--- Trent Piepho <xyzzy at speakeasy.org> wrote:
> If you are cloaked and outside of visibility radius,
> then you can't be seen.
> The only way to figure out if you are picking is to
> look for players with
> kills and bases who aren't elsewhere when a known
> planet's armies go down.

Between human players....

If a teammate is bombing the planet, you will know the
armies disappeared due to bombing as he will mentioned
it on the message board (especially if it was a
difficult bomb). 

Armies magically disappearing from the galactic can
only be explained by 3 scenarios (usually)

1. plague (rare)
2. enemy starbase pickup but all your teammates are
too far away to detect it. 
3. Some player with kills that was recently "close" to
the planet picked it up. 

Good players keep track of 2 and 3 well. So even if
they are invisible, by memory we know where they
"are/were"

The robots need to "witness" a pickup before they will
register it. AKA, enemy is going warp 0, on the
planet, probably orbiting and not invisible. Witness
armies reducing on planet. 

You could simply cloak on green alert, and beam-up,
and uncloak and the robots never catch that you
carried. A real player would see this, know that you
are carrying, and wonder why did you even bother to
cloak so you can be "invisible" for 2 seconds. 

The key is to keep track of stale information and to
track how stale it is. Player with 2 kills went
invisible 4 updates ago and planet armies decremented
by 1? His last known position close to planet with
armies? Most definitely carries....

The robots have so much compute time to figure out the
possibilities, that they should be just as
galactically aware as a clued observer coaching the
team. 


Jimmy