Re: Pather bases, yeah, they're not that easy to find. When a faction posts a bounty on one you find out where it's located, and that's about it as far as "free" ways to find the location. Totally agree that there ought to be some other way to make progress on finding one, aside from scouring everything.
Hmm... How does one setup a "spy game" in a space game? Have an intel officer in the comm directory after you build a specific industry, like a HQ? Go to the bar, get a mission for "catch the spy" or "intercept the smugglers?" from kind of contact, and then hunt down a fleet in system who in turn knows the location of the base? Spend credits for counter espionage like we do for convincing expedition fleets to go away from the intel screen? Assign an AI core to finding them, who sometimes gets blown up by Pathers in response?
Actually, a second question is what are the ways to continue to find cores? Should I not blow up all [REDACTED] stations?
All the aspects of this would be so abstracted on the campaign map that you could probably insert a campaign-level process-of-elimination puzzle. I know for a fact there are some that'd fit really well and one is on the time of my tongue but I haven't slept and I can't quite bring it to mind
but ignoring citing another pre-existing example since that part of my brain has been hit by an ion beam; the text fluff for pather cells mentions they require support from pather fleets to function. You then could make it so killing pather fleets drops a broken intel that gives three pieces of market information that is relevant to three pather cells that use aliases (cell [a]'s market has a volatiles mine, cell
's market doesn't have a starport, cell [c]'s market is on a barren world). Different intel uses different aliases and it's up to the player to piece together the clues to figure out what the real market is (the other two are fake?). Dropping marines on the wrong world causes backlash, but bc it's just marines dropped in to kill what might have been pathers and not, like, a raid or a tactical bombing the repercussion isn't "targeted market goes hostile". Maybe the fake cells are pather traps and targeting the fake cells causes a pather cell (with no valueable cargo) to appear and strike your fleet from the nearest hiding terrain?
oh shoot that was the intel from the recent cold war x-com ripoff that had shockingly poorly implemented combat
aw well, that part was worth stealing and putting into a better game