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.
"Elephant in the room" is one of my favorite English idioms. Game development seems to be filled to the brink with such elephants - important features that should be addressed but were pushed to the side. I've been using this phrase frequently enough to coin the abbreviation "EITR" in the design notes.
After addressing significant EITR two weeks ago (precise gameplay progression), it's time to meet its sister EITR: the economy. This dev diary, however, is not titled The Economy because the system developed to flexibly represent economic factors turned out to be a fantastic framework for a much wider game world. Now, the economy is just one of the 8 sectors of national assets.
Assets in Espiocracy represent infrastructure and objects of national importance. They are passive (non-actors!), exist on the map, provide local effects, can be developed or destroyed, sometimes even stolen. The player, an intelligence agency, has a few modes of interaction with them, but assets primarily are an orchestra in the background, playing a symphony of differences between countries.
Let's jump straight into examples to get the gist of the system.
Examples of Assets
Deposits are the prime type of national asset. There are three types of deposits: fossil fuel, strategic minerals, and uranium ore. Originally (unless the 1946 situation was different), these assets are dormant, located in predetermined areas on the map, and have defined depth/size of 1 to X, relative to other deposits around the world. A state or private entities can invest into upgrading them to extraction facilities, which then enable internal effects such as driving the expansion of civilian infrastructure, and international tools such as an ability to sign trade agreements or enact embargoes.
As a part of mentioned civilian infrastructure, we can look into electricity. It's an asset measured in national coverage from 0% to 100%+, representing popular access to the electric grid (with a surplus over 100 generating international income). Its effects are a not-yet-refined web of influences on other assets and aspects of the game world, including for instance changing the spread of dissent, following the example of North Korea literally keeping people in the dark.
For a more unusual national asset, let's discuss significant works of art. The game features internationally known pieces as physical objects, which are protected, can change hands, or be destroyed. Some of them can be even a matter of diplomatic dispute - for instance, collections of the British Museum. These assets are represented both as concrete named entities (eg. the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin) and in abstract numbers (eg. 2,000 historical paintings). Instead of passive effects, they have intrinsic value (can be stolen by actors, including the player, and sold on the black market), also in terms of the status quo (eg. loss of a significant piece after a break-in can lead to changes in police forces).
Full Landscape
Current full landscape of assets, subject to change:
This system combines in a simple leap quite a few interesting contexts:
- Postwar damage and theft (eg. many European countries start with severely damaged cities, airports, etc)
- International control (eg. Czechoslovak and East German uranium deposits are de facto controlled by the USSR)
- Economic ownership (a subtle attempt at modeling differences between a command economy and capitalism, we'll see how detailed it will be)
- Development over the course of the 20th century and beyond (eg. electrification)
- True motivation for destruction (eg. terrorists targeting concrete significant buildings)
- Famines, shortages, and other crises
- War targets and spoils of war
- Counterintelligence of critical infrastructure
- Actors originating from non-acting sectors (eg. an inventor from strong academia or a political leader from local government structures)
- Pretty wide modding opportunities
Development of some assets is driven by the population (eg. changes in the city size). Others need a direct investment of the government (eg. new seaport) which is handled by a mass negotiation mechanic: government members, including the player, propose upgrades, developments, rebuilding, and establishment. These propositions make it to a single list, where they are backed by the influence of proposing actors divided by the magnitude of expenses. In alignment with interests and other views, some actors may vouch for expanding housing whereas others may push for funding economic incentives. Top propositions inside the spending scope are then implemented.
Behind The Scenes
► The sheet with asset types includes only somewhat tested and implemented ones. I'm experiment with a few other interesting types such as average kcal intake, riverine transport, or currency strength.
► Technically, national assets evolved from actors. For a long time, I struggled with representing anything close to an economic system based on the very limited number of actors (eg. two top companies in the country). What's worse, these actors didn't meaningfully act, taking the place of more interesting actors. That doesn't mean however that economic entities are completely inactive - they are now represented by more personal actors, such as business leaders, who have more logical & interesting actions, and even expand decision space (eg. business leaders may be subverted by affecting their economic assets).
► The system, in its simplicity, explores an interesting gamedev riddle. Where should we place the boundary between hardcoding and flexibility? The former is much faster to develop (at least in a complex strategy game) but it's not only a matter of making mechanics as flexible as time allows - as I've seen in a few iterations, mechanics can be too flexible, become bland, interchangeable, throw the player into the Euro-gaming pit of the same ten games with slightly different themes. At the moment, national assets are implemented by highly flexible code (modders can basically replace all data points, including all sectors) but for the purposes of interconnected gameplay, it slowly contracts into less flexible form (eg. requiring the transport sector to build transport graph). It's like a live experiment in approximating the most optimal position of hardcoded-flexible boundary.
► Some features were directly inspired by high-quality discussions on our discord server. Thanks, folks!
Final Remarks
Naturally, all national assets can be targeted in intelligence operations such as infiltration, subversion, sabotage, or even cooperation (for instance with foreign underworld!). Moreover, they create a very palpable environment for all indirect actions, where for instance operatives land in a newly built airport, use a reconstructed seaport in a smuggling network, or utilize a denser road network to exfiltrate an agent by car. This will be the topic of the next dev diary - Operations 2.0 on December 9th.
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:
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"Germany's war potential should be reduced by elimination and removal of her war industries and the reduction and removal of heavy industrial plants. (...) The plants so to be removed were to be delivered as reparations to the Allies" - J.F. Byrnes, US Secretary of State, 1946