Terrorist Ops¶
Terrorist Ops send agents against a realm on another planet. You choose the operation, then how many agents to commit. The agents are spent when you send them, whatever they achieve, and the strike resolves on the target's planet once the packet reaches it — so the word comes back a day or more later.
Every operation is answered by New Realm Protection: a sheltered realm takes nothing at all.
What each operation does¶
The nine are not interchangeable. Each aims at one thing, and each agent that gets through takes its own bite:
- Send Spy — brings intelligence home and costs the target nothing.
- Bomb Intelligence Agencies — kills a few percent of their agents, which is what they defend and attack with.
- Demoralize Forces — takes a seventh off military morale.
- Cause Dissensions — a few percent of their troopers desert.
- Bomb Air Bases — burns a slice of their jets on the ground.
- Stir Emigrations — drives people out of the realm.
- Spread Propaganda — costs them popular support.
- Bomb Food Storages — the widest swing of the nine: it can take almost a third of what is in store, or almost nothing.
- Sabotage HQ — sets back their HeadQuarters by a fixed amount.
Picking one¶
Match the operation to what you plan next. Softening a realm before an interplanetary attack argues for the ones that thin what fights back — troopers, jets, morale. Grinding down a realm you cannot reach yet argues for the ones that cost it growth: food, people, support.
Getting through¶
Each agent is rolled for on its own, weighing your agents against theirs. The weighing takes the square root of each side and gives the defender the better of it, so agents help but with sharply falling returns: four times as many buys you twice the edge, and two evenly matched realms see about two agents in five get through. There is a small chance either way that has nothing to do with either side.
Committing more agents therefore does more damage on average, but it never makes one agent likelier to land. A Terrorist Prevention pact adds its partners' agents to the defence, which is what makes a well-allied realm expensive to work on.