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.
New iteration of this set of mechanics was published under: DD#32 Intelligence Agencies 2.0
Intelligence agencies in Espiocracy are closely intertwined with contacts & targets. To summarize previous DD#7 about the system one sentence, actors can be contacted to pursue semi-diplomatic actions and/or targeted to unlock more offensive operations. All players - humans and AIs - are actors too, embedded in the living world of multipolar interactions.
Contacts
As the name of the game suggests, espionage-focused actors have much broader decision space than all the other entities. This is especially prominent in interactions between the intelligence agencies...
...which are elevated to the level worthy of a grand strategy, including alliances, puppet organizations, arch-enemies, and challenging negotiations. The latter case plays an especially important role in inter-agency interactions (watch out for the "early work in progress" screenshot!):
Here, players can tailor their offers and needs, achieve many shades of win-win situations, resolve conflicts, or even attempt to deceive each other. Visible on the screenshot aresnal of negotiable subjects is granularized: for instance, non-aggression deal can range from just a promise (which can be broken, especially between human players) all the way to passing an act which locks particular offensive actions behind game rules.
Targets
While contacts with intelligence agencies have to be established and developed (and the trust can be dramatically lost), targeting is much simpler - all known agencies are targeted by default. This is natural state for the whole world, as everyone wants to know what all the other agencies are doing.
The process of targeting assists counterintelligence and leads, among others, to the salt of the espionage earth: capturing spies.
However, even the worst situations can be partially salvaged using contacts:
In addition to counterintelligence, targeting other agencies actually improves counter-counterintelligence:
For instance, in this country the knowledge about comings and goings of local intelligence services is lowering the risk associated with operations on the ground.
World
In Espiocracy, you will play as the whole espiocratic apparatus of your country. For the USA it means controlling CIA and NSA and (part of) FBI, for the USSR it's both KGB and GRU, and so on. Every country has a single - to borrow the term from espionage jargon - intelligence community.
Differences between them are the backbone of replayability. They flow not only from self-explanatory differences between countries, but also from the structure of intelligence community:
They are not set in stone. Change of the structure is a historically-inspired mechanism of recovery, where - after a revolution, large change of political climate, or just too heavy burden of internal issues - player can start from (predominantly) carte blanche. Speaking of internal issues, does the game simulate competition between agencies, so common in the real world? The answer is: partially, to not divert attention from the grand level of strategy, but to still cover the case of 9/11 which severity has been attributed to the poor communication between FBI and CIA.
Internal Management
Design philosophy of careful balance between macromanagement and micromanagement is reflected in the internal management of intelligence agencies. Player don't set up an exquisite order of battle - it can be more closely compared to a city builder, where the main resource is staff, and buildings are agencies with sections.
Let's preface this with a word about game's economy. It isn't the most exciting design in the history of games, so it suffices to cover it in a single paragraph (and is subject to further balancing and iterations). In every fiscal year, general budget is determined as a percentage of national budget, where percentage is determined by three equal stats of: minimized threat, acquired strategic intelligence, and relations with country's leader. Since it is a government entity and not a tycoon, player doesn't directly operate on that figure, and instead receives number of positions available to fill, along with some operational and black budget (more on the last two in later dev diaries).
General pool of available staff numbers can be distributed between agencies, defining for instance the weight put on human intelligence versus signals intelligence. Level below, sections standard for espionage agencies but not necessarily intuitive for laymen (such as analysis or planning sections) are automated and assumed. The building fun instead happens in the richness of optional task-oriented sections, taken straight out of the rich history of espionage:
- Direct Action (a.k.a. proffessional assassins, such as Mossad's kidon)
- Forgery & Disinformation
- Embassy Burglary
- Illegals
- Honeypots
- Poison Laboratory
- High-Altitude Reconnaissance
- Paramilitary Training
- Small Military Units
- and more
Ability to establish specific sections depends on local law - it's hard to imagine military unit in hands of CIA (well, at least before the era of drones), whereas East German Stasi expanded its Dzerzhinsky Regiment to the size of a division. That doesn't however mean that agencies in the liberal part of the world are toothless, as they can excel in other areas, such as cooperation with free market economy leading to technological feats such as U-2 airplane.
All agencies and sections are manned by operatives. At the end of the day, every command is carried out by them - not by abstract bureaucracy. This will be the topic of the next dev diary.
Final Remarks
"Operatives" dev diary will be posted on October 29th.
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:
---
"It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries" - Allen Dulles