Diplomacy is critical to the success of your empire, but not all deals are above board. Sometimes a little subterfuge goes a long way where open negotiations have failed. Sometimes, your best course of action is to undermine your opponent in secret or lure them into a trap. With the new Agents and reworked stealth system, you can do just that.
Together We Rule: Agents
Agents are a new type of unit you can use to perform various non-combat tasks. Unlike other units, there is a limit to how many Agents you can employ in your empire at a time, scaling with the number of players. You can't just overwhelm your enemy with a swarm of spies and have to apply them carefully. There are two types of Agents, the diplomatic Envoys and the devious Spies and Spymasters, who all count against the same limit.
Before we look at what a little espionage can offer you, let's briefly talk about Envoys, as they will be the first agents available to you in the Ancient era. Thanks to their diplomatic abilities, they can enter any territory regardless of border status, and they even move faster on roads. This makes them a great tool for exploring enemy territory or collecting Leverage.
What's Leverage? It's a new resource you can use to put pressure on other empires through Embassy actions and the Congress of Humankind. Your primary source of leverage will be special curiosities that spawn when and where a grievance is triggered, and which can be collected only by your Agents (unless you are playing a Diplomat culture).
If there's no leverage to collect, you can instead send your Envoys to an Independent People to slowly improve your relationship with them. We'll go into more detail about how Patronage and the Congress work now next week.
If you can't afford to be seen snooping around, the Spies and Spymasters are your best friends. Available in the Medieval and Early Modern era, these Agents have stealth and access to several actions to hurt your enemy without revealing themselves. These range from tracking the movement of enemy armies, to disrupting districts or stealing valuable resources. Here's what you can do with Spies and Spymasters.
- Watch a City: Get detailed information about the city and its production while the agent remains in it
- Track an Army: Keep vision of the tracked army for a few turns
- Siphon a District: Transfer some of the resources (Luxury, Strategic, or FIMSI yields) produced by the district to your capital
- Undermine an Army (Spymaster only): Applies a combat strength penalty to the enemy army for several turns
- Disrupt a District (Spymaster only): Disable the targeted district for several turns
- Manipulate a City (Spymaster only, requires Military Coordination): Apply a penalty to the city and spawn rebel armies or trigger osmosis events in your favor
- Create a Decoy Army (Spymaster only, requires Military Coordination): Creates a temporary immovable decoy army based on your strongest army
Metternich Update: Stealth Rework
How do these agents stay hidden, though? And what about older stealth units like the Saboteur and the Commandos?
We know that the old stealth system was rather volatile and difficult to understand. In the new system, stealth will deplete slowly until your units are revealed, rather than revealing them all of a sudden if you stepped on the wrong tile. Additionally, the new system is based on territories instead of individual sight lines, making it easier for you to move around, or to improve your counterespionage.
How long your armies can remain hidden depends on the detection rating of the territory they are in. Armies, districts, and squadrons of planes can contribute to this detection rating, but in each category only the highest value in the territory is added to the total. More or bigger armies won't make it easier to catch spies unless you add the right units. This detection rating reduces the stealth value of every army in the territory every turn, until they are revealed at 0 remaining stealth value.
The maximum stealth value of an army depends on the lowest stealth value among units in it, and since your main combat units are not trained to conceal their positions, most units have a stealth rating of 0. Armies are just not a great way to infiltrate enemy cities.
If most units break your ability to stay hidden, where does that leave stealthy combatants? Simple: Lying in ambush. An army walking into the same tile as a hidden army will trigger an ambush battle. In this battle, the hidden army counts as the attacker and receives a massive combat strength bonus on the first turn, while the defender cannot bring any reinforcements. Of course, your cover will be blown and you may need to fall back to a safer position to re-establish your stealth.
We're sure many of you are already plotting how to put Agents and the new stealth system to good use. Come back next week to hear more about the Congress of Humankind and the improved interactions with Independent People.