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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Today's dev diary happens to be scheduled exactly for Christmas Eve. It's a good occasion to try something more casual, less about the nitty-gritty and more about simple gameplay. Welcome to the first micro-AAR (after action report) of Espiocracy!

We play as Czechoslovak StB, starting on January 1st 1946.



Our situation is pretty dynamic. We are a weak democratic state with the danger of a communist takeover looming over the nation. Can we turn the tide of history and defend our democracy?

Soviet military forces liberated our country and departed just a moment ago, but they left heavily infiltrated security apparatus. Law enforcement, secret police, and even our intelligence agency are dominated by pro-communist members. This is further deepened by the presence of Soviet advisers among our top operatives and too-intimate contacts with KSČ - the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia - and MGB (predecessor of Soviet KGB). We cannot even launch anti-communist operations. It won't be easy...

Let's begin by consolidating power. We expand in the homeland by establishing numerous safehouses, a large network of informants, and a few courier rings. These will be useful immediately - supporting regular espionage - and in the future - when we launch the final blow.

We quickly run out of scarce postwar resources. Now, we can kill two birds with one stone and turn to our friends: propose a deal to MGB where in exchange for resources we will provide them benign tactical intelligence about Czechoslovakia. It can backfire in the future - they will use this knowledge against us - but at the moment it will provide much-needed resources, increase their trust, and lessen their need for physical presence in the country. Soviets are paying us to lull them into a false sense of security!

After a few months, Czechoslovakia held parliamentary elections. Unsurprisingly, KSČ has won - pro-communist views are popular, originating from the role of communist organizations in anti-Nazi resistance. The election was fair but it hands Czechoslovakia to the Soviets on a plate. The risk of coup d'état crossed 70%. Pro-communist actors - led by the secret police - are becoming bolder.

Offensive operations against these actors are currently not possible. However, we approach the problem from the other side and provide a secret stream of support to anti-communist actors via seemingly innocent contacts. This earns us their trust and loyalty while keeping them afloat for the time being. But it's just passive defense, we need even more ingenious approaches.

What about external cooperation? Surely, Americans will be interested in preserving democracy in Czechoslovakia. Let's venture out for a clandestine mission to establish contact with CIG (predecessor of CIA), using an anti-communist operative and extreme secrecy. This special operation should have a special name: we choose one of the Czech classic literary works, Kafka's "Metamorphosis".



Thanks to the common border with West Germany, it went smoothly. Initial trust is low - Americans are afraid of StB's provocation. To assure them about our intentions, we supply tactical intelligence on pro-communist actors. This is better but not good enough. They are still wary of closer cooperation. What could convince them?

We ask one of our trusted actors near the military to perform an operation on our behalf: steal strategic material about Soviet armed forces. In white gloves, we acquire materials on Soviet order of battle, which are then quickly passed to the CIG, finally bringing Americans to the table.

What do they want? Anti-communist government. Wait, KSČ is the legitimately chosen ruling party. Are they asking us to overthrow our government? Not exactly, but it might end in either their coup or our coup... What do we want? Everything! Money, operatives, tactical intelligence, cooperation on the ground. After a few rounds of negotiations, the deal is struck: rich cooperation in exchange for establishing democracy.

When resources start to flood the agency - obviously obfuscated so that the advisers remain in the dark - we use them to hire non-pro-communist staff. The small population of Czechoslovakia, ravaged by the war, is a significant limiting factor and we have to accept many underqualified candidates. This means that sophisticated operations will be out of the question for some time - instead, we'll turn to simpler operations. Sabotage & arrests, that's our goal.

After reaching proper numbers, Soviet policies limiting StB shifts from legal & strictly enforced to legal & rarely enforced. This means that in combination with extreme secrecy, we can finally target pro-communist actors. We start multiple operations of this kind, but all are set up only for preparation - after preparation is finished, we will have the ability to launch them all in a single day. Moreover, on the same day, we pass the strategic material on coup prepared by KSČ (acquired by CIG) to the non-communist minority in the government, which in cooperation with our top operatives rigs the parliament, outlaws communist parties and throws their members out of government. Last but not least, we dedicate a small but loyal force - cooperating on the ground with CIG operatives - to purge Soviet and pro-communist operatives out of StB. Banhammer.



We lost some of the precious experienced operatives but we gained real independence. Is it preemptive coup d'état? Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster...

Soviets are in shock while the West swoops in with large material help for the current government. The fight has just begun. We are surrounded by communist East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and obviously the Soviet Union. After regrouping, they will surely attack us with the full espionage arsenal. We can already see the immediate danger: Slovak separatists who, with proper Eastern support, will not only break away half of our country but also form a communist echelon with personal connections to our land...

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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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Clandestine operations, from the Bay of Pigs invasion (codename Zapata) to the Tajbeg Palace assault (codename Storm-333), can single-handedly change history of the world. Translated to games, they are OP and require nerfing... or do they?

Espiocracy will attempt to preserve gravitas of intelligence operations. On the one hand, operations are fleshed out into 34 types, numerous tactical approaches, and many possible adjustments. On the other hand, the design consciously addresses two issues present in similar systems - lack of interaction between players and the overwhelming role of randomness.

[h2]Conflict[/h2]

Operations, here, are modeled almost like battles. It is always a conflict between attacking and defending side, usually with players on both ends, which is reflected by the user interface:



In this scenario, the player attacks as Israeli Mossad. They want to sabotage Egyptian military forces, which are protected by General Intelligence Directorate (GIS). To achieve the task, the player can engage top operatives, choose tactical approaches, spend resources, employ contacts, or even invite allied intelligence agencies. These forces are met with actor’s security measures and GIS' activities - some of them might be hidden due to low tactical intelligence.

Initially, the defense is limited to passive preparation. However, at any point, the attacked player can become aware of the operation and deploy additional measures. This discovery mechanism depends on the dance of tactical intelligence levels and the nature of actual operation.



For high-stakes operations, players usually become aware of the operation before it is executed in full. Such a discovery does not imply perfect information - for instance, defending player may know attacking forces and operation type, but remain in the dark about the targeted actor. Players adjust their approaches in cycles, potentially evolving into back and forth duel, and ending up with scenarios such as forcing the opposite player to back off or spiraling into too costly conflict.

Ultimately, outcomes hinge on interactions between players.

[h2]Control[/h2]

Intelligence operations known from strategy games usually have binary outcomes - either success or failure. Espiocracy iterates on that by introducing five different outcomes for every operation, from very negative to very positive, which in practice means that assassination mission can conclude with injury instead of murder. This complexity is reduced to a value from 0 to 10 (higher = better), which determines the probability distribution of 2-3 outcomes out of 5 possible. At first, it might sound intimidating:



In practice, it quickly becomes intuitive:



In addition to many shades of outcomes, there are multiple points of failure - covered by the percentage risk parameter. A common example of a risk point is border crossing. The associated danger depends on the policy towards specific nationalities and the efficiency of border control. Player can lower it by infiltrating border control, developing document forgery capabilities, using illegal operatives, or even replacing it with another risk point such as crossing the green border.

Failure at a risk point is not (always) synonymous with aborted operations. Consequences are decided by the attacked player. They can do anything within the local law, from simply aborting the operation to preparing an ambush. Again, the game takes a step back from the concept of perfect information and introduces some limited uncertainty even about the failure.

[h2]Examples[/h2]

Let's explore three types of operations.

Propaganda operation increases or decreases support for selected views in the targeted population. It requires high tactical intelligence about the country (to speak the local cultural language) and can highly benefit from well-developed contacts with media. Type-specific tactical approaches include, among others, the use of forgeries. The targeted country defends itself by protecting media, detecting forgeries, or even enforcing censorship. Among risks, strong attribution of the operation - by operative's mistake or ingenious investigative reporter - can hand counterpropaganda gun to the defending side. Prospective outcomes range from the completely ignored campaign (very negative), through mildly affected support (moderate), up to a success larger than targeted (very positive).

Assassination is a typical high-risk/high-gain operation. Person of interest has to be targeted long in advance. On par with gathered intelligence, the choice of an assassin is critical. There are many possible options: domestic commando unit, trained top operative, direct action squad, external recruitment, or even remote killing. Likewise, tactics include anything from a white gun attack to the use of poison. This kind of operation is met with multiple defensive layers, such as surveillance, strong law enforcement organizations, VIP protection, package screening, or... actor's paranoia. The list of risks includes smuggling the gun, approaching the actor, gun malfunction, exfiltration afterward. The operation itself is costly in terms of resources and required time. The achieved result ranges from no harm done (very negative) to a perfect murder (very positive). Furthermore, this kind of operation can deeply impact operatives on a personal level, who risk their physical and psychological health.

Installing an operative does not immediately change the world but opens up new avenues. Its outcome depends primarily on the match between a top operative and the target - terrorist organization and research laboratory require different spies. Tactical approaches range from starting as a new inexperienced member to risky impostor-expert. Defending side can respond with, for instance, counterintelligence protection of the organization or stringent immigration laws. The risk is an aggregate of multiple possible slip-ups, with the frequency determined by the clash of offensive and defensive measures. Outcomes include outright rejection (negative) and shallow membership (moderate). The result of this operation brings a multitude of benefits, from a precise source of tactical intelligence, through the ability to use the undercover operative in other operations (for instance, in assassination of organization's close contact), or even influencing actions of the organization. Needless to say, an extremely risky but also extremely worthwhile variant of this operation can be executed against other intelligence agencies, with the potential to raise in ranks over years even to the position of top operative, who is used by the oblivious opposite player...

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

Although the design is fairly mature, some features will evolve during the playtesting period - such as the mechanism of operation discovery, economy of operations, precise distribution of probabilities, and so on. Also, some parts of the system were not (sufficiently) described and will be explored in further dev diaries.

The next dev diary (thirteenth!) will arrive exactly for Christmas Eve. That's a good occasion to prepare something unusual. I will leave you with three letters: AAR.

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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"There are several people in this world whom I could kill with my own hands with a feeling of pleasure and without that action in any way spoiling my appetite, but I think that it is the type of bright idea which in the end produces a good deal of trouble and does little good" - Stewart Menzies, wartime chief of MI6

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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After straightforward tactical intelligence introduced in the previous dev diary (DD#10), today we explore a more exciting layer!



Strategic materials represent crème de la crème of the secret world in Espiocracy. They exist as independent items: blueprints, orders, plans, secrets, devices, or even scarce resources. Their acquisition opens opportunities and can rewrite history of entire countries. For you, as an intelligence agency, it's an almost capture-the-flag game, where you strive to obtain foreign materials while guarding your roster of state secrets.

[h2]Example Strategic Materials[/h2]

Military actors forge various kinds of war plans. This category includes defense and invasion plans against different countries, nuclear strike C&C, or even the date of the invasion. During a war, it extends to plans of battles, offensives, and counteroffensives. These materials provide indirect means of influencing warfare - for instance, if you fancy an invasion on a specific country, acquiring its defense plans gives you the ability to recommend the war. On the other hand, detecting incoming invasion can make a difference between survival and lost cause.

Stealing technology is a cliche for espionage in games. Here, it is diversified into blueprints and devices. Both strategic materials offer different gains and risks, which are not set in stone yet, and will depend on specific types of technology. For instance, acquiring blueprints of nuclear bombs (relatively simple devices in the early Cold War) is different than acquiring blueprints of airplanes (many systems, vast documentation). Moreover, internal capabilities play a role - rocket parts may be useless if there are no rocket scientists in your country.

An interesting strategic material is uranium ore. Some countries can just source it from their own (or controlled) territory with no special intelligence activities required. Others have to arrange a complex set of operations, akin to Mossad's Plumbat in which Israel obtained 200 tonnes of processed uranium from Congolese Shinkolobwe.

High-stakes actions performed by actors - including the player - can become secrets if their authors remain hidden. Assassinations, coups, substantial support, and other internationally relevant actions automatically become strategic materials known to co-conspirators, witnesses, and sometimes even remain independently in the form of a paper trail. These materials can be used for blackmail, elimination from public life (including imprisonment), igniting protests, causing diplomatic incidents, and so on.

[h2]Materials in the World[/h2]

Some materials are planted in the world by historical simulation (for instance: documents from the Nazi era) and geography (for instance: uranium). All the other strategic materials are directly created and managed by actors. Their dynamics are closely integrated with the in-game world - for instance, a military leader with an anti-Canadian view will naturally push to prepare an invasion plan against Canada. Once created, knowledge dynamics are pretty intricate: actors can temporarily access the material and become aware of it, the creator can resign and still remember the plan, other actors can cancel the plan or replace it with a new one, the previous actor may not be aware that his knowledge about the plan is obsolete, and so on.

Genrally, you are aware of all strategic materials belonging to your country. This allows you to intensify counterintelligence around actors with access to particular materials, spot possible breaches and react accordingly, or even engage in a double agent game. The latter is possible after discovering a spy, successfully turning them, and then providing fabricated strategic materials of your choice. Such an approach brings special gravitas to false intelligence: imagine feeding the enemy with false defense plans to lure them straight into one large ambush.

[h2]Acquiring[/h2]

The sheer existence of strategic materials is usually intuitive, but the details are not given away for free. You can safely assume that war plans are near military actors, but you'll need significant tactical investment to figure out if they include an attack plan on your country, which would elevate eventual acquisition operation to a completely different level of prospective gains.

Successful engagement with this meta-layer (information about information) enables the most straightforward operation type: stealing chosen strategic materials. Details of operations will be covered in the next dev diary. However, knowledge about materials is not required to obtain them. There are other methods, ranging from random to shotgun approaches:

• Country-level regular espionage (very rare)
  
• Targeting actors with access to materials (rare)
  
• Contact with access to materials
  
• Breaking in, infiltration
  
• Kidnapping and interrogation
  
• Deals with other intelligence services
  
• Spoils of war
  

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

UI is in the middle of rework - hence no screenshots.

The next dev diary "Operations" will be posted on December 10th.

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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"Documents can be forged, but the information is true" - Ahmed Sékou Touré, President of Guinea, about Soviet forgeries stating hostile intent of 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.

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According to Allen Dulles, the longest-serving CIA director, espionage is not for archbishops. Is it for gamers, though?

Espiocracy is first and foremost the Cold War game. Focus on espionage stems from trends characteristic of this period:

• frequent government changes (leading to inevitable frustration if you're a government as well)
  
• significantly influential individuals (who don't take kindly player overriding their decisions)
  
• decolonization, coups, revolutions, civil wars, and other asymmetric episodes
  
• scarce role of actual military conquest
  

The last point is especially important for grand strategy gameplay. How do we expand if there is widespread military stalemate, rare wars are heavily constrained by international pressure, and many minor countries are locked out of interesting actions for 50 years? Naturally, you move the center of gravity towards espionage, since this is the golden era of subversion! We could even ask a question: can espionage take the lead from warfare and preserve the satisfaction of conquering the world? This is where we start today.

As a whole, espionage system in the game is composed of three parts: Actors (DD#6), Contacts & Targets (DD#7), and Operations. Whereas the first two are fairly universal, the last one is real espionage-espionage part with many features around it, which we'll explore in the next few dev diaries.

Transcript: the last third consists of regular espionage (example: following people), strategic materials (example: war plans), major operations (example: assassinations), counterintelligence (example: capturing spies)

We kick off with the most low-level part of spying: regular espionage. In a single sentence, it is a fabric permeating all other systems - constant background activity, direct connection to the game world, gateway to launching operations with surgical precision.

[h2]Tactical Intelligence[/h2]

Tactical intelligence sits at the heart of this darkness - it covers standard intelligence materials, which do not rise to the strategic level (duh!), such as recruiting secretaries, photographing locations, following people, understanding local culture, and so on. These informations are obtained in large quantities and their contents do not really interest the supreme spymaster, but are nonetheless essential foundation of more exciting operations.

Tactical intelligence serves as an abstraction of basic espionage to 0-100 parameter ascribed to all countries and all actors. Zero represents no intelligence gathered, whereas one hundred is perfect and total infiltration. In development, special attention is paid to the actual click-by-click use of tactical intelligence. Instead of (negative) knowledge tax known from espionage systems in other games, here it plays mostly the role of (positive) discovery mechanism: providing extra actionable information, figuring out what an actor plans to do, uncovering well-guarded secrets, enabling additional but not obvious (usually: risky) operations, unleashing interesting events, improving outcomes of advanced operations, assisting counterintelligence, and so on. The game will be clear about possible uses of tactical intelligence - for instance, discoverable positions on the future agenda of an actor are crossed out instead of being just hidden from the interface:

Transcript: crossed out lines in "future activity" section

Acquisition of tactical intelligence is integrated with the system of contacts and targets. On the one hand, you can do your thing and prioritize valuable targets in broad strokes. If you target a whole country, your spies acquire tactical intelligence on the country itself and many actors inside. On the other hand, you can buy this information via contacts with other intelligence agencies, or even enter inverse agreement in which you spy on behalf of another agency in exchange for resources.

Tactical intelligence is dynamic sum of components, which can decay and are connected to game events. For instance, opposite player can hit bull's-eye operation and dramatically increase their tactical intelligence about you as the ingame actor, but you can fight back by spending resources to reorganize internally, burn blown covers, and outdate (lower) the level of tactical intelligence in the enemy hands. Similar embedding accompanies country-level tactical intelligence, where common history and in-game events such as postwar chaos influence the results of regular espionage:

Transcript: components of example tactical intelligence level - +5.0 neighbouring country, -16.9 historic (expires in 4.6y), -20.0 postwar (expires in 2.7y)

[h2]Local Infrastructure[/h2]

In addition to tactical intelligence, regular espionage on the level of entire countries is expanded by long-term investments: recruited people, listening devices (bugs), and infrastructure. The first two will be number-based and roughly follow historical trends - for instance, in 1946 CIA had 125 agents in Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany - whereas the latter will let you to build with espiocratic twist.

Above all, you're controlling embassies, which play primary supporting role for espionage activity. They can be expanded in size (to the limit set by bilateral agreements), improved in security, expanded with consulates in other population centers, and most importantly - they can host stations, which are special cells carrying out intensive espionage in the whole region. These states within states are much more demanding in terms of resources and, therefore, remain jewels in the worldwide infrastructure, with just a few for small intel agencies and no more than a few dozen for superpowers. To invoke declassified data, CIA had 47 intelligence stations in 1952.

In addition to overt diplomatic infrastructure (which can also include, among others, onsite SIGINT installations), you can also establish covert buildings and non-physical structures, such as:

• safehouses
  
• courier rings
  
• cover organizations
  
• illegal spies
  
• sleeper networks
  
• stay-behind armies
  

The third category of local structures includes special projects, taken straight out of history and fiction. They combine high risk, high cost, high gain, and interesting events. As an example, they include a counterpart of operation Gold - a tunnel from West to East Berlin built to eavesdrop on Soviet phone lines:

Transcript: drawing of the tunnel, photo of preserved part of the tunnel, photo of journalists taking photos inside the tunnel Credit for the last photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-37695-0051 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

All buildings are more than bonuses and maluses and enrich gameplay mainly by offering meaningful decisions. For instance, top operatives can be posted to stations to conduct regular espionage there, higher number of consulates increases chances of defections and walk-ins, stay-behind armies are actively used in wars, and so on.

[h2]World Conquest[/h2]

Ultimately, this low-level espionage will be represented on the map as one of the symbols of progress. Fully leaning into the nature of espionage means that you're not limited to front-like warfare - instead, you can focus on any place in the world, build on the hostile ground, constantly work behind the lines.

In some situations, it will be a literal conquest, comparable almost to 4X games, where postwar voids and weak local institutions of newly established countries tempt you to throw in all the resources and become the undercover puppet master of a country.

This is also the most down to the ground but already significant battlefield between players. For instance, the use of infrastructure in uncovered operation may expose it to the opposite player, loss of these structures, permanent scaling down of embassy size, deficits in tactical intelligence, lower the ability to conduct advanced operations in this country, or even lead to loss of life...

"In December 1975, the chief of the CIA station in Athens was gunned down on his doorstep by three members of the 17 November Group, a far-left urban guerrilla terrorist organization after his cover as a member of the CIA was publicized"

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

After tactical intelligence matters, the next dev diary will dive into "Strategic Materials" - see you on November 26th!

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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"Hectic atmosphere of flaps and crises is normal for direct espionage unit" - Chief of CIA station in Berlin, 1948

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's no spy fiction without sharp characters. Espiocracy, as a character-driven game, leans into this trope and places operatives behind most actions of the player. Operatives are closer to George Smiley than to James Bond - hard workers in the background rather than stars stealing the show, but they won't shy away from rare flashes of entertaining story arcs that we all cherish in spy genre.

[h2]Grand Level[/h2]

Operatives - also known as operators, officers, agents, spies* - are employees of intelligence services in the game. Agencies commonly have hundreds of them and the largest ones (CIA, KGB) can sport tens of thousands. To preserve grand level of the strategy, player interacts only with a group of the most valuable (top) operatives.



Primarily, they exert positive influence: improve outcomes of operations, enrich intelligence collection in a particular country, mentor other operatives, and so on.

Details of their activity depend on the position in two-dimensional map of intelligence expertise, from technological to human intelligence, and from counterintelligence to foreign espionage. This system represents design principle typical for Espiocracy - simple enough to understand at a glance, complex enough to allow emergent strategic situations. Here, by gardening proper roster of top operatives you can steer the agency into the direction of technological surveillance behemoth or into empire of human manipulation.

As the game is focused on interaction with external world, there is no micromanagement of internal affairs. Operatives are fairly autonomous, don't require constant stream of orders, and do their thing wherever they have been posted.

[h2]Interaction[/h2]

Operatives directly perform operations - from infiltration to assassination - which will be covered in a separate dev diary. It suffices to say that their involvement follows macromanagement and autonomy, for instance instead of skill paths, characters grow by doing (or fall into alcoholism after too many murders...).

Operatives can seek new opportunities and bring them to the table if they are interesting enough:



They rarely cause problems, but this game couldn't be called Espiocracy without this (rare) negative event:



[h2]Depth[/h2]

Depth dominates over breadth. There are multiple parameters instead of +X% traits. The actual traits are rare and cover exceptional attributes - such as PTSD.



These parameters are shaped by the world, grounded in events as they happened in the history (before 1946) and in the game (since 1946). If player's country is engaged in a war, you can expect that some veterans will end up as operatives and years later shore up in the group at the top. Local historical tidbits - such as names from the epoch or levels of illiteracy - are further increasing authenticity of characters.

Top operatives form a loose team. They socially interact and can form subgroups. There is synergy effect in like-minded group, but their efficiency can quickly get stale if kept without influx of different perspectives. Moreover, their views matter not only individually but also en masse, where for instance anti-Asian group of top operatives can hinder alliance with an agency from Asia.

Operatives are persistent over many years, also beyond the service. After leaving, they live in the world, either keeping low profile or becoming an influential actor who, say, writes books about espionage like Ian Fleming or... becomes the president like Vladimir Putin.

[h2]Behind The Scenes[/h2]

System of operatives went through many significant iterations. This dev diary presents elements that are well-tested, but it's certainly nowhere near final version.

It turns out that controllable human-like characters are pretty hard to get right in a strategy game. Extent of player's agency, required attention, detail of actions, positive and negative contributions, level of influence on the game world - all of these aspects amount to an intricate subject.

One of the largest - and most surprising - factors that requires subtle balance is... pre-gameplay player's perception. One of the early prototypes leaned more heavily into characters and led to the game being seen as "X-COM clone". Too large focus on management can quickly push the game into vicinity of tycoons. Too many numbers and sRPG players expect the attributes of this genre. As Espiocracy is, first and foremost, historical grand strategy game, the design of operatives aims to strike balance right between fun but not central and important enough.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

All screenshots are obviously early work, as can be inferred from the lack of icons.

The next dev diary "Units" will be posted on November 12th.

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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* - Meaning of terms "agent" and "spy" can vary widely. There are circles which use them to stress the difference between recruited foreign individuals and own operatives employed by the intelligence service. However, it remains semantically controversial, since, for instance, FBI employees are called agents and some services refer to their director as the top spy.

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"What do you think spies are? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and indians to brighten their rotten lives" - John le Carré