What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.
Welcome back,
In the second dev diary about guerrilla warfare in Espiocracy, we will focus on player agency - available actions, interactions between players, degrees of freedom. This very central lens of the development receives a lot of attention in prose of many dev diaries (#22 in particular). To spice up the agential focus by a notch, here we'll skip the prose altogether and jump straight to bullet points interspaced with screenshots that answer the most important question: what can you actually do in the game?
Counterinsurgency
► Gameplay focused on grand strategic interventions and denial of future capabilities
► Spread defense between borders, population centers, critical infrastructure, transport networks
► Achieve degree of control over insurgents to push them towards particular actions
► Gather intelligence on incoming ambushes to evade and counterambush them
► Strike weapon flow and caches
► Search, destroy, and other SOF approaches
► Many approaches to propaganda, from false materials to radio stations
► Recruit, infiltrate, and other intelligence operations
► Capture and interrogate people
► Negotiate with intercepted saboteurs
► Cooperate with population centers, governors, and actors inside
► Establish resettlement camps
► Force relocation of entire villages
► Bounty and amnesty programs
► Destroy terrain, including the likes of Agent Orange
► Hunt down double agents among own ranks
► Deal with ill-disciplined acts and massacres, from trials to cover-ups
► Detect and intercept covert international support
► Loss of operatives as an opportunity to strike, pursue intelligence, or change sides
Insurgency
► Sub-national gameplay parallel to decolonization
► Nudge participants towards objectives: ambushes, attrition, contesting terrain and cities
► Recruit people en masse
► Smuggle weapons
► Establish training camps and other structures
► Fortify conquered territory with tunnels, mines, and asymmetric weaponry
► Infiltrate law enforcement services and military
► Convince and coerce actors to support the cause
► Conquer prisons to free up captured rebels and acquire new members
► Provoke indiscriminate attacks of the other side to exploit anger in the population
► Negotiate ceasefire, concessions, withdrawals
► Procure international support
Other Combinations
► Game over condition: loss of all operatives
► Fall back to partisan underground during occupation
► Infiltrate third-party conflict to gather intelligence and opportunities
► Back insurgency and counterinsurgency in the same conflict
► Send envoys and mediate negotiations
► Engage United Nations
► Become sanctuary for one of the sides
► Exploit lawless territories
► Beat the drum for third-party military intervention
Final Remarks
As always, it's work in progress and after nth iteration there's always n+1.
The next dev diary will cover Conventional Wars, to be published on September 2nd.
If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/
There is also a small community around Espiocracy:
---
"Warfare is no longer a matter of chivalry but of subversion, and subversion has its own special arsenal of tools and weapons" - Stanley Lovell, CIA officer