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NIC
NAVIGATION INTERCEPTION COMMITTEE DIRECTIVE
- This is an educational game to help you learn the names and locations of countries and cities around the world.
- Players. Any number of players can collaborate to play against the computer.
- The Setting. The Navigation Interception Committee or NIC, is a secret service whose goal is to intercept a Spy who is traveling toward a target city.
- The target city is always located in a democratic country with a 2025 liberal democracy index greater or equal to 0.445. Here is a link to a clickable liberal democracy world map.
- The NIC has powerful resources and is expected to always succeed.
- There five secret agents (code names: Aqua, Plum, Lime, Gold, and Coral), initially located in air bases around the world.
- They can quickly fly between airbases but when pursuing the spy on the road they move at the same speed as the Spy.
- That speed is equal to the distance covered in miles per game round; however, the agent's speed cannot be faster than 500 miles per round.
- This limitation means that, although not impossible, it is very difficult to catch the spy when following from behind. But, when the spy is about to cross from one country to another, the NIC can gather intelligence to determine what the next country is, and it can call the border. As a result the spy gets more cautious and slows down, and the agents can cover twice the mileage in one round.
- If the agents manage to block the spy in a series of five consecutive games he's done for good, which means that the NIC saved the world. Note: to start the first or the next game in a series, press the red GAME button. Reload the page to start a new series.
- You can always decide which city each of the agents should move to but sometimes it is more practical to click the car icon and initiate an automatic pursuit.
- When stuck in places far away from an air base NIC's agents can call on vertical-take-off jets to transport them from the field back to any open air base. They can fly only one agent at at time and there are only five jets per game.
- If the spy is about to cross an ocean or a large body of water or if he is currently located in a small island or peninsula, the NIC can stop the spy using at least two but sometimes tree interceptor boats.
- Within a series of games, the first deployment of any boat can be anywhere in the world. After that a boat may move up to 250 miles each round, or up to 500 miles when the spy's next step is 250 miles or longer. The dotted circle around each boat shows that distance.
- On a subsequent game if you want to move the boats across a large distance it is best to use the auto pilot mode and navigate on a compass heading.
GAME BUTTONS AND CONTROLS:
Press the red GAME button and notice the numbers flashing on the right panel.- When the numbers stop flashing, zoom and drag the map to see the colored circles marking the current location of the agents. Find the smaller black circle. That's the spy.
- Try all the console displays and buttons. A description of the button's function appears when you mouse over it.
- Scroll to the top of these instructions and press the Path Reveal button. Looking back at the map you see the entire path that the spy will take. During a real game and until you stop the spy, you can only see the path from the start to the current spy's location. But you can use this Path Reveal feature for training. By the way, each game has a different path that has never been seen before.
A GAME TUTORIAL:
- See Fig.1 in the panel above. At the start of a game the spy's location is shown as a black dot in Chota, Peru, and the five agents are in air bases all over the world. I select the red circle on the left of the map and draw a distance circle centered on the spy's location, with a radius of 4,000 miles, which, as shown on the right panel, is the approximate distance from the spy to the target city. Now I know that the target city location is in a democratic country and not too far from the red dotted line. San Francisco is close to the line but so is Winnipeg in Canada.
- I click the agent's buttons and one by one plan their next moves such that they get closer to America and to the spy's location.
- Next look at Fig.2. I press GO. The Spy moves a little North and I get some intelligence that the spy's next move is less than 100 miles and that he is about to cross a border. The question is which border? If I guess corretly my agents can travel a little faster although that is only useful if they are on the road. At the moment they are all in air bases, but I think I'll ask two of the agents to drive. Hovering the mouse over the possible country names I see that Equador is the only possibility. I click "Equador" and I see that the Spy is delayed, so if my two agents are driving they can go twice as far as the spy.
- Plum and Coral are 2,400 miles away in Guadalajara Mexico but, assuming that the spy is traveling North, that is still the closest air base. So I click their car icons to initiate an automatic pursuit. I don't see Plum on the map because he is in the same place as Gold. The agents itinerary panel shows it.
- I keep clicking GO, while leaving the chase on auto pilot and answering the country crossing questions the best I can and soon I get to the situation shown in Fig.3. At first it looks like my agents could actually move to the current spy location, which would count as a win (you'll see why below). But, on closer inspection, I see that they can move really close but not exactly to the spy's city.
- Move on to Fig.4. I cancel the auto pilot chase and click both the agent's and the spy's buttons to reveal the permitted travel cities, which show up on the map as open circles.
- I draw a circle of 140 miles centered on the spy's location. According to the intelligence shown on the right panel, this is the approximate distance of the spy's next step. I send Coral and Plum to two cities that the spy could probably go to on its next move.
- Move to Fig.5. I press GO and see that Plum ARRESTED the spy in Bluefields Nicaragua. The whole spy path's is revealed at this point and I see that the target city was indeed Winnipeg in Canada, about 35 miles from that red line I drew at the beginning of the game.
FOUR WAYS TO INTERCEPT THE SPY:
Fig.5 The Arrest. This is how we blocked the spy in the above tutorial. The spy is arrested when he moves into a city when an agent is already there.- Fig.6 The Bermuda Triangle This strategy works if you can surround the spy with three boats. Place the boats at the vertices of a triangle with the spy inside it. Each boat must be inside the other two boats' circles, and the spy inside all three circles, that is, all four inside the intersection of the three boat circles. The next spy's step is thereby blocked.
- Fig.7 The Blockade If you are certain that the spy is crossing the water in his next move, block the spy's path by placing two boats such that a line between them intercepts the spy's path. Each boat must be inside the other boat's circle.
- Fig 8. The Harpoon. This is used on land and you need two agents to make it work. When the spy's current city is within the driving range of both agents, drive both of them into the spy's city.
IMPORTANT ODDS AND ENDS:
If things are not working as expected check the following possible causes:- See if the circle-drawing tool or the eraser tool are still checked and un-check them.
- Same thing for the boat deployment buttons. If one of them is activated either move the boat or de-activate the button.
- The GO button will only move the agents if it is green. For example, if you want to move an agent from the road to a faraway air base you also have to request a jet, otherwise the GO button will not work.
- Have you answered the border crossing challenge? You got to do it before you can move your agents.
- The spy was supposed to jump 4000 miles but he just disapeared from the map. This is a longitude problem. Notice that the map repeats itself along the EAST-WEST line. Look at one of the repeated panelsto find the spy again.
- Boats To deploy a boat, click one of the colored boat buttons and then click on the map. If you change your mind just press the βΆ button to reverse or cancel the move. On an honor basis players must voluntarily place boats only on water. Placing boats in rivers far from the ocean is not fair but sailing in estuaries is totally fair. Large land-locked seas are OK too but just know that while you can initially place your boats in the Caspian Sea or in the Greal Lakes, they will be stuck there for the remainder of the series. In contrast, if you use two boats near Lisbon to block a spy's jump from Lisbon to the Americas and on the next game you want to sail the boats across the Atlantic, you can totally do that. And, you can put then on auto-pilot on a chosen compass heading.
- Making the game easier or harder. You can do this in settings. While the set of air bases is randomly picked, you can increase the total number, up to one hundred and twenty two, to make the game easier, and vice-versa. Likewise, you can increase the maximum non-fly distance, which will make it very easy to catch the spy just before he takes a long trip to his next city. As for the other settings, they have to do with the way the spy's path is calculated. It's probably best to leave them unchanged.
