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 more dev and more diary than usual)
How do you precisely achieve progress in a game of Cold War intrigue?
Better yet, to invoke a one-liner decorating walls of my office: in a full psychological Cold War intrigue maturely exploring espionage, nuclear strategy, ideologies, politics, and conflicts. How do you measure goals in that, what are the main resources, how do you weave feedback loops, and what's the tick-to-tick strategizing in the game?
This should be probably the topic of the first or the second dev diary. Instead, it was described briefly a year ago in the 8th DD, and then mentioned only between the lines. The reason is simple: elemental progression and basic resources are so fundamental to the game that I was in the middle of the endless cycle of implementations, playtests, and course corrections. Reconnaissance-in-force. We could follow Mozilla versioning scheme and discuss Intelligence Agencies 52.0 instead of 2.0.
The answer, on the surface, is surprisingly simple: as the player in Espiocracy, you're the master of people and funds.
These are further divided into a set of 6-18+ basic resources used by every player.
Money
Espiocracy leans into the plethora of interesting contexts - from origin to legality - around money. While this aspect is kept mathematically simple (make no mistake, it's far from a money-heavy management game!), the game world, much like our real world, essentially revolves around cash.
The player, as an intelligence community of a single country, has a set of contributors who monthly subsidize the intelligence enterprise in exchange for access to intelligence reports. In a typical case, these are Department of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Department of Justice. The extent of funding depends on the departmental budget (stemming from the total state budget which in turn is extrapolated from SPI) multiplied by an unorthodox parameter of "trust and need", separately tracked for every contributor.
SPI (State Power Index) is a purely competitive parameter, increased by overtaking other nations in almost any measurable aspect of the game world, be it quality of the military or shape of the economy. The player has limited indirect influence on SPI (for instance by conducting military or economic espionage) - it's more of an asymmetric landscape between nations than a basic vehicle of progression.
In contrast, trust and need are directly controlled by the player. Trust, naturally, is gained through operational successes and lost after failures. Stealing blueprints of strategic weapons increases the trust of military circles, whereas failure to prevent a terrorist attack decreases trust across the board. Here's also where things get interesting - the same parameter tracks also the need for intelligence. Terrorist attacks definitely increase the need, as do regional wars, international tension, or hostile activities. By combining these two aspects into the same coin, Espiocracy explores the uneasy inflection point between real fear and fear-mongering, between failing upwards and making yourself obsolete by being too good. This paradox was the bane of worldwide intelligence funding which peaked around 1989 and was dramatically slashed just a few years later, rendering many intelligence professionals no longer needed... Find what you love and let it kill you.
Contributions, counted in millions of dollars (usually with an accuracy of $0.1M), are divided into three pools: operational, restricted, and illicit. An operational account accumulates the main legal resource - money that can be spent on expansion, improvements, agents, bribes, special operations, and so on. Restricted funds are dedicated to particular areas, for instance American player receives restricted funds from the Department of Justice which can be spent only on the expansion of the FBI. Illicit money comes from breaking the law on the ground, shady contributors, and covert governmental programs along the lines of Iran-Contra. The last kind of pool can be spent only on already covert activities (eg. bribes), more overt expenses (such as hiring staff) first require laundering illicit funds into an operational account.
At the heart of spending money in Espiocracy sits a radical solution: upkeep is abstracted away, all expenses are one-time expenses. Players don't babysit monthly changes in account balance because there is no maintenance cost. Instead of worrying about salaries, you spend money on a hiring campaign that brings in X new operatives. Lore-wise, salaries and other upkeep costs are handled by contributors (you're a part of state apparatus, not a business, after all) but fuzzy explanations aside, it makes for very fluent gameplay with swift feedback loops, skipping straight to the fun, and moving anti-snowballing mechanics into the vicinity of competitive challenges (eg. more operatives means larger attack surface for foreign infiltration).
Speaking of which, contributors form a kind of contributor economy which takes the role of (also) a negative feedback loop, traditionally implemented by upkeep costs. Symmetrically to large successes rewarded with an injection of money, large failures may require covering the damages (eg. of a diplomatic incident). Further significant loss of trust and need leads also to discrete "downsizing" events, where the player has to single out scapegoats, cut down the staff and sprawl in general, to regain the trust. If that fails (or the loss of trust is dramatic), it may lead to the reform (large changes in the structure of the intelligence community, along with purges and downsizing in general), or even loss of contributors. Changes in the composition of contributors can also happen along political changes - for instance authoritarian one-party systems may feature The Party as the main contributor, some totalitarian countries love overarching Ministries of Internal Affairs that heavily depend on the intelligence community, and small democratic states may almost completely do not care about intelligence, leaving it to a single governmental body such as President's Office.
Staff
People form the second half of resources in the game. Almost all tasks are implemented directly by the staff. You can get by (temporarily) without money but falling to 0 operatives is a game-over condition.
The bulk of staff consists of regular operatives - working mechanically as a currency with internal dynamics. Regular operatives are divided into agencies (eg. for British player there are three separate pools of regular operatives: MI6, MI5, GCHQ), hired with funds, and then (somewhat cynically) thrown in numbers at issues, operations, expansion, and other actions. Each pool is characterized by an average tradecraft level which is increased by training, improvements, engagements on the ground, cooperation with more skillful players, and allows classic quantity vs quality decisions. In addition, regular operatives have limited but impactful office life that includes spontaneous factions forming around views and ideologies, even up to said faction potentially refusing actions, pressing demands, going rogue, or defecting.
Beyond regular intelligence officers, players develop specialized operatives in cycles similar to classic technology trees of other strategy games, with the addition of irregular mandatory investments. Currently (subject to change) there are 12 capabilities - optional specializations:
- Social Engineering
- Politics and Diplomacy
- Science and Technology
- Business and Economy
- Media and Culture
- Digital Devices
- Guerrilla Warfare
- Military
- Direct Combat
- Criminal Investigations
- Philosophy
- Deep State
They are tied to many contexts in the game world: directly contributing to operations (eg. securing better evidence for espionage trial), unlocking available structures and tools (eg. paramilitary training camps tied to guerrilla warfare), influencing events encountered by the player (eg. leaning more into politics or more into military), feeding into asymmetric positions (eg. British player starting with highly developed direct combat thanks to commando experiences in WW2), mirroring the population (eg. less literate countries having a hard time expanding more sophisticated capabilities), and so on.
And then we have top operatives who already received larger separate dev diary. In this, close to the final, iteration of basic resources, top operatives are slightly more impactful operatives who can be both proficient at tradecraft and specialized in a few capabilities. They are definitely not hero units, their main role still belongs to the storytelling layer, but they are embedded in the progression with rather an unconventional mix of mechanics. Instead of the standard choose one out of three random character cards known from many other strategy games involving characters, new operatives are created by the player from a set of positive and negative traits that use a pool of points, not far from character creation in C:DDA. You can increase the number of available points by choosing an alcoholism trait and spending the excess on higher specific skills - or invent a candidate less skilled at the moment but having cheap large potential for the future. As with all other resources, these points will be tied to local contexts and the game world, namely by different weights of the traits. Although it is a departure from the usual realism-first approach, this mode of player agency and flavorful strategic decisions that influence the next decades of storytelling is too good to not feature in the game.
Behind The Scenes
► Implemented, tested, and dropped ideas included various mana pools (from political influence to approvals in blanco), realistic fiscal years (yearly popup with budget negotiation, yay), worktime of operatives as the primary currency (sort of action points but in real-time), full bookkeeping experience along the lines of Football Manager, and even RPG-like progression in levels from 1 to 100 based on Fallout: New Vegas. Some were bad, some were acceptable, and some contributed features or themes to the current system.
► What about intelligence? Is there an information economy? Yes, it exists but not globally - it has ephemeral, local, discrete value. Experiments on resources included many different approaches to the quantification of intelligence, from counting the number of produced reports to chasing numerical requirements posed by the government, but they all reduced the game to euro-gamish manager of an intelligence mill (and as a bonus, were biased, confusing, and too often broke immersion). In later iterations, I consciously replaced quantity of intelligence with quality. It's a wider question of what this game is about and the answer was never about production chains or chasing green numbers. A smaller or larger number of infiltrated actors doesn't matter when you rewrite history by stealing Khruschev's "Secret Speech", procuring uranium for your nuclear program, and pulling off a coup d'etat on your eternal enemy.
► Note on the realism: IRL state funding of intelligence agencies is diverse, murky, and full of contradictions. Aside from the riddle of representing state funding at all in a game (which is somewhat immersively solved by the simple equation of SPI x Trust and Need), there's an entire ordeal of policies, authorizations, approved items, programs, oversight, competition between departments, red tape, and so on. Some of that made to a game in the form of contributors but I cut off most of these to avoid developing a bureaucracy simulator. Yes, in some parts of the modern world spending money without all these points is a big no-no (until you scroll to the "Controversies" section on Wikipedia), but I'm not too subtle about players playing less as 2022 state enterprises and more as the middle of the Cold War, "we lost accounting books and this sum was spent to weed out traitors who tried to sabotage moon landing", espiocracies!
Final Remarks
Next up, National Assets on November 25th.
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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"Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany, to bolster labor unions there. He tried undercover techniques to keep me from finding out how he spent it. But I had my own undercover techniques" - Thomas W. Braden, 1967