Believers and Probe Teams.

[theohall]

Been practicing Lal in single player on Transcend. Recently the following message came up when attempting to Probe one of Miriam's units:

The Lord's Believers have selected Social Engineering choices making them immune to probe teams.

Has anyone seen this before?

Having the Empath Guild - Miriam is running Fundamental (+2 Probes). She does not have Thought Control yet since no one is close to The Will to Power tech. She gets the +1 Probes for being Miriam. The only other possible bonus is Polymorphic Encryption which doubles subversion costs, it doesn't make units immune.

So what SE settings, pre-Thought Control, would make one's units immune to Probe Teams. It takes more than +3 Probes, that's for sure.

FYI, I was using an Elite Probe Team when making the Probe attempt. Also running Fundy at the moment as I was trying to make friends with Miriam after she turned into a backstabbing wench.

[RedFred]

Yeah, this is normal. +3 probes is as good as it gets and enough for probe team immunity.

[theohall]

If +3 is good enough for probe team immunity, what's the big deal with the HSA since SE settings will eventually give you immunity and a few units with Polymorphic Encryption will make subversion cost prohibitive prior to Thought Control?

Why have a +4 Probe setting (+5 for Miriam) possible, if +3 makes one immune?

IMO, this doesn't make sense.

[Marid Audran]

Well, simply put, there is no point in having a better than +3 probe rating. However, unless you're playing the Believers or the Angels, you'll have to run both Fundy and Though Control in order to get it. Even as one of the aforementioned factions you'll still have to run one of them to get +3, and those aren't the most Builder-friendly SE choices. By having the HSA you won't have to worry about it and can have as atrocious a probe rating as possible (basically by running the ever-popular "Knowledge" values) with impunity, saving you the research/support tradeoff of Fundy/Though Control.

In fact, this is common with most Society affects. They have a threshold where it gets as good/bad as possible regardless of excess points. For example, with Efficiency a +4 gives you the Paradigm Economy, however by playing the Gaians with Demo/Green/Knowledge you can jack that up to +7, but it's still only a +4 Paradigm Economy. A +3 Support rating allows you to support up to 4 or the base size worth of units free per base, and running Police State/Power will give a +4 rating, but it's still only as good as +3. Works on the negative ratings too; A Police rating of -5 disallows use of police and you have two extra drones for every military unit away from a base. By running Free Market/Cybernetic you get a -7 Police Rating, but it's still only as bad as -5. The complete listing of these Society Affect ratings are in the Alpha.txt and the Datalinks in-game.

By the way, you *don't* want a probe rating more than +3 because of an undocumented bug in the game which actually rolls your probe rating over to 0 if you're running one that's +4 or more. This affects the Data Angels the most (free covert ops center in every base with Pre-Sentient Algorithms), so if you have SMAX installed scale back their base probe rating to +1 instead.

[Chowlett]

This is all erfectly correct - but even if the Believers hadn't been running +3 Probe, you wouldn't have been able to capture the unit, as one of their faction bonuses is, I believe, "Units immune to mind control"

[cbn]

The other big deal with the HSA is that having it means you can permit your probe rating to drop and still not worry about losing units to mind control. Very handy if you are only fighting skirmishes and want to run more economically and research enahancing SE choices while having a solid probe defense. For players who rarely run fundy the HSA can be a hugely beneficial achievment.

[theohall]

thanks for all of the replies. Guess it's time to "drop" in on Morgan and get the HSA, then pummel Miriam in to submission.