Ok, first quick try at an espionage faction (Just a general idea for now):



Ascended:

Parasitic immaterial species that only reproduce by infecting living beings with their energy and mind controlling them this way. After a certain development period the infected individual bursts into bright flames and a new ascended appears - this is called "Ascension". Some species worship them as they see Ascended as angelic beings and think that "ascension" is a good thing for them as it would bring them to some sort of next level (in reality they are completely destroyed, but the Ascended that emerged from them can inherit their memories and thus provide valuable information to his race). Normally their cities are built by a number of infected but not yet ascended individuals as well as some that willingly came to receive the "gift", that's why they still need food & food techs.



Affinity: Ascension - agents cost x% less and get a number of special missions:

• Ascension: Sacrifice the agent to remove 1 pop from the enemy city and receive an "Ascended" unit in one of your cities (added cost of the mission itself scales up with city pop).
• Possession: Can possess a unit in enemy garrison, cost of possession depends on industry cost of the unit. You gain full vision on army/garrison this unit belongs to and and "Awaken" option that can be activated either on the map or in combat with your forces. Awakening on the map initiates combat between the unit and the rest of the army. Awakening in combat makes this unit to defect to your side. If the awakened unit survives it turns into an "Ascended" unit in x turns. You can not awaken more than 1 unit in the army regardless of how many possessed units it contains (maybe can be improved to 2 at age 6).
  
  

Traits/techs:

• Secret covens - get 1 agent for free in a city when it's discovered. Enemies are unable to eradicate this agent in any way (but you can spend him).
• Worship - +1 influence/citizen
• Well of souls - killed "Ascended" units can be bought back retaining their xp.
• Purge - when enemy city is captured you can get an option of gaining full ownership immediately by halving the population. In this case you also gain 1 Ascended unit for free on capture.
  
  

Units:

• Initiates - (infantry) cannon fodder which is hard to kill. Represents the non-Ascended part of the society. Abilities: Feel no pain - Dies only when at 0 hp at the end of its turn.
• Ascended - (cavalry) fragile heavy hitter. Special abilities: immaterial (can pass through enemy units)
• Archon - (support) expensive ranged heavy hitter, fragile. Special abilities: immaterial, possession - killed units are brought back to life with x% hp to fight on your side. Since this is done fast and thus improperly they burn after combat without producing an Ascended.
  
  

I like a lot of these ideas, but I think they are adding too much complexity. A simple way to go would be to add a new hero type everyone can buy from the market with an espionage skill tree replacing the faction skill tree. I would even prefer two or three merc heroes with abilities like those of a spy, thief, raider or assassin.



Possible abilities:



1abc) Banditry: steal %x/y/z FIDSI from the region you are in.

2) Incite rebellion: lower happiness -20? of (other player's) region you are in.

3a) Stealth: enemy cannot see unit types in garrison.

3b) Stealth: enemy cannot see whose team the stack belongs to.

4) Sabotage: prevent construction in the city under siege.

5a) Spy: (as governor) gain vision in neighboring region cities.

5b) Spy: (as governor) see production/garrison in neighboring region cities.

6) Invisibility: Cannot be seen on map when army size is 2 or fewer (unless adjacent to army/city/watchtower). Cannot move while using ability (active ability like siege).



I could probably think of about 100 more possible abilities, but this is a nice simple way to put in some espionage. Other possibilities include adding a minor faction of thieves or whatnot, or adding 1 or two techs (for everyone) that do things like the above. Example: Spy Network: (city improvement) gives information/vision on neighboring regions.

Using influence is the way to go. Each city has a Defense rating for physical attacks, but they also need an Intrigue rating for spy defense. In Era one at the start of the game cities would be vulnerable but then there would have to be techs that establish a base rating. Lets say a Constable office, however other techs can lower this Intrigue rating, Like if you build roads in a region is will lower your spy defense, if you get that later tech that increases the number of trade routes it will lower your spy defense even more. Forcing you to spend influence to erode an enemies intrigue defense, and also spend influence to raise your own defense



Now we have to figure out how to attack another play via espionage



Information Gathering

1. FIDSI,

2. How they feel about other factions

3. what their regions look like.

4. what sort of troops they have garrisoned.

5. Discover who paid for the mercenaries that just attacked



Sabotage

1. Inciting Rebellion - in cities

2. Inciting Rebellion - Minor faction village, cause them to unpacify

3. Artificial shortages - Lower the rates that Luxury and Strategic Resources are gathered

4. Lower the Vision of watch towers



Counter intelligence:

1. give false information on the composition of an army

Influence used for information, and at a higher cost, debuff enemy empires. Science reduction, units weaker (poison the water well.) Things like that. Just my two cents.



All effects temporary, of course.

Some quick thoughts:



1. Espionage system shouldn't be "clunky." I don't want to have to have 10 different agents I'm moving all over the map, or assigning to different cities, etc., etc. Civ V's implementation of Espionage seemed uninspired to me. Since so much about EL is a unique twist on classic 4X, I hope they push Espionage in different directions.



2. I like the idea of linking Espionage to Influence. Given the preponderance of Influence empires often have in the mid-late game, this could also have the effect of making Espionage a mid/late-gate feature.



3. I don't really care about getting more information on competing empires (knowing that their cities are building, what they're currently researching, etc.). Again, that seems too Civ-uninspired. And dull.



4. Possibility: make Espionage a way to attack city and empire happiness.



5. Possibility: New hero units with an "Agent/Spy"-specific skill tree. If alone in an army, these heroes are undetectable on the map by opposing empires (however, Watchtowers/etc. could detect them). These Agents can sabotage strategic/luxury resource gatherers. Either destroy them outright (or if that's not powerful enough - too easily fixed), allow you to syphon off some of the resources into your own empire. These Agents can also reduce moral in enemy armies (assassination seems too extreme, but maybe not).

I think that espionage can be implemented at either an empire-wide level as a subsystem of Diplomacy (similar to the Drakken "Force X" abilities. Think "Steal Maps" to force a one-sided map exchange, or "infiltrate" to include vision) or as a localized system through agent units. Units are superior to agents sent into specific cities in this respect in my opinion as they would allow interaction with cities, minor faction villages, and armies without the need for a clunky interface, and may even be able to trigger all relevant abilities through an action button (or right-click pop-up similar to the one when moving an army "onto" a minor faction village).



With city and army sabotage, tech stealing, rebellion, and perhaps even the ability to bribe armies or villages, I believe an espionage-based faction could be pretty strong in the right hands.

Well there is at least one trait that decreases army costs (I forget what it's called), and there are two traits that increase caps (army cap increased by 1 or 2 - not specific to a faction but is a custom trait) (district level cap increased to 3 - native to Cultists). An espionage-focused faction needs multiple of these traits to be unique and play differently. A decreased agent cost and increased cap reinforce the idea of using agents - that is, using the strength of the faction. Existing factions do the same - push you in a particular direction, a particular focus or playstyle.

Tigregalis wrote:
I think 1) it's intuitive because Agents are a unit like any other, 2) enemy cities in fog of war are non-interactive, but if an Agent is in the vicinity, it has vision over it, 3) there's a greater turn investment involved (recruit an Agent on a city, x number of turns to travel to an enemy city to deploy there), 4) for an espionage-focused faction (other than reduced costs all around), it would allow their Agents to move, say, twice as fast as other Empires in order to deploy faster, and perhaps breaking the invisibility rule, to detect Agents from other Empires on the map within their vision radius

These are valid points, but I think most of these can be achieved without having agent units. E. g. 1) It heavily depends on what flavor do you want your agents to be. They can be either from your faction or someone you bribed/posessed/somehow control from the enemy faction. Buildable agents reflect only the 1st case. Agents you can buy are more abstract. 2) You probably can do this via empire screen where you have a list of all discovered enemy cities. 3) Depends on how you want to balance it and the agent could simply have certain "activation" delay. 4) You can equally well manipulate the stats of non unit agents. Interactions on the map could be interesting though and imo the main reason of considering "physical" agents.



In the end I think both approaches work, and I'm not sure which one I like more.



Perhaps it should be influence because there's not much use for influence later in the game otherwise. On the other hand, if you use dust, then you need to trade off espionage with other actions, plus you can have Agent upkeep like Hero/Army upkeep.

Tigregalis wrote:


I think feeding false information can be tied to the prerequisites for the other missions. You need to know what hero is governing a city to be able to assassinate it. You need to know an empire's research technologies in order to steal one. You need to know how much production of a resource a city has in order to sabotage it. And so on. If the information is false, other than misleading the would-be spy empire, it would result in mission failures - even though the empire had to commit the dust/influence to initiate the mission. However, even though it's cheaper, it's less reliable than simply intercepting a mission and stopping it, because the right information needs to be false for an applicable mission to fail, while putting your agent on Intercept will stop any mission from succeeding, while simply killing the enemy agent will stop anything.



As far as the UI goes for field operations, you could just re-use the normal city/empire UI. With an agent in place, you can select the enemy city, and each of the panes on the UI start out blank. Simply clicking on the relevant pane will prompt a screen to confirm the cost of the mission, and confirming it will reveal the relevant information for that pane. So if you click on the area with the garrison, it reveals the garrison. If you click on the area with the governor, it reveals the governor. If you click on the production screen, it reveals all of the resource production for that city. And so on. Having revealed a pane, you can now activate a mission applicable to it by clicking on the same pane. Revealed governor => assassinate governor. Revealed resource production => sabotage a specific resource.

Pretty cool idea with UI, the question remains how to manage "falsifying" the information. Giving the player an option of manually setting what to display it would be too cumbersome and time consuming. I think smth more simple is in order. (Like showing some illusionary garrisons, fake build queues and hiding real empire scores and showing reduced or increased ones). Guess it can be done by just setting an option "falsify information" which would give some mission failure chance (but that would be pretty obvious for the other player when it happens), I think this would be much more boring than actual mind games though. Another interesting option with falsification is that the owner of the uncovered agent will see all missions as successful (and continue spending resources on them) even though they failed.

Tigregalis wrote:


There are all kinds of things you can do with this. More abilities like applying a -100 Happiness debuff to a city, or causing minor faction villages on the city to rebel, meaning that (like converted villages) you must destroy them and then rebuild them.



With these rules, you can easily craft an espionage-focused faction that effectively bends or breaks many of these rules. Obviously, significantly reduced costs are a big one. The abilities of the agents are another (moving faster on the map, detecting other Agents on the map). Perhaps the ability to steal technology or dust stockpiles or destroy influence stockpiles (which are not City-based but Empire-based) should be a faction trait native to this faction - the ability to destroy city improvements could be another faction-specific ability. Perhaps caps can be increased for agents from this faction, such as the ability to engage in multiple sabotage/assassination missions in a single turn, or being able to deploy multiple Agents to a single city to achieve the same. There are many ways to make the espionage-focused faction viable this way.

Minor faction rebellion idea is pretty cool, definitely a must in my opinion. I think some modifiers to espionage abilities can definitely work as traits for espionage faction, however I think the affinity should do smth unique that other factions can not seeing that's what most affinities do (ability to detect agents where others can not counts, decreased agent cost or increased cap do not).

I think 1) it's intuitive because Agents are a unit like any other, 2) enemy cities in fog of war are non-interactive, but if an Agent is in the vicinity, it has vision over it, 3) there's a greater turn investment involved (recruit an Agent on a city, x number of turns to travel to an enemy city to deploy there), 4) for an espionage-focused faction (other than reduced costs all around), it would allow their Agents to move, say, twice as fast as other Empires in order to deploy faster, and perhaps breaking the invisibility rule, to detect Agents from other Empires on the map within their vision radius



Perhaps it should be influence because there's not much use for influence later in the game otherwise. On the other hand, if you use dust, then you need to trade off espionage with other actions, plus you can have Agent upkeep like Hero/Army upkeep.



I think feeding false information can be tied to the prerequisites for the other missions. You need to know what hero is governing a city to be able to assassinate it. You need to know an empire's research technologies in order to steal one. You need to know how much production of a resource a city has in order to sabotage it. And so on. If the information is false, other than misleading the would-be spy empire, it would result in mission failures - even though the empire had to commit the dust/influence to initiate the mission. However, even though it's cheaper, it's less reliable than simply intercepting a mission and stopping it, because the right information needs to be false for an applicable mission to fail, while putting your agent on Intercept will stop any mission from succeeding, while simply killing the enemy agent will stop anything.



As far as the UI goes for field operations, you could just re-use the normal city/empire UI. With an agent in place, you can select the enemy city, and each of the panes on the UI start out blank. Simply clicking on the relevant pane will prompt a screen to confirm the cost of the mission, and confirming it will reveal the relevant information for that pane. So if you click on the area with the garrison, it reveals the garrison. If you click on the area with the governor, it reveals the governor. If you click on the production screen, it reveals all of the resource production for that city. And so on. Having revealed a pane, you can now activate a mission applicable to it by clicking on the same pane. Revealed governor => assassinate governor. Revealed resource production => sabotage a specific resource.



There are all kinds of things you can do with this. More abilities like applying a -100 Happiness debuff to a city, or causing minor faction villages on the city to rebel, meaning that (like converted villages) you must destroy them and then rebuild them.



With these rules, you can easily craft an espionage-focused faction that effectively bends or breaks many of these rules. Obviously, significantly reduced costs are a big one. The abilities of the agents are another (moving faster on the map, detecting other Agents on the map). Perhaps the ability to steal technology or dust stockpiles or destroy influence stockpiles (which are not City-based but Empire-based) should be a faction trait native to this faction - the ability to destroy city improvements could be another faction-specific ability. Perhaps caps can be increased for agents from this faction, such as the ability to engage in multiple sabotage/assassination missions in a single turn, or being able to deploy multiple Agents to a single city to achieve the same. There are many ways to make the espionage-focused faction viable this way.

Tigregalis wrote:
I think espionage should be based on Agents. You start with training an Agent. Agents are invisible to other players on the map. Now, Agents can Infiltrate a city. From there, Agents can act on your behalf. Agents will be able to undertake Intelligence gathering missions, Sabotage missions, and Assassination missions. All missions cost varying degrees of Dust. Agents have a high dust upkeep, with additional agents costing more. Agents in the field are more expensive to maintain than Agents at home.



Intelligence gathering missions are low cost, and give you a snapshot of a City's production of resources, constructions, researches, governor, or garrison. You gain the city's vision automatically, however.



Sabotage missions are medium cost, and allow you to significantly hamper a city's production of one chosen resource for a fixed term, or a city's happiness level for a fixed term. A prerequisite to a Sabotage mission is to first engage in an intelligence gathering mission that is relevant to it. If you have an Agent in an enemy city during a siege, you can activate it to "open the gates", immediately dropping a city's siege points to zero.



Assassination missions are the most expensive, allowing you to kill a garrisoned unit(s), or governor-Hero (very expensive). A prerequisite to an Assassination mission is to first engage in an intelligence gathering mission that is relevant to it.



To counter Agents, you also need Agents stationed in your cities, but their counter-intelligence skills are not passive and automatic. You can activate your Agent(s) to discover any enemy Agents. However, to keep things interesting, discovering an enemy Agent does not automatically kill them, only places them under monitoring. Either you immediately capture and interrogate them, or you can opt to feed false information to them, or intercept and cancel out any sabotage/assassination attempts.

Seems that we agree on the agent mechanic, however what value do you think having them move on the map rather than buying them directly in the city will bring?



I suppose dust is a viable alternative to influence as the main espionage resource, need to think about pros/cons.



The "feeding false information" idea is actually pretty cool, however it's quite tricky to implement so it's simple and viable at the same time. I suppose a fake build queue can be added to cities (controllable by player) to be shown to players whose agents have been uncovered. Maybe you can also multiply or divide your economy/military/diplomacy score by a fixed amount.

I think espionage should be based on Agents. You start with training an Agent. Agents are invisible to other players on the map. Now, Agents can Infiltrate a city. From there, Agents can act on your behalf. Agents will be able to undertake Intelligence gathering missions, Sabotage missions, and Assassination missions. All missions cost varying degrees of Dust. Agents have a high dust upkeep, with additional agents costing more. Agents in the field are more expensive to maintain than Agents at home.



Intelligence gathering missions are low cost, and give you a snapshot of a City's production of resources, constructions, researches, governor, or garrison. You gain the city's vision automatically, however.



Sabotage missions are medium cost, and allow you to significantly hamper a city's production of one chosen resource for a fixed term, or a city's happiness level for a fixed term. A prerequisite to a Sabotage mission is to first engage in an intelligence gathering mission that is relevant to it. If you have an Agent in an enemy city during a siege, you can activate it to "open the gates", immediately dropping a city's siege points to zero.



Assassination missions are the most expensive, allowing you to kill a garrisoned unit(s), or governor-Hero (very expensive). A prerequisite to an Assassination mission is to first engage in an intelligence gathering mission that is relevant to it.



To counter Agents, you also need Agents stationed in your cities, but their counter-intelligence skills are not passive and automatic. You can activate your Agent(s) to discover any enemy Agents. However, to keep things interesting, discovering an enemy Agent does not automatically kill them, only places them under monitoring. Either you immediately capture and interrogate them, or you can opt to feed false information to them, or intercept and cancel out any sabotage/assassination attempts.

If you say so .

MANoob, could you add a link to this post in your signature? This way we get more views on this page and hopefully more feedback

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
You may want to change the name of your infantry unit, the cultists already have a unit called a fanatic.

Changed to initiates. Anyway these were just example mechanics for a spy-focused faction.

You may want to change the name of your infantry unit, the cultists already have a unit called a fanatic.

Since apparently espionage is one of mechanics planned for addition maybe we can gives the developers some ideas now rather than wish for them later. This definitely has a potential of becoming a very interesting mechanic with great depth and possibilities. Espionage faction ideas (or new espionage traits for existing ones) are also welcome.



(Gonna write down my own ideas a bit later)

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
How strong would a faction focused on espionage really be? Sure they would probably be able to sabotage the enemy, and gain valuable information on their enemies. But, this faction would be far behind the other factions in terms of everything except influence. With such a disadvantage, how could they stand up to enemy armies? What would their units be? How good would their traits unrelated to espionage be?

I think espionage faction should mostly rely on sabotaging enemies to soften them up before military conquest, although if some of the more powerful espionage options are introduced (like taking cities by initiating rebellions) it be quite powerful on its own. More cities = more resources = not behind. Some science leeching/tech stealing can be introduced as well. Plus, stalling enemy progress through sabotaging can bring them to your economy level or lower, that can be problematic to do against multiple opponents simultaneously however. Units and espionage traits are a matter of design.



Will post some example faction soon.

How strong would a faction focused on espionage really be? Sure they would probably be able to sabotage the enemy, and gain valuable information on their enemies. But, this faction would be far behind the other factions in terms of everything except influence. With such a disadvantage, how could they stand up to enemy armies? What would their units be? How good would their traits unrelated to espionage be?

T41 wrote:
Civ5 BNW had police stations and the like to add to the anti-spy rating. Happiness would also be a major factor to prevent espionage. If the people actually like being part of the empire they're obviously more willing to report suspicious activity. Propaganda could be a feature; telling the people to avoid strangers and the like could decrease trade bonuses but increase that anti espionage factor.

Yep, I agree with the idea, I already wrote here that happiness can be considered as an anti spy rating multiplied. Buildings like imperial kennels can contribute to the anti spy defence or new ones can be introduced.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
Paranoid empires don't make many friends, the trade bonuses should decrease for you and the factions trading with you. It should probably also generate a negative opinion of you for the AI.

Thinking of this, maybe "close borders" treaty can contribute to anti spy defence and maybe some new policies like "customs" with similar effects can be implemented on empire level.



Some ideas of how to integrate espionage in existing factions (just thematic ideas for now, not actual traits/techs):

• Wild Walkers - being sneaky type they fill in the "rogue" boots better than other factions. So they can their natural agility and camouflage skills and maybe use the Sharing to employ animals to spy for them.
• Broken Lords - I don't see BL as an espionage focused faction, but being immaterial beings of sorts maybe some of them can detach themselves from their physical shells (armour) to travel as ghosts. Don't know how lorebreaking that would be.
• Ardent Mages - well, magic explains everything, so invisibility/mind control/clairvoyance magic can work really well.
• Cultists - hidden covens and secret cults theme fits pretty well.
• Roving Clans - dust and bribery can go a long way. Maybe they can bribe citizens of other factions to spy for them.
• Necrophages - "Alien" comes to mind here. Maybe they can infiltrate cities through sewer systems and breed there, killing civilians and governors. I think "Pitiless" should disable some of the espionage options that require communication. Another option for them would be to inject their larva into living creatures and mind control them this way(but it can be an idea for a whole new espionage based faction as well).
• Vaulters - I see Vaulters more as anti-espionage than espionage faction. Their defensive tech could give extra spy defence as well.
• Drakken - maybe citizens of other factions would be willing to side with Drakkens just out of respect and belief that they are a force of good on Auriga.
  
  

Basic ideas for new espionage based factions:

• Shapeshifters
• Parasites
• Race that injects mind-controlling larva into its victims (so parasites, but only in larva form)
• Naturally stealthy races (maybe earth elemental type that can blend into stone/walls or invisible air creatures)
• Religious cults with hidden covens
• Mages with clairvoyance/farsight/remote mind control
• Monks/assassin guilds trained in ways of stealth
• Any combination of the above
  
  

Paranoid empires don't make many friends, the trade bonuses should decrease for you and the factions trading with you. It should probably also generate a negative opinion of you for the AI.