Recap:
- magian wrote that "It would be neat if the eye [of KGB] could show you the contents of any enemy stack"
- KGB replied: "That would be better suited to a new skill like 'scouting' that allowed revealing units in an enemy stack from a certain distance (higher the level of the skill the further away you could see the contents of an enemy stack). Then that skill could be given to certain units and heroes."
- Chazar replied "that a skill to look inside a stack should come at a price, i.e. a gold cost per use comparable to the cost of producing, moving and sacrificing a crow/scout. " In addition, one should consider that a player may to some extent defend against spying crows and scouts.
Another direction I was thinking was that a player is provided with (possibly flawed) graphs - even in ladder games. So a player can spend gold to learn about the number of cities of a certain player. The answer ought to be somewhat unreliable (maybe the accuracy being linked to a new heroes' skill). However, one has to be careful if the deviation is just random, as a player may quickly learn the true number through repeating spying requests in subseqeunt turns - maybe the game should store the previous bias, and just check with a chance whether the bias should more accurate or less accurate - again chances being linked to skill and invested gold. This might allow for a compromise to allow some limited stats in ladder games. Ideas?