Intel - what are the mechanics of the numbers?

Hahaha, I'd be surprised if anyone knows how intel works. I've tried many things with intel and none of them works very well. Once I tried using 40K intel points against an enemy with 3K intel points max and I had 60/60 failures in the course of like 5 turns. It just makes no sense. And even when it does work you get back junk information like they have a few levels of this and that tech, or they're spending x amount of resources that turn. None of this information is even retained in the empires report. If you find out the enemy has lv 5 DUC from intel on this turn, you won't see it noted in their empire report the next turn. You get more info from scanning ppl's planets and ships then you ever do from intel. If someone actually knows how intel work, that be great because I'm tired of trying to use intel for any purpose other than defense.

I tried to sabotage a small meaningless ennemy in a alltech game, and even with more than 50k points sent right on him for sabotage, it never suceeded. And im using the 1.25 demo, in the 1.08 demo, intel was a AI killer; i could capture dozens of ennemy ships with little points in sabotage.

Without ammo, nice guns are just sophisticated clubs.

I usually use between 30 and 50k per 5k the enemy has in intel and it works fine. If the gap is along the lines of 20k nothing seems to get through. When the next patch or two come out I'll start work on my mod, and intelligence is one of those things I intend on revamping.

I think intelligence should work sort of like this:
Defender gets all defensive points divided by number of targets that need to be defended.
Attacker's target is chosen randomly based on attack type.
Defender gets bonuses based on the state of the target (population, ships in orbit, intelligence centers, etc).
Attack power = Attacker Points - Defender Points.
Based on the final attack power, the outcome is decided.

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From reading the scripts..... though not 100% of them... Intel seems to work like this.

Defence Points are cumulative. They add up from turn to turn.

Attack Points are also cumulative, but are used as soon as you can 'afford' a specific espionage mission(cost from 10k - 20k points generally)

Your attack points are then compared to their cumulative defence points, some calculation done based on %ages, but generally if they have a higher cumulative defence it wins.

Then Defence points are subtracted from the cumulative total in response to attacks.

So if they only have 10k intel a turn and you ahve 50k, but have saved for 100 turns, you have to chip through their stockpile of defence(new algorithims they built, lack of an existing network for you, etc) until you wear them down to no cumulative defence, then you will have successes start to get through.

This is all scriptable and at present seems to be in a very long list format, and not very Dynamic.
It's one of the things I intend to recode in my AI work, and change it so that the area you select is only a focus, and not the only intel mission that can ever happen, but the most likely sort to happen. Also to make it a much more dynamic form of attack vs defence. And make the AI think more about it.

Actually i think the whole intel attack/defense is somewhat bugged. I too had a look at the scripts after being puzzled why i still had succesfull attacks on an empire eventhough i had stopped intel a long time ago (15-20 turns..) and moved the points to another empire. (had accumulated too much i guess 1 mln vs their 20000 points per turn =) and the intel just continued. I killed the first empire, hoping it would make it stop and continue my intel on the 2nd empire, but even this didnt work. I then hacked the intel script and forced to remove 99 mln points from my accumulated attack points and voila: no more intel on empire 1. Then removed my little 'hack' and tried to spy with about 100k points for 1 turn. on a little empire with no intel. It immediately reported succesfull attacks but is still reporting succesfull intel attacks several turns later.
Did the hack thing again, to clear the accum. points and started on a bigger empire, my last enemy but after 10 turns, still nothing eventhough my points are about 10 times more than his defense. The reason is probably it has accumulated so much during the game it'll just take ages to start.. and once it starts, i'll have accumulated so much it'll not end again unless i immediately stop at the first succesful attack i guess:)

I think the accumulated points should expire after a while, (say 10 turns) , something like setting the accumulated to accumulated * .9 + intel_current_turn. (effectively limiting the total points to about 10 times your max spent intel on that empire)
Like it is currently it's nearly impossible to start intel later in the game against a big empire, eventhough you have quite a bit more intel points to spend.. plus if you stop a bit too late the intel just wont stop.
When you stop spending points it should definitely stop producing succesfull intel within a few turns, no mater how much points you had collected on that empire
definately when that empire doesnt even exist (and i still get minerals..)

i guess partly it's intended .. like one said before, building up network etc, creating a little lag in getting something going, all fine, but it's bugged.. I'd definitely like to see it slightly different, the way it's now i'm just tempted to use intel for defense.

I think that's a great idea.

I've had similar problems in intel in a single-player game against the AI. I had a huge reserve of intel points, and once I had killed off my primary AI target I tried to switch my sabotage attacks to a different target. Even though I had 50k more intel points per turn than the new target, none of my attacks ever succeeded. I had already guessed that intel was cumulative or something so I waited quite a while before giving up.

There seems to be a bug related to switching intel targets.

How does the different intel bonuses stack?

For instance my empire has -5%-10%=15% intel generation, and 2 Inteilligence Centers generating 500 (-15%) points each, for a total of 500*2*0.85=850 points
Ok that's straightforwad.
But let's see if the defending empire also has +10% intel generation, 2 research centers an a governement intel defesne bonus of -10%.
What happens here?
First it looks like that he'll make 500*2*1.1=1100 points with his intelligence centers.
(If he spends all of his points to attack me, will I see 1100 points shown in the intelligence screen? What about foreign Empire intelligence estimates? I wonder if they take in consideration pop bonus modifiers, since as far as I can remember, I always get nubers round by the thousand.)

But then I'm not so sure anymore... how does the -10% governement intel malus stacks with the Intelligence Defense Modifier of 120 ?
Is it 120-10=110 or 1.2*0.9=1.08 ?
In teh first case it would be 1100*1.1=1210 intels points worth of def, int the second case 1100*1.08=1188.

From Script_Main_Intelligence.txt:

// Intel Prevention & Luck
if (sys_loc > 0) and (retval) then
set event_mod := Sys_Get_Solar_System_Bad_Intel_Avoidance_Percent(sys_loc)
if (Sys_Get_Random_Long(1, 100) (2 * num_items)) or (atk_spending