Problems with how the "investigating councilor" system works.

[Ericus1]

I just watched the AI immediately "fire" one of the operatives I had just spent a lot of effort investigating and then capturing with a plan to turn them, simply to rehire them back immediately after. This has the effect of completely resetting the 3 investigations it takes to be able to turn them and the capture, at basically no cost other than a trifle amount of influence.

This cannot be how the system should work. The whole idea that simply by "going underground" we lose all information gained about an enemy asset, as if we don't keep dossiers or burn them all and have to start from scratch is absurd to start with, but that the AI can simply fire/immediately rehire them to both get them out of custody and wipe all investigation progress is simply stupid. If they are captured, they should be locked. If they fire them in this situation, they should LOSE all orgs attached to them and the councilor, forever. There needs to be serious consequences and drawbacks here, such that maintaining your councilor loyalty and protecting them matters. The amount of investigations needed to attempt turning is also ridiculous. Higher success rate, sure. Required, no.

This needs to be changed.

[Ericus1]

Do you not understand that YOU thinking it is "significant in cost" is purely nothing but your opinion? Literally, everything you just said is also nothing but MORE OPINION.
Whereas, nowhere in the actual real world would firing your agent lead to their happy, harmless release from capture.

God, this conversation is inane and pointless, so I'm simply going to block you - as it's pretty clear you do not add value to discussions - and remove myself from it. It's literally talking to a brick wall, about something that already WILL be changed, regardless of what you think.

[vicberg]

Fire/rehire is just one of many issues surrounding councilors. The councilor gets fired (or assassinated). the orgs go into a holding area, even though it's beyond the normal limit of unused orgs that a faction can keep, giving time to hire another councilor and re-assign those orgs. There's not nearly enough penalties. Those extra orgs should be LOST, not held until end of turn. Fired councilors shouldn't ever be available to the firing faction again. The lack of penalties makes the councilor game feel somewhat meaningless.

Yes, attrition comes into play. Take out enough councilors, the enemy faction might not have enough money or influence to re-equip, might not have enough to re-hire. But towards later game it does feel very meaningless as money/influence isn't an issue. So you always have all these opposing councilors running around causing problems even towards the later part of the game and I'm being forced to engage in a fruitless effort to stop them.

[vicberg]

And I would take this one step further. Too many orgs, with no ability to truly get rid of them. 5 orgs a month, possibly 10 orgs month depending on research. Way too many, much like the bloated tech tree. It's a pattern in this game. Less orgs overall. Need the ability to disband, permanently organizations. Plus what I said above. Lose orgs if your councilor is fired or killed. No ability to hire back a fired councilor. Now suddenly, the councilor game becomes meaningful. Protecting your councilors becomes meaningful.

[Ericus1]

Originally posted by vicberg:

Now suddenly, the councilor game becomes meaningful. Protecting your councilors becomes meaningful.

Exactly.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by vicberg:

the orgs go into a holding area, even though it's beyond the normal limit of unused orgs that a faction can keep, giving time to hire another councilor and re-assign those orgs. There's not nearly enough penalties. Those extra orgs should be LOST, not held until end of turn.

That is not how it works. If a councilor gets killed mid-turn, the faction must immediately reassign or sell orgs until the amount of orgs in reserve is 10 or fewer. Hiring a replacement immediately to place those orgs on them is an option, but waiting until the next turn is not.

[vicberg]

I'm aware of that. You can't hold on to orgs past the limit. But you can hold onto the orgs from the fired/killed councilor past the limit, immediately hire a replacement and put those very same orgs back onto a new councilor. Meaningless. No consequence at all.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by vicberg:

I'm aware of that. You can't hold on to orgs past the limit. But you can hold onto the orgs from the fired/killed councilor past the limit, immediately hire a replacement and put those very same orgs back onto a new councilor. Meaningless. No consequence at all.

You said you can hold them until end of turn, which you can't.
And of course it has consequences. The replacement for a long-time councilor is going to be vastly inferior to them due to the lack of experience, you still have to pay to reattach the orgs, and the inferior councilor may not have enough Administration to allow you to equip enough orgs without ditching some.

[Ericus1]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by vicberg:

I'm aware of that. You can't hold on to orgs past the limit. But you can hold onto the orgs from the fired/killed councilor past the limit, immediately hire a replacement and put those very same orgs back onto a new councilor. Meaningless. No consequence at all.

You said you can hold them until end of turn, which you can't.
And of course it has consequences. The replacement for a long-time councilor is going to be vastly inferior to them due to the lack of experience, you still have to pay to reattach the orgs, and the inferior councilor may not have enough Administration to allow you to equip enough orgs without ditching some.

Dude, that is entirely the point of this post. You can immediately rehire fired councilors. So no, you don't lose that long-time councilor. You don't end up with a vastly inferior replacement. You aren't losing the years of experience. You aren't going to have someone with too low administration. And the cost to reattach orgs is trivial - or trivial enough compared to original purchase cost - and especially so once you're a couple years in.

Are you just another guy that is ignoring the entire point of this post just to hear themselves speak?

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

Dude, that is entirely the point of this post. You can immediately rehire fired councilors.
[...]
Are you just another guy that is ignoring the entire point of this post just to hear themselves speak?

The person I quoted mentioned assassination as a cause for orgs getting stripped. So yes, in the case of the councilor getting assassinated and the orgs getting thrown into reserve and overflowing, you do lose out on the good councilor.
Not every post in a thread is going to be entirely 100% on the topic of the OP.

[Ericus1]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by Ericus1:

Dude, that is entirely the point of this post. You can immediately rehire fired councilors.
[...]
Are you just another guy that is ignoring the entire point of this post just to hear themselves speak?

The person I quoted mentioned assassination as a cause for orgs getting stripped. So yes, in the case of the councilor getting assassinated and the orgs getting thrown into reserve and overflowing, you do lose out on the good councilor.
Not every post in a thread is going to be entirely 100% on the topic of the OP.

Okay, so yes, you are here just to hear yourself speak. He mentioned assassination as an aside (hence why it was in parenthesis) to the primary issue. Of course assassination results in the loss of an experienced councilor, but his point still remains that to near 100% degree, you can simply rehire the same or a new councilor and reattach the orgs in both cases. Given that even the AI mainly uses adm orgs to increase admin skill, the actual loss of an org due to it being a councilor with insufficient admin is extremely low.

Hence the entire problem with the system. You, like the other guy, are massively overstating the case of any real drawbacks, and focusing on the unlikeliest of minutia to do it.

[generalcoffeemug]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

Do you not understand that YOU thinking it is "significant in cost" is purely nothing but your opinion? Literally, everything you just said is also nothing but MORE OPINION.
Whereas, nowhere in the actual real world would firing your agent lead to their happy, harmless release from capture.

God, this conversation is inane and pointless, so I'm simply going to block you - as it's pretty clear you do not add value to discussions - and remove myself from it. It's literally talking to a brick wall, about something that already WILL be changed, regardless of what you think.

This post is an opinion.

[generalcoffeemug]

Originally posted by vicberg:

Fire/rehire is just one of many issues surrounding councilors. The councilor gets fired (or assassinated). the orgs go into a holding area, even though it's beyond the normal limit of unused orgs that a faction can keep, giving time to hire another councilor and re-assign those orgs. There's not nearly enough penalties. Those extra orgs should be LOST, not held until end of turn. Fired councilors shouldn't ever be available to the firing faction again. The lack of penalties makes the councilor game feel somewhat meaningless.

Yes, attrition comes into play. Take out enough councilors, the enemy faction might not have enough money or influence to re-equip, might not have enough to re-hire. But towards later game it does feel very meaningless as money/influence isn't an issue. So you always have all these opposing councilors running around causing problems even towards the later part of the game and I'm being forced to engage in a fruitless effort to stop them.

What if a player fires a councilor or has one of their councilors die or get captured, every org they had is put back into the org pool?

Yes, the whole operation of turning can be frustrating sometimes but that is just part of the game. Its supposed to be hard to get penetration into another faction because it is so powerful. If you want to cripple a faction's org inventory, use mass hostile takeover and sell.

Its possible to totally cripple a faction and have them run around with a bunch of sub 10 stat everything councilors for years.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

Okay, so yes, you are here just to hear yourself speak.

You're making it apparent that your purpose here is to jump down the throats of everyone who doesn't immediately 100% agree with your point. I never once disagreed with the topic of your OP, because I happen to agree with it.
Calm down.

He mentioned assassination as an aside (hence why it was in parenthesis) to the primary issue.

The assassination part wasn't what I was originally commenting on in the first place. It was the misinformation saying that orgs in excess of the holding limit of 10 could be held until end of turn, which they can't. But then they continued including assassination as a cause for having orgs stripped, which has obvious drawbacks.

[Ericus1]

No, I'm making it clear that this is about this topic, and not a place for arguing about irrelevant tangentials and minutia. You were nit-picking a minor mistake that had little to nothing to do with their overall point, as evidenced by your need to excise 90% of their post in your "quote" of them, then immediately pivoted to overstating how dramatic an impact this would have, despite it having virtually no impact whatsoever in the fire/rehire situation, and likely as little in the assassination situation too since the AI rarely carries a full pool of unassigned orgs or fully loads up their councilors with orgs, as well as relying on admin orgs to boost that stat like a human player does so even a fresh, brand new, zero-xp councilor could likely hold them all.

So, no, you don't come across as "agreeing" with the topic, you come across as another defender of the status quo arguing that the penalties for councilor loss are good enough as is.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

No, I'm making it clear that this is about this topic, and not a place for arguing about irrelevant tangentials and minutia.

You're complaining about the basic nature of a discussion.

You were nit-picking a minor mistake that had little to nothing to do with his overall point

It had plenty to do with the overall point, because their statement was seriously flawed in how much damage mid-turn councilor losses do.

as evidenced by your need to excise 90% of their post in your "quote" of them

The excising is done because either I don't disagree with it and so have no need to address it, or because the flaw makes the rest of their argument pointless because it's being made on an incorrect foundation.

and likely as little in the assassination situation too since the AI rarely carries a full pool of unassigned orgs or fully loads up their councilors with orgs, as well as relying on admin orgs to boost that stat like a human player does so even a fresh, brand new, zero-xp councilor could likely hold them all.

I have many times in the past completely ruined a faction by assassinating enough of them that they can no longer afford to reassign their orgs, or sometimes even be unable to hire new councilors, both of which are devastating in the long term because the loss of stats from the loss of orgs and experienced councilors not only causes their councilors to fall way behind but it also means that they lose CP cap and so others jump on their vulnerable CPs, further destroying them. Then, with the loss of their CPs, they lose their MC, and so their space presence is hobbled, and/or the AI factions gang up on them to steal their space assets. The loss of CPs also means that they lose the ability to use Unity to generate public opinion, which is the primary source of the Influence they need to hire councilors and equip many orgs, and with the early game landgrab being over their only choice is to try to take control back from other established factions that have everything going in their favor to defend against them.

So, no, you don't come across as "agreeing" with the topic

I never voiced agreement, either, until I told you in the previous post that I agree. And yet you assumed that I disagreed with you based on things I didn't say.

you come across as another defender of the status quo arguing that the penalties for councilor loss are good enough as is.

They ARE good enough in the case of assassination. They'd also be good enough if they couldn't rehire fired councilors. Neither of these stances are contrary to the idea that they shouldn't be able to rehire fired councilors.