The difference in number of units vs ship list is a VB6 problem that (I hope) is corrected by C#. In VB6, when a ship is destroyed the intelligence display can no longer reference it. In C#, the alien ship records should be maintained independently. I'll keep an eye on it during play test.
I'm assuming DIT_grue saw the same thing I did, and want to make sure you (Steve) are seeing and referring to it too. In the first screen shot, in the "Selected Class Observed Attributes" panel it says 6 units are known. In the "Last Location for ..." panel it has names for 5 ships. In the second screen shot it's even worse: 14 units known, but only 3 in the location panel. Since this is a C# screen shot, it appears that this is either experimental evidence that the VB6 bug has not been corrected or there's an intentional discrepancy between the counts in the two panels.
If it's not simply a bug, then it seems like knowing the name of a ship (i.e. being able to identify the instance/unit, not just the (ship, not C#
) class) is a higher level of information - for some contacts the player will know the unit, for others the player will only know the class, while (presumably) for others the player might only know the owning empire. My concern (and I suspect DIT_grue's) is that there should be a way to see the last location of all Sao Paulo destroyers, not just the ones that are individually identifiable. I that case, I think:
1) It seems like the "Last Location ..." panel should be "Most Recent Sightings of Class Members" and include generic Sao Paulo contacts as well. For example in the 1st screen shot there would be an additional "Sao Paulo 6" listing.
2) This leads to the problem that the same (class-only) ship could produce multiple "most recent sightings" (e.g. if a contact is lost momentarily then seen again). My inclination would be to go ahead and let the intel system "cheat" and auto-prune these extras completely based on the true identity of the contact (from the database). Barring that, the player should have an easy way to prune the contacts himself.
3) For destroyed ships, I would add an extra line "Number destroyed" to the "Selected Class" panel. As someone said, destroyed ships could show up in the location panel in red - (I think this is what you mean by "flagged").
John