In the original version of Covert Action, you only had a few
options:
- Sex: To determine if you were Maxine or Maximilian
Remington
- Codename: Any surname you can come up with
- Difficulty: Local Disturbance, National Threat, Regional
Conflict or Global Crisis
- Preparation: 4 aptitude points to distribute between the
4 different activities.
And you could increase the difficulty level after missions
when you caught the mastermind.
Personally, I never need any aptitude point in electronics,
am pretty bad at driving and need to see the spaces between
words to be able to decode messages. As I went up the
difficulty levels, I started ignoring certain activities until I
went to Global Crisis where I almost only relied on combat.
I also created a new agent when I wanted to go up the
difficulty level because I would not assign the aptitude points
to the same activities. It is much harder if you put all
your aptitude points in driving instead of combat.
Done:
Left to do:
- Basic options: Name, code name, name of assistant.
Maybe include your photo and the photo of your assistant.
- Difficulty level per activity and one for other (initial
clues, number of double agents, etc).
Ideas for improvements:
- Objects in possession of a turned criminal will not
count negatively toward your score. In the original
game, you could perpetually break into the building of a
turned criminal to confiscate an object in his possession
and then wait for him to reacquire it.
- The victim of a plot has a home and, when you identified
his/her role as victim, you can remand him/her in custody.
The role of victim is identified by decoding any message or
getting the transcript of a meeting. You get the
location of his house by getting clues, like we have located
1920 St-John Street in the city of New York. There is
victim only in certain plots, like kidnapping or
blackmailing.
Difficulty factor
| Each activity would have a weight associated with it
(10% for driving, 15% for electronics and crypto, 40%
for combat and 20% other). You can select a
difficulty level for each of them. So, you could
select National Threat for driving and Global Crisis for
electronics.
In that case, driving would be worth
2 national threat * 10% weight = 0.2 difficulty
factor
The sum of the difficulty factors for every part of
the game would give you the total difficulty factor, but
you only get the difficulty factor associated with an
activity if you used it successfully at least once in
the course of the mission. |
Hall of fame
| One section for fastest time for Crypto, Electronics
and Driving, somewhat adjusted according to difficulty
level. One section for best mission score and one
for best career score. I want to avoid someone
doing only a few mission from having the top career
score, so I can't use the average mission score alone,
but I don't want to simply add the mission scores
together because you would get a better score simply by
doing more missions. It will most likely be a
combination of both. |
Options: Some of them would incite you to use all the
activities. Most of them would also increase the total
difficulty factor. Here is a first draft of the list:
- Electronics: Get coded messages only from tapped phone
lines.
- Electronics: Start electronics with unknown chip in
hand.
- Electronics: Some chips stay unknown when picked up.
- Combat: Never get the role from computers.
- Combat: Don't get the location of other organizations in
the same city from computers.
- Combat: Grenades and Triggered booby traps makes nearby
booby traps explode. I find it too easy to eliminating
every guards by placing large stacks of booby traps near
doors and then start the alarm.
- Combat: Criminals move inside the house.
- Combat: Criminals have bodyguards near them that require
more than one shot to take down.
- Combat: Some kind of puzzle when you try to open wall or floor
safes. You have to be careful to keep an eye on the
breaking into building window to make sure the guard do not
surprise you while you do this.
- Crypto: Can decode messages anywhere (I might remove
that option and consider it on).
- Driving: Criminals really go to meetings and infraction
sites.
| If you are inside the house when a suspect leave,
your assistant will ask you if he/she should follow it.
When you actually leave the house, the driving activity
will be activated, but car 2 will start with a delay
corresponding to the time it took you to leave the house
after the criminal did.
If the suspect go to another city, you will follow
them to the airport, you can then take the same airplane
and continue the car chase once in the other city.
If the suspect go to an infraction site, you will be
able to catch him in the act!
If you are in the house while a meeting is taking
place, you can make two arrests in the same combat!
Talk about killing 2 birds with one stone! Note
that a criminal will go to a meeting with his own
guards, so there will be twice as many guards as usual!
It might be a better idea to place bugs before the
meeting to get the transcript of the meeting and the
roles of the participant and then arrest them
individually. |
- Other: No initial clues
- Other: One plot per week. Instead of having one
plot every month, there is one plot every week. If you
spend too much time on one plot, you may be too late to
prevent the next one! The criminals won't wait for you to
finish preventing one plot from succeeding before they start
another one.
- Other: Innocent until proved guilty. A suspect will be
considered "Not involved" until he sends a coded message,
receives a coded message or go to a meeting with another
suspect.
|
