result, for each further espionage relating to this future sabotage action will grant more bonuses to its attempt. so if you come up with elaborate espionage actions for 2 turns and are successful this will grant two bonuses to the result when you try the sabotage. Should you fail at a espionage then your plan falls apart and you lose all bonuses you may have stacked against your foe. Hope this is making sense so far...
SABOTAGE: The mother of all INTEL, this when successful can cause mass devastation against planets killing population or destroying structures, blowing up vessels or even stealing them, this action can also steal credits or research points for yourself... With the aid of elaborate espionage actions used successfully before a sabotage this grants a bonus as explained earlier, with multiple espionages stacking the bonus further, but 1 failure loses all espionage bonuses to the sabotage action as explained earlier.
HOW DOES IT WORK: Good question! Even espionage say 1000 espionage/saboatge vs Internal Defense 1000 would mean you have a 50% chance of being successful in your action. There is however a chance that you will be detected which is 10% of the failure chance. So if you have 50% chance of being successful based on the scores above and Q roles his mythical dice and roles 96% or higher your action have been discovered. On the plus side, should you succeed by the same margin 01-05% (based on above calculation) you succeed so well your hand in this affair is not detected as normal and you may blame another empire...
Of course if someone has higher INTEL strength against your own the margin or success and failure will adjust accordingly.
Any questions please post below and ill explain further.