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!
Today we will explore diplomacy, an absolute master of the Cold War, and a supremely important subject for Espiocracy.
(It's probably the last large mechanical topic in the diaries before we dive back into minutiae and AARs, which means that this diary is in the older heavier style. Also, linguistic disclaimer: "diplomacy" here includes many elements of wider international relations, following standard vocabulary of political games, and to avoid confusing references to "IR".)
Diplomacy in strategy games is usually implemented by personifying countries: giving them attitudes/opinions on one another, the ability to insult, offer gifts, trade favors, or enter almost-marriage-like alliances. This model is rooted in board games where every faction is indeed a human player who has real opinions on other players. However, as we travel further away from the roots, it makes less and less sense. In the case of Espiocracy, with 150+ countries in the Cold War (and beyond), complex frequently changing governments, and the player playing as an intelligence community - this model simply would not work. I know because I implemented it by default three years ago...
Many iterations of research / prototypes / playtests later, we are finally pretty close to really solid diplomatic gameplay in Espiocracy.
Keeping the unusual player persona at the center of mechanics, this model allows the player to interact at every stage with all the existing elements of diplomacy, not only in their own country but also in many other countries around the world!
Cooperations and Conflicts
The game completely drops abstract opinions/attitudes between nations. In many - most interesting - cases of the Cold War, it was not possible to reduce relations between two countries into a single opinion value. Take for instance stormy relations between France and the UK in the early Cold War, where both countries worked towards NATO and the EU, while at the same time they were sabotaging each other in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Following this and many other historical examples, countries in Espiocracy have multiple ongoing mutual cooperations and conflicts over defined subjects.
Cooperation or a conflict is the middle matrioshka doll of diplomacy.
Inside, it contains individual international actions. They are both defined by and dictate the depth of a relation. Two countries in new economic cooperation do not trust themselves enough to establish free trade - first, they have to pave the way with investments, loans, imports, and other less significant actions. Conversely, a diplomatic conflict does not (usually) begin with severed diplomatic ties, and instead crawls through overtures such as canceling diplomatic events or expelling diplomats.
While a plethora of actions can be managed through more general relations, a plethora of relations can be managed through more general...
Diplomatic Structures
Real-world diplomacy loves structures, protocols, frameworks, and everything in between. This fact is subtly represented in a few strategy games but, as if bound by murky "opinion" parameters and people universally rolling their eyes at the word "policy", this aspect seems like a missed opportunity. In my humble opinion, similarly to nuclear brinkmanship, diplomatic structures make a fantastic game-building clay!
Espiocracy implements main tools of diplomacy as a way to start / define / end multiple cooperations or conflicts in one sweep, with possible extension to details such as emphasis on particular actions or exchanging actions belonging to two different subjects.
Non-exhaustive ordered (from the least important to most important) list includes:
- Implicit Alignment, eg. anti-communist countries cooperated to quell communism by default
- Informal Deals, eg. East Germany sent weapons to Arab states during the Six-Day War, and in exchange, they recognized the sovereignty of the GDR
- Retaliations, eg. a set of countries ended military cooperation with Russia after the annexation of Crimea
- Bilateral Treaties, including Alliances but usually more ambiguous, eg. the Finno-Soviet treaty of 1948 with its complexity (Finland partially traded independence, mainly by being obligated to reject the military cooperation with the West, in exchange for neutrality that would stop the USSR from coercing Finland into future Warsaw Pact... kind of)
- Collective Treaties, eg. post-WW2 peace treaties, NATO, Warsaw Pact
- Special Relationship, eg. USA and UK
- Coalitions, usually a temporary structure to jointly wage a conflict, eg. a coalition of 42 states for the Gulf War
- Policies, meta-decisions about cooperations or conflicts which do not have to target specific countries, eg. Hallstein Doctrine (in game mechanics it's closer to a policy than a doctrine) in which West Germany refused to engage in diplomatic relations with any country that recognized East Germany
- Doctrines, powerful sets of global meta-decisions available only to significant figures from significant countries, eg. Truman doctrine pledging support for democracies against authoritarian threats
In addition, diplomatic structures have meta-dynamics: they can evolve into waves (eg. a wave of retaliations where even smaller countries can retaliate in the shade of international crowd), their proclamation or modification can become a significant event on its own that is met with a diplomatic reaction (classic case of Warsaw Pact forming 5 days after West Germany joined NATO), their implementation may be ceased, a policy may expire due to impracticality of enforcement, and so on.
Staccato of Interactions
Diplomacy in the game advances, similarly to the real world, one contact at a time. Rich tools of inter-governmental communication - intermediaries, contact groups, summits, visits, letters, phone calls - define the pace, basic availability, and evolution of relations (eg. Czechoslovak attempts to form a local security pact contributed to the formation of Warsaw Pact), and most importantly: a large layer of diplomats who are influenced by intelligence agencies.
The ability to pursue these interactions (and all other diplomatic actions) is primarily tied to diplomatic weight - a parameter rooted in the general position of the country (State Power Index), modified further by independence, legitimacy of the government, recent diplomatic successes, international credibility, and actors directly responsible for diplomacy. By partially decoupling material and diplomatic position, it allows nations to diplomatically punch much above their weight... or become unreliable unwanted partner even despite superpower status.
This is where a casus belli, the good old staple of strategy games, comes in. Grave actions (such as an invasion) have a high weight threshold, often higher than achievable diplomatic weight. However, it can be lowered by an expanded Cold War variant of casus belli: a "diplomatic justification". Weaker nations can prepare sophisticated justifications against a targeted nation, often in secret coalition with other nations. For instance, the "unification" claim was not enough for North Korea to invade the south, both historically and in the game, and instead, the invasion was preceded by two years of uprisings, complicated negotiations in Moscow and Beijing, and finally a month of calls for elections, conferences, and peace talks. On the other hand, heavy-weight nations or leaders may follow "might makes right". Justification can be presented post-factum, much like Brezhnev vaguely explaining the invasion of Czechoslovakia a month after it was executed, or hand-waved, similarly to Lyndon B. Johnson's communication around the invasion of the Dominican Republic.
Following deeper the rabbit hole of Cold War diplomacy, the game also features international incidents. These constitute an inherent cost of many actions, for instance, deployment of a naval group (which can run into mines or a shoot-out with vessels from another country), a nuclear test (fallout risks), a space launch (falling rockets and satellites), and many espionage activities. An incident at best may be settled through deconflictive actions and at worst may escalate into an international crisis.
International Crisis
A crisis in the game is a rare named event, with a limited lifetime and participants, punctuated by a string of confrontations. In a way, it's a diplomatic war.
Crises can originate not only from incidents but also from significant enough actions (across many mechanics) that involve significant enough nations. Berlin Blockade and Cuban Missile Crisis are classic historical events represented primarily as international crises in the game. For more examples, you can consult the fantastic International Crisis Behavior database which has been an indispensable help in the development.
When a crisis begins, belligerents enter a cycle of (usually fast) turn-by-turn escalations and deescalations, with high risk and high gain, which sooner or later have to end in a resolution.
The chart above hints at the current implementation but details are subject to larger changes. If you are familiar with game theory (as a mathematical field, eg. the famous prisoner's dilemma), you may suspect that this kind of mechanic can be surprisingly difficult to implement in a satisfying way. That is true, this two-player game inside a game can collapse into spectacular opposites of what was intended (eg. a countdown to war instead of a diplomatic stand-off). Hence, this section is limited to communicating mainly the intent, without burdening you with methods of achieving the intent, as they will certainly evolve.
Behind The Scenes
► Gifts and insults can rarely happen in the game, on the fringes of diplomacy. The former relies on local traits of a country giving it special types of gifs available (eg. panda diplomacy), and the latter can be executed by actors trying to gain domestic clout (eg. Reagan calling the USSR an "evil empire").
► There's not a single "national interest" mentioned in the dev diary because this mechanic was retired due to its very repetitive redundant nature. As it turned out, views (especially combined with the tools described above) are more than enough to motivate actors.
► How does this system fit into schools of thought in international relations? If we can argue that classic (opinion-based) implementation of diplomacy is closest to the constructivist school, then diplomacy in Espiocracy is in a very small fraction constructivist (when individual actors overwhelm foreign policy) and mostly stays in a superposition between liberal (eg. states often mutually dependent, international frameworks, internal interest groups) and realist (eg. power politics, interest-driven rational decisions, states acting as coherent units) approaches.
Final Remarks
The next dev diary will be posted on April 5th!
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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"Much of the diplomatic traffic of Third World states was vulnerable to cryptanalysts in both East and West. On the eve of the 1956 Suez crisis, the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, formally congratulated GCHQ on both the ‘volume’ and ‘excellence’ of its decrypts ‘relating to all the countries of the Middle East'" - Christopher Andrew in "The Secret World"