Espiocracy News

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.

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New iteration of this set of mechanics was published under: DD#41 Intelligence Programs

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As a primer for the summer and incoming dev diaries on wars, today we'll take a short and simple dive into spy equipment.

From time to time, I use the word "simulationist" to hand-wave certain mechanics. What does that exactly mean in Espiocracy? Usually this:



The entire game world in one chart. More than a mere classification exercise, this is the beating heart of simulationist implementation.

Spy gear is the perfect excuse to explain this approach in concrete terms. A lipstick gun is:

• an entity - can be selected, described, created, followed, be a subject of mental concept
  
• a physical object - occupies space, can be controlled and change hands, physically destructed
  
• a small item - can be used, moved, concealed, produced, convey intelligence, can malfunction
  
• a spy gear item - precise modes of use, production, etc
  

Such accumulation of properties and capabilities creates a game full of open-ended tools. In the previous 23 dev diaries, you may have spotted that we rarely talk about "rules", which is slightly unusual in the context of grand strategy tropes. This is the reason - the game is not exactly sculpted in rigid terms, no one sat down to write a rule that a lipstick gun can be destroyed in a nuclear explosion, it's just an emergent consequence of being a physical object and nukes destroying physical objects. So is the ability to steal your spy gear or said nuclear device!

[h2]Inventory[/h2]

Following this angle, the player essentially has an inventory of espionage equipment:

Transcript: Widget with spy gear abilities, queued spy gear, and available items.

Its contents scale from the smallest intelligence agencies (just one person) to the gargantuan likes of CIA and KGB. In general, there are three tiers of spy gear:

• Standard tools of trade such as handguns, one-time pads, subminiature cameras, listening devices
  
• Unusual gear such as concealed weapons or inflatable aircraft
  
• Large projects like U-2 or counterpart of Bletchley Park
  

Player's attention shifts with the scale. As a group of a few people, you will struggle to procure handguns but not as an established agency. On the other end of the spectrum, largest projects are available only to largest players. Between these two extremes, most players engage with the middle tier of spy gear - interesting enough and not yet prohibitively expensive - which expands player's agency one item at a time.

[h2]Crafting (kind of)[/h2]

Cutting-edge gadgets can be crafted at player's will by operatives, laboratories (including Soviet sharashkas), and contractors:

Transcript: Window with choice of a new gear to develop.

Availability depends on developed capabilities (agency-wide know-how), entity developing the gear (for instance strong local industry), scientific and technological paradigms, policies, willingness to acquire secrets (illegal experiments can enable or accelerate the process), and obviously budget. This is also one of the places where a realistic hero economy can enter the stage - employing a genius can be as impactful as building a large laboratory.

Majority of items do not have to be developed after player's orders - operatives invent devices on their own during operations. In this learning-by-doing mechanic, performing for instance many assassinations can bring in new weapons, built and refined by creative people trying to solve an issue.

[h2]Gallery of examples[/h2]

It's that simple! Focus on the grand scale naturally makes spy gear a non-core part of the game. Such an approach motivates the search for most interesting items out there - fun enough to be worth player's limited attention! Here are a few of the items to be featured in Espiocracy:

-> Single-shot pen gun

Credit: Ahmed Bin Mazhar


-> Umbrella with poison in the tip, also known as Bulgarian umbrella

Credit: ossr.ru

-> Explosive material concealed as a lump of coal

Credit: Nostrifikator


-> Cat with an eavesdropping device, also known as acoustic kitty

Credit: Spycraft (2009)


-> Radioactive equipment used for lock picking (one of the most insane espionage stories of the Cold War! described in an entire book full of interviews and photos from the most secret embassy rooms, unfortunately not available in English)

Credit: Łukasz Karolewski


-> Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or simply - nuclear backpack




[h2]Final remarks[/h2]

For now, we conclude the sequence of dev diaries about espionage. Next up, we will focus on various shades of conflicts, with the first coming on July 8th: "Asymmetric Conflicts I".

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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Banner image: AN/PEQ-1 SOFLAM, laser designator produced by Northrop Grumman and used in Afghanistan by American special forces.

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"My wife often said I mumble in my sleep, but that I never said anything clearly. Except one night, apparently, I sat up and shouted, ‘Those f*cking batteries!’" - CIA operative from Technical Services Division

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.

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There is a question that closely connects the imagination of both players and game designers: will a game feature X, Y, and Z? Naturally, games cannot represent all complexities of the world (even Dwarf Fortress does not have seemingly straightforward items like boats) - many of them have to be abstracted away to create an approximation, a model.

As mathematicians say, "all models are wrong but some are useful". In this context, useful should probably mean logical, interesting, challenging, and sometimes fun (sometimes - fun is not the only emotion evoked by good games). This is reflected by the hotly debated issue of mana points in grand strategy games. It is also an important culprit in the hunt for sins of espionage systems in strategy games, since most of them (with the significant exception of hooks in Crusader Kings 3) model espionage as knowledge tax where you just pay to uncover something. Paying taxes does not sound like interesting gameplay.

In an attempt to build a different espionage system, one founded on constructive actions and discrete results, Espiocracy models espionage as a world full of secrets and opportunities, which have their inherent dynamics, can be acquired and weaponized, and may even bite you back.

[h2]Acquiring Secrets[/h2]

Secrets are one of the many facets behind reactive world-building in the game. Murders happen, people can get away with them, but the act will stay in memory of the perpetrator as a secret. These memories can be elicited from friends, in drunken conversation, or during interrogation. Sometimes they expand to the larger world of witness accounts and hard evidence (photos, recordings, signed documents), giving modus operandi of removing witnesses and Hoover-style kompromat hoarding.

Transcript: Widget with Edvard Benes indicates 3 secrets associated with the actor.

Their inherent design is simulationist. Real world secrets are surprisingly granular and escape any wider generalization. There is an obvious angle of significant law breach - but what happens when the law is unjust or is not enforced or is dropped but the stigma remains? The UK prosecuted "homosexual acts" in the 50s and convicted GCHQ's Alan Turing to chemical castration but Guy Burgess, Soviet spy in MI5, who "made no attempt to conceal his homosexuality" did not have any issues. The law was dropped in 1967, but the British government in its system of "positive vetting" rejected homosexual candidates all the way to 1991. It is anything but simple!

The game tries to capture the most important parts of this granularity by making secrets local, personal, and situational. In the USSR believing in communism isn't a secret, in the USA it is. For one person, a love affair is dramatic secret, for another, it's a reason to boast.* Murders during the war are much less of a secret in contrast to a long period of peace. Above all, this leads to a continuous instead of binary (secret or non-secret) spectrum, which nicely plays into metaknowledge about secrets: falsifications, allegations, and different types of evidence weigh differently on the impact.

Speaking of which, secrets serve as full blackmail material - not only in the form of threat but also as a real tool with large impact. Leaking a secret to the press can destroy a career, purge an organization, or even topple governments. It's not limited to public scrutiny and can be used to open doors, for instance revealing a secret to the government can give you green light and special funding to harass the organization out of your country.

[h2]Protecting Secrets[/h2]

The Player, as an actor in the game, is also subject to the world of secrets. Since you are an intelligence agency, rules are made to be broken - by accepting the challenge stemming from a new secret in your backyard, the risk of blackmail, whistleblowers, and scandals.

Transcript: Starting a new operation will lead to the acquisition of a new secret "assassination of country leader".

Coming back to the introduction and murder example, people are often jokingly asking if you can kill your president in the game - that's the place where the system of secrets kicks in. Following the intelligence rule of need-to-know, this secret is privy only to operatives engaged in the operation. It arises on the first day of planning and evolves over time ("planned to kill the president" has an obviously different weight than "killed the president"). Successful assassination, even with the best cover in the world, can still leave traces of evidence for nosy reporters, detectives, and other players. Moreover, it remains in the memory of executing operatives. Should they stay in the conspiracy circle or be eliminated? If elimination goes partially wrong, won't some of them run for their lives and reveal the secret to the world? Maybe blaming everything on one scapegoat is enough? (Here's also where the stakes are spiced up by one of the game-over conditions: grand treason. If this particular secret is revealed, it can lead to complete dissolution of intelligence apparatus, loss of all operatives, and therefore end of the game.)

There are many less grave secrets: illegal wiretaps, enhanced interrogation, creative accounting, deals with gangs and terrorists, experiments on humans and animals (that comes down to mentioned local sensitivities; in the era of CIA's illegal experiments on humans in MKUltra, the idea of eavesdropping "Acoustic Kitty" was feared as too dirty for people concerned about animals), and so on. There are even rare secrets that can be brought upon the player by operatives, such as covering up a stupid crime committed by an operative too useful to be imprisoned.

[h2]Opportunities[/h2]

Following the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid!), Espiocracy features literal extensions of player agency: opportunities. Examples include the ability to intercept a person in transit, infiltrate an organization with an agent of ideal background, steal a piece of technology presented at an expo, funnel money from the government to an actor, and so on. They are essentially a discrete currency of the intelligence world, acquired during operations, bought from actors and other players, received from the government, or sometimes just randomly stumbled upon.

Transcript: "Funding" opportunity in the outliner. Tooltip describes its dynamics: can be funneled to Czech actors, cannot be passed to other agencies, expires when Benes is no longer country leader (possible in next elections, 5 months).

On the most basic level, they are as intuitive as the word "opportunity" can get (which is why this section is rather short). From the strategic point of view, they introduce one more layer of decisions that contributes to planning, preparation, cooperation, coordination, and a few other staples of decision making. Some of the opportunities get more complex dynamics, limiting their use to a particular time window, location, or a set of requirements (the last one can be broken by getting, for instance, the "creative accounting" secret). Other times, they function as a sincere favor system - after assisting the local mafia, they may return the favor in the form of opportunity. There are also cases where opportunities can make failure worthwhile by opening new opportunities. Rarely, some opportunities can feed into the paranoic side of the game, where a player can dangle manufactured opportunities to ambush other players.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

The order of espionage dev diaries has been switched, next up we'll have previously announced "Spy Gear" - on June 24th.

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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* Relevant anecdote: At the height of the Cold War, Eastern counterintelligence services tried to recruit the wife of a diplomat in a Western embassy. They found out about her love affair, bugged the house of her lover, and acquired photos of them. When they produced these photos during the recruitment pitch, the wife responded: "I look beautiful in these photos, show them to my husband, maybe he'll finally start paying attention to me"

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Photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

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"In chaos, Madame Ambassador, there is opportunity" - CIA officer Douglas London

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.

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Jason Schreier in "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" wrote:

People often wondered how CD Projekt Red sharpened the writing in Witcher games so well, especially when there was so much of it. The answer was simple. "I don’t think there is a single quest in The Witcher 3 which was written once, accepted, and then recorded," Szamałek said. "Everything was rewritten dozens of times"

Iteration is central for Espiocracy as well. Some mechanics went through 20+ cycles of implementation, playtesting, and redesign. One of them is core loop of the game, "contacts and targets", eight months ago described as an interface between player and actors (characters, organizations, populations). True to the usual disclaimer "subject to change" found at the end of dev diaries, today we will explore a new version of this system and swing by a few other changes. (Don't worry about reading the outdated 7th diary, the following description will be largely universal.)

Subject to change! Transcript: Screenshot of current main & empty view in the game with some agencies visible on the map.

[h2]Quintessential Why[/h2]

Core loop was italicized above for a reason. It's easy to define a core loop for entire genres - shooting or collecting experience points - but it gets tricky with 4X and grand strategy games. Which one of the ten concurrent loops is most important? Is there a unifying pattern? What should be the core loop of Espiocracy, if anything at all?

Perhaps one of the most universal suggestions was eloquently proposed by Troy Costisick. In an article for eXplorminate, he tried to stray away from the traditional definition of 4X games (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) and focused instead on the motivation: at the heart of these games, player unlocks hidden tools for victory. When you research technology, build a city, or create a unit, you get new tools to achieve your goals, which are, then, used to acquire even more new tools, and so on in the loop. This point of view is obviously not new, there are even entire books* which argue that game designers sculpt mainly in the medium of player agency (agency understood as the ability to do things, not an intelligence agency). Troy's observation, however, goes a step further: enjoyable strategy games put the player in the sculpting seat. You're not just reliving agency planned by the game developer, you're designing your own agency during a campaign.

This is the real core loop of Espiocracy: expansion of player's agency.

Following this perspective, contacts and targets evolved from the primary mode of interaction with actors into an intricate first half of interaction which can open up the second half, full of new strategic possibilities.

[h2]RICSE[/h2]

Transcript: Visible some actors in Poland, player selects recruitment option, after selection actors with impossible actions are greyed out, player clicks one of the recruitable actors, and then a context menu popups with four options: ego, money, coercion, and custom.

Now, the first half of interaction with actors relies on intelligence operations divided into five categories:

• Recruitment
  
• Infiltration
  
• Cooperation
  
• Subversion
  
• Elimination
  

These are further fleshed out by methods, customization, and progress that roughly follows 12th dev diary. In this iteration, operations - by blending them with contacts and targets - become a key to continuous interaction instead of a one-off affair (with the honorable exception of spectacular murders, a.k.a. elimination). How exactly?

[h2]Agency of Actors[/h2]

Transcript: Widget with an actor in the USSR which has the following available actions: meeting, support, subvert, change, write a book, tour the country, create private art piece for an actor.

Using operations, players expand their agency by tapping into the agency of actors. In less convoluted description, after recruiting a writer, you will have the ability to nudge them to write a specific book, abandon the manuscript of a book that would be detrimental to your ideology, develop a relationship using their reputation to spy on your behalf, and so on. Extrapolate that to all actors, types, situations, countries...

Actors become a battlefield. Intelligence agencies compete for control over pawns, attack assets known to be controlled by other players, generously support their favorites, create an environment in which some actors succeed whereas others fail, put the right pieces on the chessboard, sometimes to execute a machiavellian plan, and sometimes just to have backup options.

This is where differences between operations create emergent strategies far beyond original contacts and targets. Subversion includes also deception and threats that can push actors into different actions. Cooperation features plethora of deals, either with strings attached to particular decisions of the actor, or as a method to gain trust before future operations. Infiltration is an exciting case in which spies can become members of an organization or get closer to a character, and influence some of the decisions. Finally, recruitment is the pinnacle of control, where via a combination of MICE (money, ideology, coercion, ego) actor's decisions can be more or less fully controlled. Note that the same actor can face attempts at cooperation, infiltration, or even recruitment from multiple intelligence agencies, naturally allowing, i.a., double or even triple agents.

If you think hard about it, it's really "Inception" of agencies of agencies of agencies. What's the better place to pursue that kind of gameplay if not a game where you play as an intelligence agency?

[h2]Preparation[/h2]

If you are familiar with the original system of contacts and targets, it all should map fairly well except for the big-picture focus of espionage. Previously, you could target not only actors but also entire countries. Now, this part of preparation is integrated regular espionage: if player wants to expand in particular countries, they simply establish stations, covert cells, and purpose-specific structures (like smuggling lines and SIGINT arrays). This is also a partial answer to mistakes detected in playtests with old contacts and targets, where the optimal strategy was to contact everyone and to constantly shuffle targets. Currently, the simulationist principle takes over the wheel, and your operatives autonomously develop relationships with everyone and spy on all the actors likewise (with the ability to strategically nudge them, e.g. focus on terrorists).

Transcript: Fragment of country widget, with local intelligence value, parameters of local network, and buttons for establishing new structures.

Furthermore, regular espionage now also features literal spy networks, where operatives acquire assets in a particular country, and follow fairly realistic intelligence ladder: spotting candidates -> developing relationships with them -> getting them to divulge random intelligence (a.k.a. sources / informants) -> recruiting them for cooperation that can be directed or even used in operations (a.k.a. agents).

[h2]Other Significant Updates[/h2]

The following paragraphs are far from dev diary patch notes, just a few - in my opinion - interesting changes.

DD#6: ethnic groups are now represented as special population actors and the role of previous sectors is distributed between these special actors and SPI parameters. On the one hand, it frees up countries from boring repeatable actors (e.g. academia or industry in every country) and solves awkward detachment of propaganda from other operations, on the other hand it extends mechanics such as influence or actions to ethnic groups, facilitating for instance different levels of discrimination and the ability to create new actors.

Transcript: Small widget with summary of funding sources and ability to change spending.

DD#8: player's resources were spiced up and adjusted to different levels of gameplay, from a small organization to a governmental juggernaut. Money can be flexibly procured from many sources, not only from the national budget, but also from cooperation, actors who will attempt to control you with strings attached, or even illegal means. This is, then, translated to staff and special budget. Staff is the main currency that the player spends on spying, networks, and structures. It is now divided into three tiers: amateur, professional, and elite, providing classic strategic trade-off between 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck. Operational budget - as not exciting enough - was abstracted away. Black budget - as too gamey - was replaced partially by special budget (millions of dollars to be spent on propaganda radio stations, large bribes, and so on) and partially by opportunities (which will receive dev diary on their own).

DD#12: speaking of which, operations now have procedurally simulated endings, to be explored in a separate dev diary. Just to hint at a general idea and reasoning behind it, five rigid outcomes for operations turned out to be a little bit too stale for espionage-based gameplay, so now they can result in different details, consequences, fallout, evidence, counterintelligence possibilities, depending on the details of a simulated car chase, murder in the train, or a particularly heated... recruitment conversation.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

With this dev diary, we return for a while to everything espionage-related in Espiocracy. The next diary will be posted on June 10th: Spy Gear.

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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* See for instance, C. Thi Nguyen (2020) "Games: Agency As Art"

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"We provide for their needs, they provide for ours, it's the way of the world" - John le Carré

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.

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Jules Verne in "From the Earth to the Moon" describes how three people conquered the Moon by launching themselves from a cannon. Curiously enough, the French novel has been translated into English with large changes, entire passages rewritten, and "boring parts" removed. Verne complained that this barbarism painted him as a writer of fiction for children, despite his serious approach to the matter.

We could argue that the topic itself - space flights - already pushed him into the shelf of simple amusement. First a dream, later a reality, space was at best an entertainment and at worst, for some, fringe activity that distracts people from important Earthly issues. This attitude was captured perfectly at the peak of the Cold War by Sister Mary Jucunda in an accusatory letter sent to NASA:

"How could you suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth?"

Director of science at NASA responded in widely popularized "Why Explore Space?" which can be distilled to the following line:

"I believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help"

The letter printed in Marshall Space Flight Center journal.

Ironically, just around this exchange, the budget of NASA was dramatically slashed by billions of dollars, lunar program Apollo came to a halt, and the project mentioned here (manned landing on Mars) is currently scheduled for 2033, sixty-six years after the letters. In the meanwhile, World Food Conferences, UN FAO, The Hunger Project, and others started to spend billions of dollars on the issue of starvation.

Regardless of whether Sister Jucunda was morally right, she correctly predicted the future, grasping the age-old collective thinking. Following the words of Joseph Conrad, Espiocracy will "attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe" by featuring the space race not as just as a few checkboxes to tick, but as a conflict between nations, peoples, and lines of thinking.

[h2]The Value of Space[/h2]

On the national stage of the Cold War, countries pursued space conquest to prove their ideological and economic superiority over competitors. There are no gamified prestige points - the main reward lies in spreading the ideology, as was the historical case of the Soviet-American race. In gameplay terms, it creates very concrete motivation for participation in the space race, where achieving one of the firsts (satellite, man in space, man on the Moon, and so on) achieves more than any propaganda campaign could ever do, and provides heaps of material for actual propaganda activities, such as the USSR parading Gagarin around the world (except for the USA which deliberately barred Yuri from entering).

Soviet cosmonauts in a TV studio, 1963. Attribution: RIA Novosti archive, image #879591 / Khalip / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Pursuing a space program after the initial push can still yield limited political gains. The first satellite in South America or the second in Africa can move regional imagination. Fulfilled promise of sending a man into space, even if it's the tenth nation to do so in the world, can significantly influence incoming elections. At the same time, these projects have to be weighed against real and imagined opportunity costs - in some countries, spending money on space initiatives can backfire.

Beyond pure politics, the space race expands player's agency, provides more options, opportunities, and tools. It is no coincidence that "Why Explore Space?" focused on space-borne inventions broadening the toolset used in programs attempting to solve the issue of poverty.

[h2]Agency expansion[/h2]

Continuing political options, a successful space program in the game opens avenues of cooperation with other countries: sending their satellites and astronauts to bolster relations, establishing joint programs, providing valuable data from Earth-facing satellites, and so on.

At the same time, space is an important step forward for many technologies of the era such as TV, radio communication, and positioning systems. Most importantly from our perspective, it hands the player a new important tool - spy satellites! Real-world history counts at least 18 satellites launched by the CIA over two years (1959-60) despite fledgling space engineering. They truly were at a forefront of technological espionage.

KH-4B Corona, satellite produced and operated by CIA between 1967 and 1972.

In the game, satellites directly collect a wealth of intelligence:

• Precise mapping
  
• Early warning of a nuclear strike, monitoring of nuclear tests
  
• Military units and bases, including missiles
  
• Activity of strategic factories
  
• Deployed air-defense measures
  
• Interception of communication
  

At the moment, direct interaction of the player with the manned space program is limited to a healthy dose of events and some juicy event chains (including one with a spy sent into space). In the future, they may be a scene for espionage operations - on a space station or a Moonbase, closer to Bond movies than the history. Speaking of which...

[h2]Plausible Points of Divergence[/h2]

The space race is a great place to ask a few interesting "what if" questions in Espiocracy.

Stemming from the plethora of mechanics explored in the previous dev diary, pace and participants will largely depend on actors (including Operation Paperclip) and paradigms (mainly around missiles and electronics). The progress relied on many tests and disasters, represented here to punctuate the race with unpredictability. Some of them will have international consequences, providing additional challenges during the campaign - such as the case of Kosmos 954, a Soviet satellite with a nuclear reactor onboard, which disintegrated over Canada. Other failures, paradoxically, will open up new opportunities - for instance, the CIA planned to blame the jamming of Cuban revolutionaries for (unrealized) death of the first American astronaut (with a bit of imagination, space-based casus belli right there!).

Transcript: Newspaper header with a photo of Soviet nuclear-powered Kosmos spy satellite and title: "Could spread destruction, radioactivity if it hits a populated area. Soviet satellite out of control." Note, this is about Kosmos 1402, a few years later after Kosmos 954.

One particularly significant "what if" is the eventual militarization of space. Contrary to almost all the science-fiction, humankind did not export warfare into space, and we know only of a single space-borne weapon test (R-23 autocannon attached to Salyut 3 in 1975). However, players should be able to take a different path in Espiocracy. Instead of signing peaceful Outer Space Treaty in 1967, the limited development of space-to-space weapons is a somewhat neglected yet plausible alternate history. This can further escalate beyond space-faring nations if the weapons in space - nuclear bombs, god rods, Strategic Defense Initiative - start facing Earth.

God rods, kinetic weapons capable of destroying nuclear bunkers.

Second important "what if" comes back to the introduction. What if we did not stop on Apollo 17? The world of Moon bases, landings on Mars, and spaceships orbiting Venus was in the early stages of the space race presumed to happen. By capturing the tension between people with a desire and disregard for space conquest, Espiocracy will also feature the world in which the first group leads superpowers away from The Hunger Project, to continue the exploration of space.

Early proposal of Soviet lunar base found by wonderful Anatoly Zak, a legend in space history circles: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/lunar_base.html

Smaller "what if" is also dedicated to the commercialization and internationalization. The space industry is currently worth 420 billion dollars, ten times more than the movie industry which is rather generously represented in the game (directors, actors, Hollywood as a special sector). Espiocracy will simulate that what-if with space-focused companies, famous engineers, initiatives such as the European Space Agency, and cooperation leading to the International Space Station - all of which could take different paths, creating a slightly different world in every campaign, opening strategic opportunities such as SpaceX reaching for space in player's country.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

Sorry for the lack of screenshots, the game undergoes important changes. The next dev diary should make up for it - we will talk about the new iteration of Contacts & Targets on May 27th.

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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"Oh Little Sputnik, flying high / With made-in Moscow beep / You tell the world it’s a Commie sky / And Uncle Sam’s asleep" - G. Mennen Williams, Governor of Michigan

Espiocracy was announced to be published by Hooded Horse and a new trailer was shown in the Hooded Horse Publisher Showcase at PAX East 2022. The publisher showcase revealed new content and announcements across Hooded Horse’s strategy games.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Espiocracy can be wishlisted below:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/

The trailers for Espiocracy and the other games featured in the showcase can be found at the Hooded Horse Publisher Page on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/HoodedHorse