What are the chances of building vessels that deliberately mimic the deign of other races or at least disguise their origin?



I like the idea of attacking someone's colony but shifting the blame to someone else



I don't know how practical this would be but I remember something similar from the Civ games.



*edit* I thought I should expand on this as I may have been a little vague (and i've only got three stars for the thread)



What i'm looking for are ways to inflict harm on another player without being blamed for it. I got the inspiration from a game of Moo2 I was paying the other day when I jumped through a wormhole and obliterated an enemy colony.



As the wormhole colony served as a communication point between my empire and theirs when contact was eventually re-established I wasn't actually at war with them. It got me thinking that surprise attacks using communication jamming technology could potentially prevent a system from communicating the attack back to the rest of the empire. I don't know if this would work against other people however (hence the camouflaged ships I cited previously).



Another way of looking at it would be to hire mercs to carry out assaults on an enemy - a proxy war so to speak - without getting your hands dirty. There are plently of real world examples I coudl cite (but won't) where this takes place so it might add an element to the in-game political intrigue.



failing this i'd love to be able to (SOASE) convince the pirates to attack someone else. I enjoyed the bidding system in that game.

I have mixed feelings on this.



Initially, I thought this would be best placed in an espionage category. Of course, I don't actually know how espionage will work in this game, so I can't suggest anything concrete in that category.



And then I thought, "How cool would that be to be able to pull that off: blitzing a colony in such a way that they can't communicate back." You could attack a colony, obliterate it before communication can be sent off, and then wait for the enemy to investigate the attack. They'd send some ships and have a percent chance of figuring out who did it.



But then I also thought, "How uncool would it be to constantly get messages that my colonies simply disappeared and no one knows why?"

Yeah I ha a similar thought in my OP. I think this could work on 1 player though and tie into espionage.



In multiplayer I was thinking more disguising your ships I.e. creating hull designs similar to other factions to shift the blame

I think this sounds like an interesting idea. Just thinking along these lines, following an attack, it could take a certain amount of time / turns based on number of units lost to purge the evidence of having been there, i.e. time taken to remove datacores, bodies, and other incriminating information from the wreckage. Which would mean that the people you attacked would have some time to try and get another fleet there to find out what happened.