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#47 Espionage Gameplay
According to Allen Dulles, the longest-serving CIA director, espionage is not for archbishops. Is it for gamers, though?
Espiocracy is first and foremost the Cold War game. Focus on espionage stems from trends characteristic of this period:
- frequent government changes (leading to inevitable frustration if you're a government as well)
- significantly influential individuals (who don't take kindly player overriding their decisions)
- decolonization, coups, revolutions, civil wars, and other asymmetric episodes
- scarce role of actual military conquest
The last point is especially important for grand strategy gameplay. How do we expand if there is widespread military stalemate, rare wars are heavily constrained by international pressure, and many minor countries are locked out of interesting actions for 50 years? Naturally, you move the center of gravity towards espionage, since this is the golden era of subversion! We could even ask a question: can espionage take the lead from warfare and preserve the satisfaction of conquering the world? This is where we start today.
As a whole, espionage system in the game is composed of three parts: Actors (DD#6), Contacts & Targets (DD#7), and Operations. Whereas the first two are fairly universal, the last one is real espionage-espionage part with many features around it, which we'll explore in the next few dev diaries.
Transcript: the last third consists of regular espionage (example: following people), strategic materials (example: war plans), major operations (example: assassinations), counterintelligence (example: capturing spies)
We kick off with the most low-level part of spying: regular espionage. In a single sentence, it is a fabric permeating all other systems - constant background activity, direct connection to the game world, gateway to launching operations with surgical precision.
Tactical Intelligence
Tactical intelligence sits at the heart of this darkness - it covers standard intelligence materials, which do not rise to the strategic level (duh!), such as recruiting secretaries, photographing locations, following people, understanding local culture, and so on. These informations are obtained in large quantities and their contents do not really interest the supreme spymaster, but are nonetheless essential foundation of more exciting operations.
Tactical intelligence serves as an abstraction of basic espionage to 0-100 parameter ascribed to all countries and all actors. Zero represents no intelligence gathered, whereas one hundred is perfect and total infiltration. In development, special attention is paid to the actual click-by-click use of tactical intelligence. Instead of (negative) knowledge tax known from espionage systems in other games, here it plays mostly the role of (positive) discovery mechanism: providing extra actionable information, figuring out what an actor plans to do, uncovering well-guarded secrets, enabling additional but not obvious (usually: risky) operations, unleashing interesting events, improving outcomes of advanced operations, assisting counterintelligence, and so on. The game will be clear about possible uses of tactical intelligence - for instance, discoverable positions on the future agenda of an actor are crossed out instead of being just hidden from the interface:
Transcript: crossed out lines in "future activity" section
Acquisition of tactical intelligence is integrated with the system of contacts and targets. On the one hand, you can do your thing and prioritize valuable targets in broad strokes. If you target a whole country, your spies acquire tactical intelligence on the country itself and many actors inside. On the other hand, you can buy this information via contacts with other intelligence agencies, or even enter inverse agreement in which you spy on behalf of another agency in exchange for resources.
Tactical intelligence is dynamic sum of components, which can decay and are connected to game events. For instance, opposite player can hit bull's-eye operation and dramatically increase their tactical intelligence about you as the ingame actor, but you can fight back by spending resources to reorganize internally, burn blown covers, and outdate (lower) the level of tactical intelligence in the enemy hands. Similar embedding accompanies country-level tactical intelligence, where common history and in-game events such as postwar chaos influence the results of regular espionage:
Transcript: components of example tactical intelligence level - +5.0 neighbouring country, -16.9 historic (expires in 4.6y), -20.0 postwar (expires in 2.7y)
Local Infrastructure
In addition to tactical intelligence, regular espionage on the level of entire countries is expanded by long-term investments: recruited people, listening devices (bugs), and infrastructure. The first two will be number-based and roughly follow historical trends - for instance, in 1946 CIA had 125 agents in Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany - whereas the latter will let you to build with espiocratic twist.
Above all, you're controlling embassies, which play primary supporting role for espionage activity. They can be expanded in size (to the limit set by bilateral agreements), improved in security, expanded with consulates in other population centers, and most importantly - they can host stations, which are special cells carrying out intensive espionage in the whole region. These states within states are much more demanding in terms of resources and, therefore, remain jewels in the worldwide infrastructure, with just a few for small intel agencies and no more than a few dozen for superpowers. To invoke declassified data, CIA had 47 intelligence stations in 1952.
In addition to overt diplomatic infrastructure (which can also include, among others, onsite SIGINT installations), you can also establish covert buildings and non-physical structures, such as:
- safehouses
- courier rings
- cover organizations
- illegal spies
- sleeper networks
- stay-behind armies
The third category of local structures includes special projects, taken straight out of history and fiction. They combine high risk, high cost, high gain, and interesting events. As an example, they include a counterpart of operation Gold - a tunnel from West to East Berlin built to eavesdrop on Soviet phone lines:
Transcript: drawing of the tunnel, photo of preserved part of the tunnel, photo of journalists taking photos inside the tunnel
Credit for the last photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-37695-0051 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
All buildings are more than bonuses and maluses and enrich gameplay mainly by offering meaningful decisions. For instance, top operatives can be posted to stations to conduct regular espionage there, higher number of consulates increases chances of defections and walk-ins, stay-behind armies are actively used in wars, and so on.
World Conquest
Ultimately, this low-level espionage will be represented on the map as one of the symbols of progress. Fully leaning into the nature of espionage means that you're not limited to front-like warfare - instead, you can focus on any place in the world, build on the hostile ground, constantly work behind the lines.
In some situations, it will be a literal conquest, comparable almost to 4X games, where postwar voids and weak local institutions of newly established countries tempt you to throw in all the resources and become the undercover puppet master of a country.
This is also the most down to the ground but already significant battlefield between players. For instance, the use of infrastructure in uncovered operation may expose it to the opposite player, loss of these structures, permanent scaling down of embassy size, deficits in tactical intelligence, lower the ability to conduct advanced operations in this country, or even lead to loss of life...
"In December 1975, the chief of the CIA station in Athens was gunned down on his doorstep by three members of the 17 November Group, a far-left urban guerrilla terrorist organization after his cover as a member of the CIA was publicized"
Final Remarks
After tactical intelligence matters, the next dev diary will dive into "Strategic Materials" - see you on November 26th!
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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"Hectic atmosphere of flaps and crises is normal for direct espionage unit" - Chief of CIA station in Berlin, 1948