Add a way to combat hostile snitches

[awoo-civ]

The issue with hostile snitches as they are is that they're nigh impossible to find. You simply do not have the means to find out whether your town has been snitched by someone else or not. In the case that you somehow do know it has, you have a painstaking task of digging up half of your town to find it ahead of you.

Viable Solutions

Snitch Revealer

• An expensive block produced in a factory (like a Bastion)
• Has to be reinforced to start working
• After being placed it can no longer be retrieved
• When placed it will trigger snitches that would be revealed with a special notification and everyone on the snitch group will receive a warning message upon logging in. They will also be notified should the revealer be destroyed before maturing. The notification should include the coordinates and reinforcement group of the revealer
• Has to mature for a day or more before it can be activated
• Activated by right-clicking the revealer block
• When activated it will show coordinates of all snitches in the area that were there at the time the revealer was placed
• Small area of effect

Abuses accounted for:

• Offensive usage highly limited by the special notification
• Spamming peoples snitches with the notification by mass-placing detectors is accounted for with their high cost
• Placing a detector and letting it mature before someone places snitches in the area and activating it later will not detect those snitches

Flawed Solutions

Snitch Detector

• An expensive block produced in a factory (like a Bastion)
• Has to be reinforced to start working
• After being placed it can no longer be retrieved
• When placed it will trigger snitches that would be revealed with a special notification and everyone on the snitch group will receive a warning message upon logging in. They will also be notified should the detector be destroyed before maturing. The notification should include the coordinates and reinforcement group of the detector
• Has to mature for a day or more before it can be activated
• Activated by right-clicking the detector block
• When activated it will tell the player if there were any snitches not on the same group as the detector in the area when it matured
• Range: 16x16+ in 2d (all Y levels regardless of Y level its placed at)

Abuses accounted for:

• Offensive usage highly limited by the special notification
• Spamming players' snitches with the notification by mass-placing detectors is accounted for with their high cost
• Placing a detector and letting it mature before someone places snitches in the area and activating it later will not detect those snitches
• 2d range makes it impossible for a player to reduce the search space by placing the detector at a different Y level

Issues:

• The player might want to exclude an arbitrary amount of groups from being detected and there doesn't seem to be an easy and intuitive way to do so.

Snitch Fighting

Snitches slowly destroy other snitches in their fields at a rate proportionate to their refresh value. This means that whoever visits a location the most gets to keep their snitches there.

Issues:

• No way to make a snitch aware that it shouldn't attack other snitches on friendly groups.

[redmag3]

I personally don't see an issue with a player pre-placing a detector at a location, and having it poll the area when activated, to locate all snitches and other detectors in the radius.

[awoo-civ]

Another alternative: Upon entry by a player not on the snitch group, emit a message: "There is an unknown snitch nearby.". Whether the message appears or not would be random and rate-limited (per player/per snitch?) to make easy triangulation impossible.

Pros:

• Proper scaling - the more active the location you snitch is, the higher the chance of your snitch being found.
• Easy to implement.

Cons:

• As a player, realistically you'd want to write down each occurence of the message with coordinates to have a chance of finding the snitch - not the best UX.