Quote:
Originally Posted by Curmudgeon
The speadsheet looks good.
Did you mean Rank or did you mean Status, and if you did mean rank would it be military or administrative rank or rank within the conspiracy. I could see Status as being potentially more useful to placed agents for influencing the masses but Rank could be a great way to represent the agent's placement within the conspiracy. If the agent were to lose all rank (not just taken down to Rank 0, but has no rank at all), it could be a useful means of cutting the agent off from all access to conspiracy resouces. They'd have no access to information, weapons, funds and be completely on their own, possibly even hunted by their former masters.
The problem I see with being Administrative Rank 4 or 5, even or perhaps especially in a bureaucracy, is that you've now reached the stage in your career where you could justifiably walk around with a sandwich board inscribed, "Suitable candidate for my superior to push under the bus to deflect criticism from him."
Any thoughts about recruiting superior agent types. I'm thinking in terms of Ian Fleming's James Bond (from the novels) for a full-time and Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise for a part-time agent at this level.
I'd also suggest creating some basic tasks such as surveillance of a location or a person, fabricating documentation, eliminating a spy, gaining clandestine entry/knowledge from a location/person and other common tasks in terms of time, manpower and required resources to give you a feel for what level of resources your conspiracies are going to need just to perform their day to day operations. Any special ops you'll make up as you need of course, but it would probably be helpful if you knew what they need just to be as active as you envision them. Given that these aren't exactly activities whose budgets are commonly given in the newspapers, you may just have to assign some arbitary numbers and possibly thrash the assumptions out later.
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You probably missed the many column labels. Rank means what Rank they have at their day jobs / infiltration target organisations. I'm not making higher-ranked infiltrations more expensive, because having such 'infiltration points' is itself basically a non-tradeable asset (i.e. it's not something that can be routinely bought or sold for money, even though
some arrangements are possible). Presumably, agents who have in-conspiracy Rank but not Infiltration Rank should go into the Other Rank column (of which I made two, just in case). Not sure what precise benefits on a strategic level it should provide.
Surveillance is probably just 200+ MH/week (to account for travel, change of shifts etc.). Document forgery is likely very little in terms of man-hours, but demanding in terms of skill - not sure how to account for that without getting into ultra-fiddly details for each member.
Passing specific laws, picking specific contracts, that sort of thing is even fiddlier.