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Soren Johnson returns to talk spies, espionage, and covert action with Rob and Julian. They then subject espionage mechanics to forty minutes of interrogation, torture, and unkind words. Then they remember the one game they’ve played that has spies and espionage that they don’t hate. Suspiciously, Rob’s microphone fails midway through the show. Happenstance or sabotage from an enemy agent?

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As the forum's resident Civ5 apologist, I feel obligated to disagree with Rob's dislike of the G&K spy system. I think the Civ AI plans its wars several turns ahead of declaring war. In fact, this happened in Civ 4, and you could find out when they were making war plans by finding a particular response to mousing over one of the diplomatic options. (They said something like "we are busy right now" which always meant that they were getting geared up for war). I think the Civ 5 spy mechanic simply makes that explicit to you, telling you that a particular AI is actually in the process of planning a particular war. I've seen the invasion fleets en route after learning about these sneak attacks. And, as they always have, the AI has retained the option of pulling back from the brink if they don't think it's going to work. Again, I've seen those same invasion fleets mill around for a while before simply turning and heading home.

In sum, I think it's a cool little mechanic, which I suspect simply takes advantage of the existing AI routines.

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In sum, I think it's a cool little mechanic, which I suspect simply takes advantage of the existing AI routines.

Yeah, I just played a game of Civ IV and noticed the last power with a different religion on my continent responding really reactively to my troop movements along their border. It's a great step further along those lines to have the game put that into the limelight, especially if it's better than the blunt "I know what you're doing, stop planning an attack" messages that pop up in Gal Civ II.

I do agree with the podcast crew though, that espionage works best in a game that has mechanics specifically designed to interact with it. Soren suggests an event system, and the plotting in Crusader Kings II is a good attempt along those lines.

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A few scattered thoughts:

I think hidden-role games like Battlestar Galactica do the "spies, espionage, and covert action" theme right, if you broaden the category just a bit. There is even a sub genre of Starcraft Custom maps that work a bit like this: where group of players uses both in game mechanics, as well as regular text based diplomacy, to ferret out the traitor(s) (who usually have huge in game advantages, but they can't use them without being careful to give away that they have them...)

Similary, in WW2, the allies had broken the German codes, but they had to figure out how to act on that knowledge without revealing this knowledge. I think there's room for some great game mechanics along those lines.

Another game that had a really interesting take on espionage is the ill-regarded Game of Thrones strategy game. The single player in that game in crap, but in multiplayer, it has some pretty great stuff. Just a couple of examples:

Spies can take over cities and castles without the opponent realizing they have been taken over. They give you half-income, but if War is declared, the opponent realizes they have been taken over and you get full control. You could have a unit producing structure infiltrated, so that it produces double agents that you actually control but your opponent thinks he does (until it's too late!). All kinds of crazy stuff.

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I thought of a few different things related to this topic before listening:

1) One way to do espionage is to make it an extra resource that you acquire, but keep it self contained. You can spend it on certain actions, such as sabotage, scouting, stealing tech, stealing resources, or slowing down enemy troops. Then the enemy can spend a certain amount of resources to block your espionage attempt, possibly with a penalty (it costs 150 points to negate an attack worth 100 points). While this adds strategy, since you can put in lots of cool ways to gain the espionage points, and it is also really simple and easy to understand, it seems pretty boring overall. I think its a dead end to go down this route.

2) A common problem with espionage is that its chance based. I think this is fairly accurate to real life, many times plots are uncovered by accident or agents make silly mistakes and expose themselves. The problem is that spending resources to get a mere "die roll" that has a chance to do something cool is unsatisfying. In the Total War series, assassins have a small chance to kill enemy generals. This is very useful when it works, but that is unlikely. It bogs down the game training these units, moving them around, and then repeatedly failing to accomplish much.

3) A way to integrate espionage into existing game mechanics might be to simply combine it with units. So you could have a saboteur unit that has a combat ability that does extra damage to defensive buildings, but can also be used on the strategic map to destroy part of an enemy city before you attack. This feels more like special abilities for units than espionage, but it would probably flow better than having dedicated espionage units.

4) My best idea, which was mentioned in the podcast, was to have a tech tree for espionage. Have it so you generate espionage from buildings, diplomacy, and researching special technology. Ideally you would choose between developing other resources and espionage. The way you spend it is kind of special, since there is a tree of options that branch out. First you might start by spying on their economy. Then maybe you could decide to start sabotaging their supply lines, stealing resources, or mapping out their troop movements. As you go further down it requires more and more resources invested. Then the enemy player could spend resources on his defense tree in espionage. This would slow down the progress of your spies and allow him to reverse to the effects if he outspends you. This kind of tree for espionage would only work if you could design interesting choices and trade offs all the way through, and have good interactions with all the main aspects of gameplay without disrupting the game flow. My initial impression was that lots of passive bonuses/penalties and a few abilities with cool downs on how often you can use them. Or maybe some parts of the tech tree are lost when you use them and you have to buy them again.

I think there is an opportunity to add cool decisions to make, such as spending money on secret police for defense or spreading propaganda to encourage citizens to turn in traitors. If its a complex trade off between military strength, citizen happiness, and keeping state secrets, it could be an interesting mechanic.

In the end I think visibility is a key aspect, as mentioned in the podcast. If you can see all the espionage that happens against you, it can be very annoying for the human players. It feels like a war of attrition or perhaps whack a mole, especially when its random. I am curious if it would be possible to lie to the player about his economy. Generally you can see and calculate every penny that passes through your kingdom, so if it doesn't add up it should be immediately obvious. Then again, if the UI is a little cluttered it may be easy to overlook the fact that you are losing out on 10% of your gold production.

What do you guys think, should a game ever hide the fact that someone is stealing from you, should they allow you to figure it out if you are paying attention to details, or should they make it very clear and obvious?

Random events work for this purpose, but they are fairly limited in occurrence. Usually they only happen once every 5-10 turns. If you had a random event every turn because 5 AI players were messing with you, wouldn't it be overkill? I suppose it could be balanced out, and it could prevent players from ganging up on one player, but I'm not sure it is the most elegant solution.

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The gathering and obstruction of information accounts for most of the strategy in RTS games. It's not very apparent as a mechanic, but it's the deciding factor in games when the micromanagement skills are about even. Fog of war works great, when it's not impenetrable like in a typical TBS.

Espionage is probably the only method for turn-based games to incorporate those mechanics because their design tends to make scouting impossible. They are usually so defensive in nature, and don't really have the concept of a fast unit being able to live long enough to see what's going on. They tend to hide how workers are distributed, what cards a player has, what's inside cities, and other customizations.

I think it could be done well if the game was designed for it instead of tacking it on at the end and trying to flesh it out by tacking on things like theft and sabotage.

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Oh, speaking of garnering information in RTS games, I think my biggest gripe about Wargame: European Escalation compared to RUSE is exactly how they've built upon the scouting model.

In RUSE, units have a line-of-sight circumference delineated by a white ring around a unit. The ring can be blocked or deformed by forests, buildings, or other terrain, but any unit within it will be revealed, unless it's infantry, which can hide in certain types of terrain and are only detectable there by special scouting units. Wargame complicates this unnecessarily by removing the ring and replacing it with a nebulous "optics" rating that goes from "bad" to "excellent". All units can hide now, based on their size and stealth ratings, which are anything but intuitive at first glance.

Basically, it takes a well-abstracted system and dumps a massive amount of granularity into it in the name of theme. That's all well and good, but when it boils down to me parking a helicopter over a forested choke point while never being sure if its stats just aren't good enough to find anything... I don't know, I feel less like I'm fighting the enemy and more like I'm fighting the game. I feel like unnecessary detail added for atmosphere are behind a lot of the more bothersome implementations of espionage systems, especially ones with die rolls.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I love Wargame. I can't stop playing it. RUSE just did a few things better.

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I just want to recommend Birth of the Federation by Microprose back in the day.

It implemented a system I think they described in the podcast. You created a certain amount of intel points on the map, then on the intelligence screen you invested it into counter espionage and the different factions. You could split the emphasis between intel and sabotage. Then each turn ending dependent upon the empires relative espionage/counter espionage amounts random events would occur. So you never spent the points, it was just an economic investment.

So some events would be ship X damaged/destroyed, shipyards sabotaged, power plants etc. Intel would reveal for 1 turn the location of enemy units, or planets etc. It would also give vague messages about fleets being amassed and production reports on other empires.

I felt it worked very well as it was an economic investment rather than units or coin tosses.

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Great episode.

I feel like a retooling of the Twilight Struggle mechanics could potentially be quite effective for a spy or espionage game. The competition for zones of influence seems like the right idea for what an intelligence agency is trying to accomplish.

As to how a spy mechanic might be better suited for a 4X game? I'm also not sure it could work. But if a 4X game has to have spies, I think I would prefer something that just makes diplomacy more interesting, like you could use spies to learn about various trade or military agreements, etc. I agree with the panel that espionage and counter-espionage tends to feel pretty tedious.

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I don't remember who said it during the episode, but they mentioned becoming good at a game by watching others. Doesn't this take much of the fun out of the game? For me a lot of the fun is figuring out how to win. I remember when I played Age of Empires at work, I used to win 75% of the games we played. Then a new guy joined us and clobbered me. He offered to tell us what he did, but I didn't want to know. Much more fun trying to figure it out.

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In sum, I think it's a cool little mechanic, which I suspect simply takes advantage of the existing AI routines.

I just had a chance to confirm this today. I went to the Ottomans to ask if they were game for invading Songhai. It turns out they were, but wanted 10 turns to prepare. A few turns later one of my spies reported to me that the Ottomans were secretly planning to invade Songhai (I guess we don't keep our field agents informed about these things?). A couple turns after that, I captured Egypt's capital and the Ottomans denounced me. They never came back to start the invasion. So in sum: I get a totally accurate report that the Ottomans are planning to invade Songhai, but those plans end up getting canceled. There's no way to guarantee that every single report is accurate, but some are. Of course, if they're all accurate, it does make it pretty clear that the AI just sometimes doesn't know what it's doing.

I will say this in favor of Civ 5's espionage system: it takes such little effort and thought to interact with it that it never interferes with my enjoyment of the game.

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random brainstorming about possible ways spies could be used (I don't necessarily think all of these are good ideas, but just random things I've thought about since the podcast):

1) diplomatic

- this would be more meaniningful if countries/civs/empires could have, for instance, secret alliances

- an interesting thing might be when trading with a civ and you ask "what would it take to make this work" maybe there is some more beneficial-for-you trade that the AI would relunctantly agree to that would be revealed by good intel.

- spies could allow a general diplomatic bonus to persuading a civ to do something they otherwise might not be inclined to (declaration of peace/war/alliance/defensive pact/trade/etc.). I'm putting it out there, but I feel this one is dubious because it's already abstracted into the mechanic of giving cash gifts to a civ. (i.e. it would represent bribing or blackmailing key individuals, but net effect is same spend money->easier to get civ to agree to things)

2) production

- not sure how beneficial gathering intel about this really is, but just mentioning it since it's in the current implementation

- on the flip side, the ability to slow production via sabotage could be interesting

3) technological

- instead of stealing a tech outright, maybe it gives you research points towards techs for as long as you are able to keep a espionage asset in place and undetected? also, if you are both actively researching the same tech and they are further along than you are, you should be able to get this bonus too even if it is a tech they have not completed yet.

- sabotage again to slow the rate of another civ's tech progress?

4) troop position/movement

- supplanted by satellites/sigint late game probably, but earlier and in a large enough map the limited unit sight range could make piercing fog of war more useful. The abstraction here is not that your spy would actually be in place watching the troops move (which would be better represented by some kind of stealthy scout/recon unit anyways), but that you have someone in position to see/hear orders being given.

- maybe spies have the capability to feed disinformation, leading to RUSE-like tricks when the other civ is observing your activity?

5) assassination

- maybe spies could sneak about undetected and assassinate great people? maybe potential for some kind of "martyrdom" side effect in the aftermath though?

---

tangentially (i.e. not really related to espionage directly), I think it might be interesting if there were a diplomatic option to say "don't build this/develop this tech for x turns and we'll give you x gold/whatever" In real-life terms, I'm thinking of nuclear tech, of course, but in game terms this could be neat for the world wonder thingies that only one civ can have.

edit: ooh...I just thought about a neat way the kinds of systems listed above could interact.

say civ A has a secret deal with civ B (I give you x gold per turn for 20 turns if you do not research nukes).

your spies could discover this agreement

they could then discover that civ B is NOT secretly researching nukes, but could somehow plant evidence that they ARE and "leak" that to A

...shenanigans ensue!

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Sorry for the lateness, I'm behind on my episodes--I enjoyed the discussion! Some ideas/remarks:

-- Territory-based intelligence: One thing I don't think I've seen attempted is the idea of intelligence/espionage based on territory. Kind of the idea that cities would be hubs of espionage, and that a player could direct resources toward that city. The city would then ooze intelligence/espionage capability out over the countryside--in fact a SimCity-esque "heatmap" could show how a player's intelligence/espionage capability is spreading out. Beyond the Sword did this a little, but there's room for more exploration.

This applies in the player's own territory too, and should probably stay in effect if a city is captured. If a player owns Paris and it's taken over, the player would still have great intel on what the city is producing & where the nearby enemy units are, and espionage actions should be easier to perform at first.

-- Embassies/consulates: How about being able to build a consulate/embassy in an opponent's city? That's part of how it works in real life in peacetime: a country sends their own people over and they interact with the local population, building bridges, forging ties...and recruiting assets. Often embassies are invisible in games...they could be buildable structures. Of course come wartime they get kicked out, but that territorial influence/intel would remain for a while, as sympathetic assets continue to perform.

-- Confidence levels: In real life, I suspect spy folks gauge their intel/likelihoods based on a "confidence level", as in "this informant usually gets it right, I've got high confidence in his info" or "we don't have anyone on the ground in the area, I've got low confidence that we can pull off this action". I'd be more inclined to spend those espionage resources if I knew ahead of time that an action was likely/unlikely to succeed. Even just low/med/high would worthwhile.

-- Civics matter: If an opponent has vastly different government/civics than the player, it should be harder to perform espionage. This is the "you aren't like us" factor, where it's hard to recruit assets if the opponent's beliefs are drastically different. Having 4/5 civics identical for 10 turns straight should make for easier espionage than 0/5. Taking into account the territory nationality (i.e. 10% Aztec) would make sense, as would the happiness of the population. A city having "We Love the King" parties should be a bear to infiltrate.

-- Notion of "something here": A couple of games, like Combat Mission and Silent Storm, have that way of reporting intel where your units know there are unit(s) in a location, but don't know the details yet. In most games, a player can either see a unit or they can't...it would be interesting for a player to get reports through the fog of war on "big mass of units" from their intel sources.

BTW, one board game that deals with espionage, if simply as a theme: CIA vs. KGB. It's all about deducing what your opponent will do next, and countering it.

Thanks for reading!

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