Tech stealing - just checking ;-)

[vorpal+5 (OP)]

I received as a Christmas Gift "Orbital Construction Module" tech from India, as part of our yearly exchange (one way exchange, where I use spies and they look elsewhere) 

That's good, very good! I'm concerned though, and I would like to be sure the difficulty of stealing a tech is commensurate with my spy ships technology, the amount of RP remaining to research the tech (I was in the process of researching it, but only began) and ** ideally ** the tech rate of the game (I was at 50%).

I would not like to get a tech that would require 10 years of efforts of all my labs, to sum up. I would feel like I'm cheating by using a few spy ships and get such reward.

Any experience or feedback from players or Steve himself?

[RougeNPS]

I didnt know Orbital Construction Modules were a thing.

[Zap0]

I'm not sure if the intel point cost for getting a tech is related to the cost of that tech - but it'd make sense if it did!

I've used ELINT early in my multi-race conventional Earth start and came to the conclusion that it was overpowered for such a scenario, mainly because of the free techs. The problem is that there's no counterplay to ELINT - there's no way to know if a ship is just a regular old ship or if it has ELINT aboard. When spying on (hostile) aliens it's not as problematic, as your ship being seen will likely mean that they will attempt to kill it.

[RougeNPS]

Counter-ELINT module to solve that?

[Zap0]

In the simplest case, just having it marked as an ELINT ship when you have it on sensors, the justification being that it has some strange emissions that are only needed when using spy equipment. Then the other nations can be appropriately outraged and demand that ship be taken out of service/shoot it down themselves.

Another approach is a more passive notification, say whenever 100 intel points have been gathered on you through ELINT, the being-spied-on empire gets a notification that it's colony is being observed, or that a ship has consistently strange sensor echoes, meaning it's under ELINT observation. In this case I think it'd still be necessary to reveal which ship is doing the spying, assuming you have it on sensors.

[Kylemmie]

I didnt know Orbital Construction Modules were a thing.

yeah, I've never even heard a hint of them before....

Is the OP sure they weren't Maintenance Modules? Or Orbital Habitats?

[vorpal+5 (OP)]

Sorry, "Mining" modules!

Got another tech 10 days later. I believe they are too powerful in a Earth multi-start indeed, but I like the deciphering of unknown ship classes ...

[RougeNPS]

Ah ok. That makes more sense now.

[Migi]

The rate is 1 intelligence point per day, boosted by the Intelligence bonus of the ELINT ship commander.
(snip)
When 100 Alien Race Intelligence Points have accumulated, a check is made for any intelligence gained. This is the same check as in VB6 for espionage teams and can result in new technology, survey data, new system knowledge or details of an enemy ship class. I will probably add information on alien sensors, ground units and populations to that list.

C# changes post is here.
The wiki page for VB espionage is here.

Because the base rate of intelligence gathering is fixed and you need 100 points to get an 'espionage reward' it's quite suprising that you should manage to get 2 techs within 10 days.
You should probably post that as a potential bug.
Notwithstanding the issue of rate, I'm not quite clear how the selection process for 'espionage rewards' works but possibly the reason you got 2 techs in a row is because you aren't eligible for grav, geo or system data, therefore you got a 1/3 probability twice in a row.

The idea of getting less expensive techs than more expensive techs has some merit, I think some sort of inverse probability weighting would be the right way of implementing it. That way more expensive techs would get chosen less often.

[RougeNPS]

Imagine reverse engineering a Jump Drive in 10 days.

Totally not broken.