1) I don't understand why making active sensor detection a non-hostile act would make people more likely to play the "waypoint" trick. I haven't tried this, but I had assumed that I could (in 4.0b) fire my missiles at a distant waypoint and only "light up" the target once the missiles arrive. If not, I think this should be a valid tactic from a realism point of view - I'm pretty sure that e.g. Tomahawk, AMRAAM, Harpoon, Phoenix etc. all work this way IRL. Actually, now that I think of it, most if not all of these have onboard active terminal guidance so it's not quite the same, but the same principle should apply for semi-active homing. In other words, I think this should already be possible, so it shouldn't be a negative on the idea of making lock-on the hostile act.
Its not making active sensor detection a non-hostile act that would make people more likely to play the "waypoint" trick, it's making fire control lock-on detectable only by the target
2) My answer to the original question is "yes". Most of the fun in my current game is from playing tag with the precursors, trying to get tech info from them. I'm torn as to the rate of acquisition - when I was just passively listening to the active sensors, I was getting info pretty rapidly (i.e. a couple of weeks to get enough tech for the next level). Now that I'm letting them chase me around while I ping them, which I've been doing non-stop for a couple of game-years now, the tech info is flowing in MUCH more slowly - I haven't gotten 1 full level of information in any system. This might argue for making the acquisition rate a bit faster, since the only reason I'm able to keep them under active observation for years at a time is that Precursors aren't that smart (and I'm doing a lot of micromanagement - see below).
Even if we switched to fire control instead of active sensors for tech scanning, you could still play tag with the precursors in much the same way.
A) They keep their active sensors going all the time, which makes them easy to spot, track, and avoid. A simple sprint/drift strategy, where they move to a new location, light up the actives for a few seconds, then move to another location would make Precursor systems MUCH less safe to play in.
Precursors and NPRs will turn their sensors off sometimes. At the moment though, once they detect you on passives they will switch on actives. I agree there could be a little more intelligence in this area and perhaps they shouldn't switch on actives until within range of the thermal contact. However, for the initial version of the AI I though it would be better to engage actives in case anything else was closer that passive hadn't spotted. Once the current version is done, I will revisit the AI for the next version.
When they lose contact with something they're chasing, they either stop or reverse course and head back to what they're guarding, even if they have a speed advantage. This is how I've been playing tag with them - I have an active sensor that can pick them up at ~300Mkm (their active detection range for me is about 90Mkm and thermal is probably about 150), so I turn it on, let them chase me while I scan them, turn it off when they get too close, they stop, and I build the range back up and repeat. This is a LOT of micromanagement and a bit of gaming the system - OTOH my range advantage is big and their speed advantage is small, so it can also be viewed as substituting for a much more intense cat-and-mouse with much smarter precursors. If they didn't stop, but instead continued going to the contact point they'd be tougher to evade without a speed advantage.
C) They all lump together. What would be really nasty would be if e.g. 5 precursors chasing a contact spread out when they lost contact, in order to cover a range of possible evasion courses the contact might be taking (again, assuming a speed advantage for the precursors).
D) They use a direct pursuit course, rather than lead pursuit. This means they don't close the range as rapidly as they might.
4) If Precursors (and presumably NPR) were more clever, then presumably it would be harder to keep them under active observation for long periods of time. This would argue for making the rate of acquisition higher.
When I get back into the AI code, I will add some more intelligence and some randomizing to Precursor behaviour.
5) I was frustrated that I couldn't get any information on sensor tech from Precursor listening posts. I tried active scanning them and, as far as I could tell, got nothing (they didn't show up as active contacts, even though I had them on thermal - hmmm - how does one target them for missile strikes?). When I invaded and captured them station with ground troops, they instantly popped down in tech to one of my standard tracking stations. Note that this is just an observation - I understand the coding difficulties of having different tech installations; I'm just saying it would be nice to be able to get tech information (e.g. factory, mining, wealth(?)...) from captured enemy bases which were of higher tech e.g. with a Xeno team. Maybe the thing to do is to place a ruins when an enemy population is captured, or put a "tech available" flag on populations that would be true both for ruins and for captured populations. If you went down this road it would probably actually have to be a list of "available tech" for the population, so one couldn't get Precursor or highly advanced tech from an NPR that was only slightly ahead of you.
Although you can't get direct tech data by scanning a population, when you capture a population you have the chance of gaining data on that population's technology. Larger populations will yield a greater chance.
6) When my spy ships came home to Sol, sometimes they dump to Earth, sometimes to Mars. This is awkward from a game perspective, and didn't make much sense. I'd much rather have the tech data go to every planet (at least in the system). This leads to the idea of a "load tech data" command for ships that would allow research points acquired on one world to be transported to other worlds. It probably wouldn't be used a lot, but every now and then I decide I'd really rather be working on an already-started project in another system.
Those two requests are unfortunately contradictory. If the ship with the tech data unloaded to both Earth and Mars, you could then load the points on Earth on to a ship and moves them to Mars, doubling the original points total ;-) should allow you to gain productivity tech as well.[/quote]
You can already get a huge amount of data when you capture a population but that is based on population size.
I bolded the 75% limit stuff because I think it has a lot of potential to fix the things that are subtly off with the current system. If acquisition is too fast (as for active sensors observed by passive) then you can advance too quickly in TL. If it's too slow (as it appears to be with active scanning from my experience with the precursors), then it turns into a random "act of god" event in short encounters like combat (which spying isn't a strategy, it's just luck) and requires too much micromanagement for long encounters, because the encounters are so long. The 75% trick solves the "too fast" problem by requiring research investment to use the data, and solves the "too slow" problem by allowing acquisition to be made much faster.
It does have quite a few complications though in terms of how the data is held and when it can be used.
I'm not sure (but lean against) whether the same should apply to ruins, wrecks, and/or captured populations - it seems like the data from these is different in that you've got physical artifacts to examine. In addition, these can be made slow, since they don't require micromanagement (because you've got control of the thing being examined). So from a game play point of view, the same problems don't show up that would require the 75% trick - the investment (from a game play sense) is in making the Xeno teams.
Steve