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.
This dev diary is partially outdated. The game now features slightly different expansion/building mechanics, relying on sections of operatives.
After ~10 developer diaries exploring the game world and its descriptions, it's time to close the cycle - before the summer break - with pure intelligence gameplay loop* in which you can tamper with this world.
As everything in the game exists and happens on the world map, interactions usually have geographical dimension, whether it's traveling to meet coup plotters, smuggling weapons into a war zone, or stealing nuclear blueprints from a protected location. These actions, carried out by operatives crossing the map, usually originate from intelligence stations built around the globe by the player.
Stations
Real-life intelligence agencies usually develop foreign offices, called stations (or rezidenturas in Soviet and satellite agencies), near places of interest to avoid risky and slow travel back and forth between headquarters and target locations. Operatives living overseas can handle local agents, conduct operations, and nurture covers not available to people who just visited a heavily surveilled airport or border checkpoint. As a testament to the importance of stations, the CIA inherited just a few of them in 1947, only to expand their number beyond 50 in the 1950s. Even at the peak of Cold War surveillance paranoia, CIA and KGB maintained heavily staffed stations respectively in Moscow and Washington, preferring operating from them over other modes of infiltration.
As such, a station is the most important kind of establishment in Espiocracy, analogous to cities or colonies in other strategy games. To avoid babysitting 50+ stations, their status in the game is elevated in comparison to real life: they are larger and much more costly, with a minimal staff of 5 operatives (smaller crews, typical for many embassies, are reduced to passive modifiers), and usually located in capital cities.
The definition of a station is stretched to include also headquarters - the first and the largest base for all players. Beyond managing counterintelligence and domestic operations, it is also used as the default point of origin for operatives in the absence of closer stations. Clicking on the button above means that the initial party of operatives embark on travel (which is naturally associated with counterintelligence risks) from HQ to Paris:
Once established, the rest of the crew joins the initial group and begins the work.
Spy Networks
When operatives at a station are not busy with the primary task of conducting operations against influential actors, by default they develop local spy networks and directly collect tactical intelligence on the country and its actors.
Spy networks can support operations at critical steps such as developing deep cover, gaining access to a place, hiding after a botched operation, and so on. In a process not far from real-life espionage, networks are established by continuous:
- Spotting many suitable candidates in the local population
- Developing (observing, contacting, building rapport) ~10% of best candidates
- Recruiting ~10% best-developed relations either to be a source (supplying only intelligence) or a low-value agent (supplying intelligence and participating in operations near an actor)
- Developing ~10% best-situated sources into agents
- Very rarely, assisting a low-value agent in improving their position to become a high-value agent, capable of not only providing intelligence and assisting operations but also of influencing actor's actions (outside of such rare organic strikes, high-value agents are recruited in costly full-fledged intelligence operations)
Hint at Wider Expansion
Stations, beyond environmental factors and universal configuration, can be specialized by establishing additional sections inside:
Beyond stations, the player currently can establish 19 other structures, ranging from embassies all the way to paramilitary training camps. Details are still subject to large changes, as every structure is constantly iterated upon to nail the most interesting gameplay possible.
However, stations remain the main building bloc in the intelligence empires carved out in Espiocracy.
Behind The Scenes
► (*) On gameplay loops: although this term became a staple of advanced discussions around games in the last few years (and even made it to a few dev diaries), in my opinion it's a very unfortunate way of looking at mechanics in complex games. Music is a pretty telling metaphor here. It is indeed full of repeatable parts with fancy names, but most genres delegate such loops to the background and focus instead on more important parts - not objectively more important, just in terms of creative passion and popular reception - such as lyrics, solos, expanding themes, and progression spanning entire album. Not to mention intentionally sophisticated genres, such as operas. When naked loops arrive at the front, we get Maurice Ravel's Bolero, a piece famous for making performers and the audience terminally exhausted after 15 minutes (and for its dark origin story).
► Stations have, unrealized at the moment, the potential for more autonomous activity for operatives. I'm regularly experimenting with the ability to give orders to stations - focus on X, exploit Y, prefer Z. Some of these are already in the game in the nth iteration, eg. aggression slider, and sections that focus on local tenets (eg. military or propaganda). You can expect more of them in the future.
► Naturally, all of these entities are involved in a counterintelligence game (surveilling stations, detecting structures, dismantling spy networks, doubling agents, and so on) that waits for a Bible-sized diary.
► In the screenshot near spy networks you can see the typical use of nested tooltips in the game:
Final Remarks
See you on the other side of the summer! Next dev diary will be posted on August 4th.
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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"As of 1975, the KGB’s Hanoi station had a total of 25 fully recruited agents and 60 confidential informants" - Mitrokhin Archive