Hello there, Melerickk! You bring up an interesting topic with indirect fighting.

(pretty much everything I'm writing here is covered by what you've said, but I think it's good to go over a few broad concepts again)

When you write about 'dirty' and futuristic (unconventional) methods of conflict, two primary methods come to mind: Ideological and Economic.

Ideological can mean anything ranging from civil resistance (in which a population uses nonviolent means to resist the group in power) to armed rebellion to state-funded terrorism. I don't claim to know every example of ideology-based unconventional conflict, though.

Economic, on the other hand, includes variously state-based sanctions where a group is denied access to certain resources, thus weakening them; 'economic colonialism'/neocolonialism, where a wealthier group uses something akin to brute economic force to take control of resources from a less powerful group; and possibly more, but I'm not thinking of them just yet.

And then there's state-sponsored but unconventional conflict, where resources (military, for example) are used to instigate conflict and, through it, reach an objective (such as the annexation of a desirable region), all without open declaration of war.

In Endless Legend, the Privateer technology allows for something very similar to the last example, where you can create an army of soldiers, make them appear to be pirates or barbarians, then go pillage, fight, and even conquer territories from factions that you don't want to fight a normal war with (or can't, like with the Roving Clans).

The Espionage system in EL offers another method of conducting indirect conflict.

Some of these processes are very intricate, and I'm not sure whether it would be worth it for Amplitude to create a facsimile of them in ES2. This is a science-fantasy 4x game, after all, rather than a simulator of modern politics and conflict. Still, it would be fun, intriguing, and immersive to use unconventional conflict to gain territory, resources, and/or mess up competitors, all without needing to declare war.

This is how I would see Amplitude implementing unconventional conflict in ES2:

1) Privateer technology. I think they're already including it... or something like it.

2) Espionage. This very broad concept can include a huge number of things, and each can be flavored to sound like one type of unconventional conflict or another. This would come down to spending Dust, Influence, and time, along with a Spy in the system you want to disrupt, and then selecting an action (such as Instigate Rebellion) to undertake. Many different factors would influence available actions, their chances of success, and their results.

3) Corporations. I'm not sure if Amplitude is including corporations in ES2 or how they are going to work, but I assume that they would be organizations that interact with multiple factions, operating within and between them, and allowing whichever faction possesses majority control of them to influence other factions through the corporation. They could arise through government sponsorship/patronage, the actions of individual Heroes, game events, etc, and would gradually move away from the control of their founding group unless effort is spent to keep them close.

4) Diplomacy. With an excess of Influence, you could convince other factions to stop trading with your enemy, or declare war, etc. These options already exist in-game, I think.

Here's an example of an Espionage action at work:

Civil Resistance/Rebellion - a spy, and Influence, is used to fire up the passions of a minority group (either an underrepresented population group or a minority Senate party), which then protests their lack of rights under the current regime. A lot of factors can influence this, and depending on how successful your espionage efforts are, the unrest can be represented with anything ranging from reduced FIDS yields from populations (or pop. points refusing to work, like unhappy citizens in Civ4) to actual violent intra- or inter-planetary conflict, where infrastructure is destroyed, planets stop producing FIDS, and individual populations carry out ground battles between themselves. (example: the unhappy and dwindling Vodyani population remnant on a newly-conquered Craver planet decide that a glorious death in combat is better than subjugation to what is essentially a slave race, and the neighboring Lumeris decide to lend support to the Vodyani with Dust and military equipment, hoping that will slow the Cravers down long enough for the Lumeris to shore up their own defenses.)

As you say, there are a huge number of methods of carrying out indirect conflict. It would be really cool if Amplitude could do a Game Design Document on that sometime...

Hallo,

so - at first. English is not my mother tongue. - And I´m pretty new to the "Endless Universe" So be gentle to me. ;)

I really like the idea of indirect warfare.  Especialy asymmetrical warfare. Like the use of drones, spies or small scale terror attacks. This was one of the great improvements during the "Beyond the Sword" expansion in Civ IV. This could be a very good reference, how this system should work.

Maybe, not only by "build" and use a spy. Mayby by using some soldiers from a ship or a planet who already had fought a specific enemy and gained the rank of veterans. the could be put in a small vessel and be sent to an enemy planet to do some, emh, "bad things". 

Funny Because I'm gonna write a thread with almost the same proposal. Really like for the spy ! I think we can have hero specialize to spy (like exiled from EL) and make bad things like what you ask

I really want to see in endless an easier access to the peaceful victory than for military (because no, play smooth without fighting is hard)

For the spy, we can imagine something like Beyond Earth, you can send a spy hero who make a spyweb and With influence point (and his level) , you can unlock mission to send to him ranging from theft of science/influence until uprising of a population

that could be interesting and really cool to see a nation burn himself without send an armies.

Also, for an economical victory, we can imagine an influence market which show the influence of your corporation on the other system who are connected (with trade route) . We can think more a corporation influence on a system, more he can "subjugate" a system and take the resource for the nation the corporation serve (but the system always belong to his proper faction)

I think really a lot of think can do in an unarmed way