What about captured prisoners and documents?

[Deserteur]

In a interview between Strategy Gaming Online and Paradox it was said by Paradox that: "PoWs will magically vanish…" (PoW = Prisoner of War).

Does that mean that no information will be obtained by prisoners or documents that have been captured on the battlefield?
I think that this has to be in the game. Just as examples, Germany learned how many troops were brought to Norway by the British in 1940 when they found documents about this at a dead British major killed at Trondheim. In the game this documents could lift the "fog of war" over Narvik where an until then for the Germans unknown number of British soldiers landed.

 

[unmerged(9186)]

The vanishing of PoW doesn't mean the vanishing of their documents.

For the effect of this (and other intelligence issues), I would prefer a pop-up window telling me the information. Because removing Fog of War poses another problem: For how long ?

 

[MacRobert]

I hope Fog of War is a turn off option like EU...

 

[HisMajestyBOB]

Probably a random event, like "stealing the rutters" in EU.

 

[unmerged(11047)]

Learning how many troops have landed is not meaningful intelligence. Someone has to work out whether its true or part of some enemy deception plan (being found on a dead person is not enough... see the later "man who never was" deception plan over a mythical invasion of greece -I think it was Greece anyway). This can only be done by looking at it in context of enemy oob, doctrine and other activities... in other words by a properly established intelligence service. Documents with numbers on them are simply information while intelligence is processed information. The military comes by information from all sorts of sources, and random events are only one of them. The only way I guess it can be modelled in this sort of game is to invest resources in your intelligence sources that both make sense of any information you "find" (like this), and also to establish and exploit other agencies.

 

[unmerged(6909)]

Ahhhh...but how do you know that this information is true?

It may be old information.
It may be false information to hide the true plans in case of getting captured.
It may be incomplete. (incomplete information may be as bad as false information)
It may be a trap.

Don't laugh at the last one. I've read about some instances where dead men were equipped with false information. I don't know if these sources are reliable and it's not easy to get confirmed information (no nation would admit such a thing) but if they did it: voila...you're presenting your enemies a very reliable source of information