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.



Welcome to the series of technical developer diaries about Espiocracy. We begin with user (player) experience: interactions, rhythm, and cognitive optimizations of the game.

(Three acronyms of the day: LMB - left mouse button, RMB - right mouse button, MMB - middle mouse button.)

[h2]Time Flow[/h2]

Espiocracy is a real-time strategy game with pause. There are three types of pauses: player's, autopauses, and forced pauses. It's similar to most recent grand strategy games (eg. you can double pause after getting an autopause) but the game very clearly communicates the state of pauses:



After unpausing, time flows in ticks, where one tick equals one day in the game (usually, there are exceptions, for instance during a nuclear war one tick equals one minute). Following other games in the genre, there are five speeds which you can set at the top of the screen, by pressing keys 1 to 5, or by pressing +/-. There a few improvements to this classic formula.

Speeds are configurable:



There is configurable autoslowdown for significant events, for instance the game can automatically pick speed 1 when your country is invaded:



You can progress precisely one tick forward by pressing a hotkey:



You can run the game until specific in-game date and/or real-life hour...



...or set a labeled alarm for dates or hours:



These improvements are low-hanging fruit that takes almost no development time but can be very useful in certain situations. If you have any further suggestions (also about other sections of this diary), let us know!

[h2]Notifications[/h2]

When you analyze from first principles the titular experience of playing a grand strategy game, you may recognize that it differs from 95% of UI/UX as we know it. Unlike an app, a website, a device with a screen, or even most games, core experience does not rely on clicking a button and getting feedback. Instead, it's formed largely, aggressively, and in real time (!) by other countries, entities, units, events, parameters, chains of causes-effects, and so on.

The first tool to handle this unusual situation is a robust system of notifications. The game monitors many values, states, actions, and events around the world to serve most relevant notifications. Currently there are 122 possible notifications in the game (and this number will certainly grow).



There are six types of notifications, coded by different shape, color, and sound:

• Critical (example: "our operative has been arrested")
  
• Deteriorating ("our State Power Index has decreased")
  
• Possible ("new propagandable event in our range")
  
• Change in the world ("new actor in a monitored country")
  
• Commentary ("government decided on the next paradigm")
  
• Significant gain ("an officer defected to our embassy")
  

Moreover, notifications are coded by position on the screen: left-hand side of the top bar is related to the wider world, while right-hand side is related to player's intelligence community. This left-right distinction is followed by other elements of the interface.

Every notification has a tooltip. On LMB click, you can open relevant element of interface with more details. MMB click dismisses the notification. RMB opens quick configuration menu:



Autopauses, as critical element of managing the rhythm of the game, are fully configurable:



Some notifications lead to an interface in the center of the screen (eg. event popup) or even to a different full screen (eg. regular report on the state of the intelligence community). You can configure whether such notifications automatically open relevant interface, as visible on the screenshot above, for instance to recreate classic experience of regularly getting event popups.

Between always pop up and never pop up, there is also "dynamic" setting that determines whether the game can automatically open the popup in a non-disturbing way (eg. a popup will be minimized if you are currently clicking on the map).

Beyond notifications, we are prototyping many other approaches, inspired by design also dealing with aggressive real-time situation (aviation, nuclear plants, command centers...): indicators, digital gauges, lights-out mode, HUDs, tiered alert systems etc. They are not ready yet and they will probably receive a separate dev diary in the future.

[h2]Browsing[/h2]

For exploring the wide world of the game (150-200 countries, 1700-2500 actors, 150 scientific and technological paradigms, dozen of incoming political changes at any point, and so on), Espiocracy takes inspiration from the tool that for the past two decades served as mankind's window into the world: a web browser.

The game features two browsers: left-hand side for the world, right-hand side for internal management (following screen division described above).



They implement basic browsing features:

• Hyperlinks (eg. you can click on any mention of communism, be that a word or an icon, to open the page dedicated to state of communism in game world)
  
• Going back or forward, incl. history of visited pages (eg. you can RMB on "go back" button to pull up context menu with 10 last visited pages and then return to any of them with the next click)
  
• Bookmarks (eg. you can star any page and then quickly return to it from bookmark list, outliner, and palette describe below)
  
• While there is no refresh button because every page autorefreshes on new tick, there is an opposite button: autopause on this page (eg. you can press it on "spies" page so that every time you open this page, the game autopauses until you exit the page)
  

As a variation on web browser address/search bar, browsers in the game have page/command palette:



You can type in the name of any entity, any kind of page, or even particular commands to quickly access them. You can also search through hundreds of bookmarks by preceding the input with asterisk (*). The palette can be used at the top of the browser or pulled up detached by pressing a hotkey.

There is also secondary bar, in a dropdown form and hooked to two hotkeys, that groups similar entities and allows you to quickly traverse for through lists of ideologies, countries, actors etc:

Yes, it's a photo. I could not make a screenshot of this dropdown because, due to a bizzarre bug that I didn't bugfix yet, dropdowns disappear when any screenshotting tool makes a screenshot.

As a variation on web browser tabs, you can open multiple browsers side-by-side by clicking MMB (or RMB -> context menu -> new browser) on any hyperlink:


(Mockup)

Moreover, full pages from the browser can be displayed on hover (without a click) in certain interfaces, allowing lightning-fast exploration.

Naturally, the browser is also integrated with the map. For instance, pages characterizing a property of an entity (eg. state of science in technology in particular country) can react to clicks on the map (eg. you can click around the map to quickly survey state of science and technology in any country), while other pages have (optional) heatmaps:



[h2]Rich Tooltips[/h2]

Following standards of grand strategy genre, (almost) all buttons and values produce tooltips on hover.



Tooltips are used to show calculations, subcomponents, predictions, costs, advice, and other details. They are usually attached to the cursor, with notable exceptions such as the financial prediction tooltip that appears whenever you are about to spend money:



On longer hover (or through a hotkey or MMB), the tooltip can be locked in place, and then it no longer follows the cursor - you can move it over words underscored inside the tooltip to see another (nested) tooltip...



...multiple times:



As a rule, nesting is used only for definitions and hyperlinks to entities - to avoid tooltips that hide data behind multiple layers of this fiddly interface, which happens in some games using tooltip nesting. If any data is pushed to a tooltip, it is pushed in full extent to the first tooltip.

[h2]Accessibility[/h2]

With accessibility, actions speak louder than words. Current list of options includes:

• Full key remapping
  
• Changing red-green (positive-negative) color scheme into yellow-red, blue-red, or any other pair
  
• Heatmaps with configurable color schemes
  
• Two additional map backgrounds: contrastive non-terrain map, global night dark map
  
• Configurable transparency of map coloring and map labels
  
• Increasing text size
  
• Scaling up button sizes
  
• Option to increase brightness of text and icons
  
• Disabling/enabling outlines, animations, flashes, popups, tooltips
  
• Enlarging the cursor
  
• Hotkeys to permanently lock/unlock tooltips (additional deep lock, without worrying about moving the cursor precisely)
  
• Accommodation for lack of MMB (eg. for people playing on a laptop)
  
• Relaxed mode (more resources, slower pace, less aggressive challenges)
  
• Muting psychological triggers (eg. disabling all gunshot and explosion sounds)
  

The list is subject to change (it may grow).

[h2]Tutorial UX[/h2]



Quick glimpse at tutorial UX: it's fully guided, three-tiered (missions -> objectives -> steps), with cheatsheets and storylines. It begins with colorless map and nothing else. Gameplay and corresponding interfaces are introduced one by one, hence the emptiness above. While the tutorial tries to be lively and interaction-focused, it also provides optional walls of relevant text for people who like reading (hey, I'm looking at you, from the end of 66th dev diary!).



[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

The next dev diary will be posted on the first Friday of the next month: October 3rd.

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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"It was all Alice-in-Wonderland stuff, an almost unfathomable million lines of computer software code" - General George Lee Butler about software for preparing nuclear plans

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.



Video games have complex relationship with realism. In their evolution from arcade machines in 1970s to 100GB and 100h experiences in 2020s, games cycled between more realistic and less realistic designs (eg. sim-series in the 90s and early 2000s -> arcade-ish story-ish adventures of 2000s and early 2010s -> revival of simulator genre in 2010s; it also extends to other aspects, for instance cycles of more and less realistic graphics).

In a way, development of Espiocracy went through such (miniaturized) cycle. There were months of developing mechanics rooted in realism and there were months of baking strategy-focused fun-trumps-everything mechanics. I hope that it will amount to an interesting mix. Today's topic of the dev diary is the prime example of such mix: spies in the game named Espiocracy, naturally, had to go through many iterations. It's no coincidence that they had to wait until 65th diary.

What is a spy, anyway?

• commonly: any person engaged in espionage activities
  
• professionally: a person betraying their country / colleagues / etc
  
• the game sticks to the professional definition but to avoid confusion (also in translations!), Espiocracy generally uses more precise terms than ambiguous "spies"
  

In other words, this dev diary does not describe your standard CIA or KGB employees (in the game they are always referred to as "officers"). Instead, we will be focusing on people contacted, recruited, handled, and arrested by officers.

[h2]Directions and Spy Networks[/h2]

Globally, your spy-related activities are divided into directions (eg. "Soviet direction", "American direction", "African direction" - it's a term from intelligence lingo) which can be prioritized, invested into, and also compromised. They originate automatically from your decisions, for instance establishing an intelligence station in Moscow usually establishes a Soviet direction.

Within any direction, your officers and spies develop spy networks.

Existence of spy networks in the real world is a slightly controversial subject. Many groups of spies described as networks were not really networks (eg. Cambridge Five was not connected at all into a network according to KGB). Leitmotiv of an intelligence officer memoir is isolation and compartmentalization, not connecting spies. Some intelligence organizations go even further (eg. Stratfor's famous definition of "network" says that's it's very rare and anyone claiming to operate a network is full of BS). The term, however, does exist in some of the best possible sources, so it's not just a spy fiction myth (eg. declassified reports from CIA's Berlin station describe fates of their networks in East Germany).

As always, Espiocracy embraces complexity of the world. Spy networks in the game resemble previous paragraph: they are nebulous groups, usually not connected into web-like networks (spies inside generally do not have contact with each other), but they look network-ish from the perspective of the HQ, the public, and the counterintelligence services. In rare cases, networks can get more complicated - usually through chains: a spy handling a spy handling a spy. (Mathematically, spy networks in the game are always networks [sets of nodes and edges connecting the nodes], and are displayed as such on the map, because there's always unifying central node, usually an intelligence station that handles the network.)



[h2]Sources[/h2]

Spies as individual people in the game are divided into three tiers: sources, agents, and high-value spies. It's a choice inspired by the real world but ultimately optimized for gameplay because every intelligence agency in the world has different convoluted ladder of spies (example of how specific it can get, spy ladder from Czechoslovak StB: "confidant, informant, ideological collaborator, confidential collaborator, secret cooperation candidate, agent A, double agent, resident of counterintelligence").

A source in the game is a low-level informant, low-cost and low-intelligence. Sources are found during standard espionage activities in any place, and then regularly contacted for new intelligence. They don't receive enumeration and are not (yet) recruited. Any player in the game usually has hundreds of sources around the world.

Individual sources are tied to countries (so they can provide intelligence on their country) and have useful positions (so they can provide intelligence on relevant actors and events). The latter includes: journalists, dissidents, soldiers, diplomats, politicians, police officers, mobsters, industrial managers, and so on. Every field in every country has a limited pool of possible sources for which all intelligence agencies compete with each other.

Sources are quickly gained and quickly lost, rotation is intensive. Most attractive sources can be recruited - they may become agents.

[h2]Agents[/h2]

We have to return to definitions once again. Espionage terms are (often on purpose) confusing, and real world "agent" is one of the most confusing terms. Some time ago I tried to explain various meanings of this and adjacent words using a diagram:



In the game, we stick to simple professional definition: an agent is a medium-level spy, usually paid, capable of delivering advanced intelligence and of directly participating in espionage activities. Mechanically, an agent is always tied to an influential actor in a country.

Agents are recruited. "Recruitment" is yet another espionage term that requires careful consideration. In the intelligence world, it does not mean hiring or employing, and instead it has the older meaning of recruiting for the cause (getting someone to commit to something, in this case to espionage). It usually relies on "recruitment pitch" which may end in (often written!) declaration of cooperation. Espiocracy is full of such pitches: your officers make pitches to the best sources, to walk-ins in embassies, during intelligence operations (both as secondary action and as the full category of "Recruit" operations where you can make a pitch to any human in the game world), and they may be even at the receiving end of pitches from hostile agencies.

Success of recruitment depends on target's backstory and motivation. The game features more than a dozen recruitability archetypes, such as a true believer, a disillusioned patriot, or a thrill-seeker, which then influence MICE motivation (money, ideology, coercion, ego), and then further parameters and traits (loyalty, stability, paranoia, trust, vulnerabilities, and so on).

After recruitment and initial training, an agent may be specialized into a courier, sleeper, career climber, spotter, or recruiter (or remain a general agent). Then, using the specialization and invested resources, agent's life regularly ticks with various actions (eg. agents-recruiters may directly make recruitment pitches on behalf of player's agency), which bring for the player intelligence, opportunities, assets, and sometimes also troubles.

Similarly to sources, the best agents (here: with the best career position), may be promoted to high-value spies.

[h2]High-Value Spies[/h2]

The third tier of spies are high-cost, high-impact, high-risk agents. They can spy on multiple actors and multiple countries. They can do everything any specialized agent can do. They are divided into a few types which define further available actions:

• Directly Recruited Influential Actors - Depending on precise type and position, they can access extremely valuable intelligence (eg. military plans or confidential technology), exploit relations with other actors, travel around the world, influence ongoing events, enable complex intelligence operations, and so on.
  
• Agents of Influence - People in power and slightly in the shadows, for instance media tycoons, who are less focused on intelligence collection and more on active espionage, enabling many operations, gaining control in many places, and influencing many actions around the world.
  
• International Agents - Diplomats, international reporters, company representatives, and other people who travel around the world under very good (real) cover, who can access many places, actors, countries, and provide vast global intelligence, while also finding scattered operational opportunities.
  
• Moles - Foreign officers betraying their country to spy for us. They can pass any intelligence they see in the agency, and they can influence any activities they participate in (all the way to Kim Philby's sabotage of anti-Soviet operations in MI5). Naturally, this is most prized kind of a high-value spy, with vast possible gains and gigantic risk. Every agency has internal counterintelligence department dedicated only to hunting such spies.
  

[h2]The End Game[/h2]

Speaking of risk, agents and high-value spies obviously are rather ephemeral. With every espionage action, the risk of capture increases. After years of living the double life, psychological factors also start contributing to mistakes, breakdowns, and worse events. Sooner or later, professional (and sometimes actual) life of the spy ends.

Before that happens due to external circumstances, a handler can always activate one of the three ways out. Deciding on how and when here is one of the most consequential dilemmas in the game.

• Exfiltrating - You can organize a costly complex operation to evacuate the spy under good cover. It allows further debriefs, publicity stunts, and increases trust of other agents (and success chance of recruitment pitches). However, when it goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong, with large diplomatic scandal ensuing and many further assets lost.
  
• Terminating - Contact with the spy may be simply ceased. It happens to both sides from time to time due to various circumstances. While this option requires no expenses and gives no gains, it may backfire in some cases ("forgotten" spy may offer services to another agency, giving them also some intelligence on the former handler).
  
• Burning - Some of the most attractive intelligence materials and opportunities in the real history of espionage, and in the game, can be traced back directly to the spy if they are used. Such a spy would be "burnt", quickly exposed by counterintelligence services. According to an anecdote, Stalin sacrificed thousands of soldiers in one battle instead of using intelligence from his spy in German military command because he didn't want to burn the spy. The Battle of the Atlantic was full of such decisions as well, many intelligence coups were not used to not alarm the Germans about vulnerability of Enigma. However, in many other cases, agencies decide that the life of spy comes to an end either way and one last large success may be worth more than any other ending. You can always unlock that last success in the game by burning the agent.
  

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

The next dev diary will be posted on the first Friday of the next month: September 5th.

If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it

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

There is also a small community around Espiocracy:



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"Many of Donovan’s early amateur spies ended up a waste of money. He convinced Roosevelt to approve $5,000 to send explorer and nature filmmaker Armand Denis to roam central and southern Africa to spy on German espionage and military activity, using the cover that he was scouting a future movie on primates. The Belgian American shot a lot of footage on apes, caught several tropical diseases, and filed what amounted to a long travelogue with no useful military or political intelligence. He finally admitted in a letter to David Bruce that he was a hopeless secret agent" - Beginnings of OSS, the first modern intelligence agency in the USA

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.

Secondary what's happening: This is a small AAR, "after action report", where "action" means gameplay. Based on 30 minutes of recorded gameplay. All screenshots are full-screen frames from the recording (which means that, while it's fully authentic, I apologize for not-the-best visual quality and for placeholders/bugs in various places). As always, certain features are disabled (notably, there is no Operation Paperclip).



Welcome to the USA, anno domini 1946.



We begin as an unequivocal powerhouse of the world, with top GDP, diplomatic weight, number of influential actors, international airports, leading intelligence community, and many other parameters. Among them, we should wisely use scientific and technological prowess (of 208) to widen the gap between us and other countries. As the key next paradigm, we - as the intelligence community - recommend inventing a transistor.



From our headquarters on E Street in Washington DC, we can venture out to conquer (intelligence-wise!) all the continents. We'll need more well trained officers - that calls for spy school.



Thanks to the size of our intelligence community, we can pursue two intelligence programs simultaneously. Second choice is a psychological division. If there are areas in which Soviets and potentially even other nations are more proficient than us in 1946, top candidate is the craft of shaping hearts and minds. The best vantage point to begin this operation is East Asia, where we occupy Japan, and where we already control narrative around one major event (allied liberation of Asia in WW2). A sizeable CIA station, crewed by a branch of 36 officers, will be a good first step.



At the same time, we should consolidate our control over Latin America. Recent tumult in the world may destabilize the continent and open the doors for the Reds. There is a number of coup plots active - any of them may fish towards communist support. To secure our interests, we'll send officers to Bogota and then link them up to a smuggling network to facilitate larger movement of weapons and money.



(Note that this is an FBI section. In 1946, Hoover's agency was still responsible for Latin America.)

What about our interests in the wider world? Let's take a look at battleground of decolonization:



Thanks to firm control of our allies (post-WW2 military deployment, ideological fervor, and whatnot), most colonies in the world lean either towards non-alignment or towards western bloc. They are still far away from decolonization waves, except for India, but India shines with strong blue color, which means that new independent India won't be communist.

So far, so good. We can go back to the standard craft. A few nice intelligence operations...



...and expansion of intelligence structures. A new station, in Rome, that sends back this:



(The game has, indeed, a database of contemporary political jokes.) Our Tokyo station is now well immersed, and we can use it to weave a propaganda network in East Asia.



Back in Latin America, our smuggling network also slowly comes to life.



It's time to dabble a little bit in diplomacy. First things first, it's always good to limit Soviet bearers of diplomatic passports (and therefore using diplomatic immunity for spying) in the USA.



Alignment parameter between the USA and the USSR is round -100 so it won't be worse. What about other countries?



There are a few worrying red stains. We have to engage Peru in Latin America. And Europe is surprisingly cold towards us, especially the UK. Our politicians certainly had a few severe failures in British-American relations. Let's jump straight in and recommend providing our best technology that is also most desired by the UK, let's assist their nuclear research.



In the meanwhile, Chinese civil war has been resolved rather quickly. It's now People's Republic of China. While establishing relations with the new country may not be easy (may be viewed negatively in many places in the world), it will be critical to our efforts in East Asia.



In the meanwhile, we finished first year of the campaign, which is marked by a State Power Index report. Notably, many countries demobilize troops after WW2, which can be observed by large decrease of military subindex.



One year, and a number of operations/expansions/decisions, later, we see presidential election on the horizon in the homeland. At the moment, it's in exploratory phase, with candidates competing for nominations. We'll come back to it soon.



In East Asia, our propaganda network is solid, and now it needs some events to propagate. Let's resolve medical emergency in Japan by sending aid and then organizing propaganda campaign about it. While at first glance it looks like a finicky operation (resolved medical emergency after... what?), in practice we will probably fully control narrative, and use it exactly to minimize the perception of atomic bombings.



Back at home, two nominees emerged:



That's a large gap and it's further widening. It looks like we'll have a new commander in chief in 1949.

In the meanwhile, we were just notified about changes in West Asia. Certainly there are new opportunities to pursue here.



In the USA, less than two months to the election.



And indeed, Wallace H. White won the election.



The transition period is active. This is the last moment to try something interesting with Truman. For the sake checking out that alternate history, using sandbox save feature (quick save-reload)...



...we'll suggest launching a nuclear strike on the USSR, since this is the last moment to do so before they acquire retaliatory capabilities - and we certainly won't be able to do so with isolationist White. The war begins.



Our two bomber bases and many bombers vs many targets in the USSR. Minute by minute, many hours later (initial nuclear procedures were rather slow), our bombers arrive, mostly unopposed and mostly on target:



Now, with one click, we can reload back to normal gameplay...



The next dev diary will be posted on the first Friday of the next month: August 1st.

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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"Keep hands in pockets and chew gum" - GRU manual, advice on blending into the crowd in the USA

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.



As we finish the fourth year of development of Espiocracy -- the main game build with working map and buttons was compiled for the first time in June 2021 -- we are at the stage of implementing deeper scenarios, fleshing out mechanics, and looking for last 10xer features (10xing two pillars of the game: strategy & immersion). Today we'll take a look at such a feature.

[h2]Main Character[/h2]

Every player in Espiocracy is now, first and foremost, represented by the spymaster.



From many playtests, it became clear that the game lacks something critical in the middle of its complex mix of espionage and the Cold War. The obvious answer would be a director/chief but a few various implementations failed to solve this issue, and failed even to contribute meaningfully to gameplay. DD#53 referred attempts (as of May 2024) as either too weak or too overwhelming. Since then, however, the n-th approach with careful real-life-inspired design hit the Goldilocks zone, thanks to a few elegant implementations.

Real world position of de jure director of the intelligence community - if it even exists - is often politicized, short-lived, and not really interesting. In Espiocracy, instead, you play as the spymaster: an officer who is de facto most influential in the intelligence community. It may be the chief of leading foreign intelligence agency (historical inspirations: William Donovan, Stewart Menzies, Markus Wolf, Allen Dulles), powerful chief of any larger agency (Yuri Andropov, Wilhelm Canaris, J. Edgar Hoover, Erich Mielke), or outstanding leader of a smaller unit (Arisue Seizo, Zhou Enlai).

From this perspective, on surface, it is a strategy game like any other - you send orders, receive feedback, react to changes - but in a few critical situations, you are just a person facing the wind of history. In domestic civil war, you may decide to switch sides to the rebels, taking loyal officers with you. Upon discovering a domestic coup plot, you may decide to join it (or even to stage it from the first step). You may be directly targeted by an assassin or become one (like the chief of KCIA who personally assassinated his president). When releasing, dissolving, or separating a new country, you may decide to form new intelligence community in the new country. And obviously you will take direct personal responsibility for failures and transgressions, that may end up in forced retirement, resignation, or even arrest and trial.

[h2]Succession[/h2]

These personal consequences, however, usually* don't cause the end of the game. You lose current main character, along with their advantages & achievements, but you can continue as the next spymaster:



Traits of every candidate are defined by three processes.

First, personal history, which is rooted in wider historical events, stemming from a database of events reaching 19th century that is also expanded during gameplay (eg. if your country fights Vietnam War, you may become a Vietnam-War-veteran spymaster - like Stansfield Turner, CIA director in 1977-81).

Second, intelligence service: potential future spymasters take part in operations you order, manage stations, handle spies, and execute other espionage activities. Among notable consequences, a spymaster may "have no face" (like Markus Wolf - which significantly lowers personal risks) or be publicly known. The latter state may be caused for instance by leaked/publicized/gone-wrong operations (famous real life example: Gina Haspel, CIA director in 2018-21).

Third, ties to previous spymaster. As a spymaster, you can appoint a deputy, which guarantees higher pace of increasing attributes over time (and rare special development opportunities). However, it is double-edged sword during succession. If you retired as respected officer, it will be a supporting factor - but you resigned, were fired, or even arrested, it will be a damaging factor, introducing adverse external reactions (eg. lowering government's trust). In worst cases, it may even make such a deputy unavailable during succession due to too close ties to previous disgraced spymaster.

* - Death/loss of the spymaster can end the game if it is your last officer in the world (for instance after the nuclear war...) or when it is caused by conviction in high treason trial (this game over condition can be turned off in game rules).

[h2]Personal Contacts[/h2]

As the most influential officer in the intelligence community, you can regularly develop and exploit personal contacts with significant actors.



Availability of particular targets depends on personal traits and widely calculated proximity between you as the spymaster and the target (differences between personal influence, countries, cultures, ideologies, languages, geographical distance etc). More valuable contacts require longer development time (eg. above 17 months for De Gaulle vs 10 months for French Cinema), which is critical as you can develop only one contact a time, and your career as a spymaster can be as short as a few years.

Once personal contact is developed, as the spymaster you regularly meet the contact and exploit the relation: collect intelligence, enable operations, support spies, influence actions, act as a backchannel for diplomacy, acquire funds and other resources (for instance iron-clad cover tied to highly influential personal contact).

This is a two-sided relation, in which the target will sometimes ask for intelligence, resource, or another favor. Over time, it may become stronger or weaker (to the point of losing contact), and naturally all the contacts are lost when spymaster exits the service - all except for the contact with top actor in the government, as this is a personal contact that exists for every spymaster.

[h2]Attributes[/h2]



A spymaster is characterized by five 0-100 attributes which gently influence many mechanics:

• Respect - Primary factor guiding availability and quality of personal contacts. In addition, affects government's trust, vulnerability to failures of the intelligence community, and negotiations with foreign spymasters.
  
• Survival - Directly correlates with possible years on the position of spymaster, on the span from one year (lowest survival) to full Cold War (highest survival, Markus Wolf has 100 here). Influences ability to handle failures, shift or take blame, and personal vulnerability to assassination.
  
• Resourcefulness - Influences income, costs, length of intelligence programs, and quality of additional schemes (such money laundering).
  
• Instinct - Increases prospective outcome of risky operations, handling high-value spies, supports counterintelligence investigations, in rare cases can fast-track intelligence discoveries.
  
• Rationality - High rationality lowers operational costs and improves intelligence collection related to national interests. Low rationality makes the officer more susceptible to gaining negative traits, damaging personal contacts, and also allows defection (which may be useful in very rare cases: nuclear option against intelligence community, leading to large purges and reform, and against current government, potentially causing its collapse... obviously with all the disadvantages, such as revealing treasure trove of intelligence to the receiving player; famous historical example: chief of Romanian intelligence services defected to the USA in 1978)
  

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

The next dev diary will be posted on the first Friday of the next month: July 4th.



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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"January 24, 1946: At lunch today in the White House, with only members of the Staff present, RAdm. Sidney Souers and I were presented [by President Truman] with black cloaks, black hats, and wooden daggers, and the President read an amusing directive to us outlining some of our duties in the Central Intelligence Agency, Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers" - Office diary of William D. Leahy, Truman's military adviser

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.



Grand strategy games (GSG) can be described as a deep/wide exploration of three main aspects of statehood: military, diplomacy, and economy.

Espiocracy, as a GSG-like, puts these through the lens of the Cold War and espionage, arriving at fairly limited military aspect (due to the coldness of the Cold War, replaced obviously by espionage, and also by guerrilla warfare and nuclear brinkmanship) and deeper take on diplomacy (DD#51, and ubiquitous manipulation of actors from behind the curtain). What about economy?

It's very basic. Since the player as an intelligence agency cannot really interact with economy directly (aside from small industrial espionage gameplay and microeconomic angles such as funneling laundered money), since the topic is so complex that it can be identified as a contributor to failures of other attempts at creating a good indie GSG, and since we have to pick our battles where our strengths lie (knowledge about economics is definitely not one of them) - it is kept reasonably simple.

The backbone of material comparisons between countries in the game is State Power Index, described in DD#16. It takes into account all the mentioned statehood sectors and a few others (such as nuclear capabilities or cultural influence). Economy is the most significant (25% weight) part of this index, and as such (and as fundamental part of statehood and GSGs), it receives its own layer of depth, which we will explore below.

[h2]GNP[/h2]

Espiocracy takes Gross National Product (GDP + international factors) as the main parameter to define the state of economy of a country. Its calculation resembles real world GNP calculation but it is adjusted for gameplay purposes. In-game GNP is a sum of:

• goods, services, food industry - multiplied by population (private consumption)
  
• factories, heavy industry, bank groups (investment)
  
• income from colonies and foreign state-controlled enterprises, access to global economy, access to oil (international factors)
  
• government spending
  

Absolute values are derived from actions, national resources (formerly known as national assets, DD#33) and entities in the world (eg. Anglo-Persian Oil Company, contributing to GNP of the UK). For instance, "services" is a percentage value from 0 to 100+, while "factories" is a number of active factories within the country. This, naturally, defines how GNPs increase in the game: through growing population, industrialization, investment, international expansion, and so on.

This GNP-like value, in turn, defines budget available to the government: 20% for capitalist systems, 30% for mixed systems, 40% for planned economy. Such budget is spent, as was shown in numerous diaries in the past, on domestic projects, foreign activities, and player's intelligence community.

[h2]Capitalist, Mixed, Planned Economy[/h2]

Countries in the game implement one of the three economic systems. The choice is defined by local constitution (DD#28) and emergencies. The latter factor is important in early game: after the world war, many countries maintained rationing and state planning programs for some time. For instance, the USA begins the game in March 1946 as mixed economy due to emergency laws - eg. the Office of Price Administration which was active until 1947 - until it rescinds them and switches back to capitalist economy.

While countries generally converge towards mixed system over time (aside from a few notable exceptions, especially two superpowers) which hits optimal middle ground, the two other contrasting systems offer their own significant advantages.

Capitalist countries in the game can achieve highest year-to-year GNP growth (following historical comparison of West and East Germany), significant non-state contributions to national resources and critical sectors (such as mentioned services - but also, for instance, locally mastering new scientific and technological paradigms without involvement of the state), higher number and influence of business actors, and substantial international expansion.

Planned economy, on the other hand, favors larger military, ICBM/space/nuclear programs, rebuilding after the war, and naturally all the state-funded projects (anything from state-built housing to public healthcare). From the perspective of the player, it offers also tighter counterintelligence environment (for instance, inability to establish front companies by other intelligence agencies). However, following the history, planned economies in the game are bound to fail sooner or later, ending in a crisis that forces the government to, at least, switch to mixed economy (and at most, contributing to the collapse of the country - for instance, dissolution of the USSR).

Beyond these systems, there's also fourth "economic system" in the game: informal economy - which relies on barter, illicit activities, unofficial transactions, and general lack of state authorities. It dominates countries ravaged by wars (for instance, occupied Germany at the start of the game), including nuclear wars, and/or failed states. This situation very practically changes espionage on the ground, making money irrelevant as a motivation (eg. no "fund X" operations), and elevating importance of other methods (such as "supply" operations).

[h2]Oil[/h2]

In addition to simplistic GNP-based economies, we explore one - important for the Cold War - resource: crude oil (petroleum). Governments were overthrown, wars were launched, and whole alliances were forged just to secure access to this critical material. Espiocracy reflects this by introducing simple demand-supply situation: a sufficiently developed country has to import (or use domestically extracted) quantities of crude oil proportional to its GNP. If this demand is not met, its GNP will suffer.

On the supply side, oil reserves have defined positions on the map (which can be scrambled by pre-game randomization), some of which are hidden until discovery through lengthy exploration process. At the beginning of the game, extraction is fairly timid, as the world produces roughly 8 million barrels per day. With further discoveries (including discoveries of "elephants" - giant oil fields) and build up of oil wells and offshore rigs, in an average campaign the extraction exceeds historical level of 40 million barrels per day in 1970s. This huge increase prompts petroleum exporters in the game to establish OPEC and leads to increase of global price of crude oil which, in turn, lends significant international influence to relevant countries (mainly in the Middle East), and gives them powerful international tool in the form of an oil embargo (historically activated in response to 1973 Yom Kippur war).

[h2]International Economy[/h2]

Crude oil is a significant part of wider international economy in the game, which includes also:

• Widely understood access to global economy (established through standard economic development, limited by isolating actions such as embargoes, with high isolation severely limiting economy, see Cuba or North Korea)
  
• Trade between countries with established relations (therefore, limited by lower recognition and severed relations)
  
• Strategic trade deals (for instance, Cuban-Soviet deals, aimed at countering American-led economic blockade of Cuba)
  
• Economic cooperation programs (eg. Marshall plan - but also EU's European Economic Area)
  
• Exploitation (client/satellite/dependent states, also war spoils and war reparations) and neocolonialism (non-state-level influence in former dependencies)
  
• Economic migration (to neighbors with significantly higher GNP per capita)
  
• Currency strength (while the game does not explicitly model individual currencies, it stores their relative strengths - with dollar as the strongest currency - and their evolution, which then influences practical value of bribes, funds, and other expenses during espionage activities)
  

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

The next dev diary will be posted on the first Friday of the next month: June 6th.



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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Main image attribution: Rama, CC-BY-SA-3.0, render of project Cybersyn (the project does have a single flavor event in the game)

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"Our banks and financial services may collapse, our economy may be going through the floor, our road and rail system may be a catastrophe, our Millennium Dome a laughingstock, the cost of fuel, energy, and water rising by the week, but our spies are immune to all of it" - John le Carré