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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Welcome back,

In the second dev diary about guerrilla warfare in Espiocracy, we will focus on player agency - available actions, interactions between players, degrees of freedom. This very central lens of the development receives a lot of attention in prose of many dev diaries (#22 in particular). To spice up the agential focus by a notch, here we'll skip the prose altogether and jump straight to bullet points interspaced with screenshots that answer the most important question: what can you actually do in the game?

[h2]Counterinsurgency[/h2]

► Gameplay focused on grand strategic interventions and denial of future capabilities

► Spread defense between borders, population centers, critical infrastructure, transport networks

► Achieve degree of control over insurgents to push them towards particular actions



► Gather intelligence on incoming ambushes to evade and counterambush them

► Strike weapon flow and caches

► Search, destroy, and other SOF approaches

► Many approaches to propaganda, from false materials to radio stations

► Recruit, infiltrate, and other intelligence operations



► Capture and interrogate people

► Negotiate with intercepted saboteurs

► Cooperate with population centers, governors, and actors inside

► Establish resettlement camps

► Force relocation of entire villages

► Bounty and amnesty programs

► Destroy terrain, including the likes of Agent Orange

► Hunt down double agents among own ranks

► Deal with ill-disciplined acts and massacres, from trials to cover-ups

► Detect and intercept covert international support

► Loss of operatives as an opportunity to strike, pursue intelligence, or change sides



[h2]Insurgency[/h2]

► Sub-national gameplay parallel to decolonization

► Nudge participants towards objectives: ambushes, attrition, contesting terrain and cities

► Recruit people en masse



► Smuggle weapons

► Establish training camps and other structures



► Fortify conquered territory with tunnels, mines, and asymmetric weaponry

► Infiltrate law enforcement services and military

► Convince and coerce actors to support the cause



► Conquer prisons to free up captured rebels and acquire new members

► Provoke indiscriminate attacks of the other side to exploit anger in the population

► Negotiate ceasefire, concessions, withdrawals

► Procure international support

[h2]Other Combinations[/h2]

► Game over condition: loss of all operatives

► Fall back to partisan underground during occupation

► Infiltrate third-party conflict to gather intelligence and opportunities

► Back insurgency and counterinsurgency in the same conflict

► Send envoys and mediate negotiations



► Engage United Nations

► Become sanctuary for one of the sides

► Exploit lawless territories

► Beat the drum for third-party military intervention

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

As always, it's work in progress and after nth iteration there's always n+1.

The next dev diary will cover Conventional Wars, to be published on September 2nd.

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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"Warfare is no longer a matter of chivalry but of subversion, and subversion has its own special arsenal of tools and weapons" - Stanley Lovell, CIA officer

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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Before we proceed to the second part of mechanics making up guerrilla warfare in Espiocracy, we ought to take a detour - Guerrilla Warfare 1.5 - to explore a system that plays a vital role in conflicts and deserves a dev diary on its own (be warned: it's more dev and more diary than usually, as you can judge from this very long first sentence).

Some design questions look like mathematical challenges. Find Z for the following X and Y. Find the outcome of an operation executed by particular operatives against a particular target. Find the result of an ambush given such and such belligerents. Find consequences of a raid, battle, sweep, or negotiation rounds. Given enough similar questions, like in mathematics, human mind recognizes the pattern and solves not just a single example but a larger category, perfecting methods that are useful beyond the original set of problems. This is the simulation engine in Espiocracy.

It's easier to understand it by roughly following the path of development. Originally (7 months ago), operations such as assassination or recruitment ended with one of the five hardcoded outcomes. On paper because in practice players avoid negative consequences and usually cannot afford extremely positive results, narrowing down the outcomes to just two or three variants. Bummer, let's solve this!

1. We add additional non-exclusive outcomes (eg. you successfully recruited X but you left behind breadcrumbs that can endanger X)
   
2. These should logically originate from the course of action (eg. "1" caused by a careless meeting under the eye of surveillance)
   
3. Actions should be defined by other actions, including player decisions (eg. "2" caused by rushing to meet X in their homeland instead of waiting until X leaves the country on holidays)
   
4. Additional outcomes are no longer always additional, they sometimes should directly affect the main outcome (eg. "3" -> "2" -> "1" blowing up the cover and halting the final approach)
   

Then, we essentially arrive at chains of actions and outcomes, A -> B -> C. Steps and branching, classic approach in many video games, maybe a little bit more emergent than usually.

Here's where things start to get spicy: there's nothing that prohibits such a simulation from spawning more simulations. On the one hand, we can horizontally proceed from entire simulation A to entire simulation B, for instance from recruiting X to eliminating Y given opportunity, crafting full adventure as we go - the staple of great movies and books. On the other hand, we can vertically flesh out details of any action, adding depth at will. The final pitch during recruitment operation can become a simulation inside simulation, with the course of conversation determining the result and non-linear details, and then mother simulation picking up from its result to, say, pursue hastened exfiltration of an operative because they were seriously threatened during the conversation.

Given that not every interesting set of actions in Espiocracy is an operation, this engine was naturally extrapolated to other parts of the game. It became not only a useful tool for connecting many mechanics in one space but also an interesting design lens: it's not just a procedural generation of the environment (although it can be!), it's usually a competition between active entities, whether it's a car chase, conversation, or nuclear bombing. Generalizing the pattern even further, the engine is really a universal game, intentionally developed as a flexible and efficient von Neumann machine, with inspirations drawn from a wide ensemble of games such as go, football, Nethack, or C:DDA.

[h2]Example: Ambush[/h2]

At their core, most simulations generate organic results in the background. You can always inspect them (if you have appropriate intelligence).

Mockup of ambush simulation.

This ambush consisted of two simulations, macro (daily) level and final approach (minutes). Available actions and course of events depended mainly on available people and weapons. Precise details such as killed and wounded in action, surviving materiel, or even survivors fleeing the scene are determined minute by minute. One can easily imagine many different sequences of events - for instance, without a heavy machine gun and multiple injuries in one sweep, the battle could go on much longer with varied consequences such as more damage to vehicles, rear squad returning with reinforcements, one of the sides running out of ammo, leader killed in action, and so on. All of these are fed back to the world during simulation, changing existing world entities and creating new opportunities (eg. here POWs to be interrogated, exchanged, or even recruited).

[h2]Example: Operation[/h2]

Some simulations can be followed in a more hands-on fashion. Naturally, by default you observe in detail and interact with operations:



When a player participates as one of the sides in a simulation, these are the usual types of available agency:

• Changing objectives (eg. choosing a more attractive target that became available during operation)
  
• Time-related dynamics (eg. accelerating, pausing / staying low, aborting)
  
• Optional proactive actions (eg. many ways out, engaging other participants, using more costly methods)
  
• Reactions, sometimes also prompted by operatives (eg. discovered three leads - pursue A, B, or C)
  

We'll certainly return to details of operations in the future.

[h2]Example: Operative Backstory[/h2]

A simulation can be also closer to procedural generation - they are currently used to invent backstories of intelligence operatives, which contribute to their views, traits, motivations, and vulnerabilities.



[h2]Simulationist Tangents[/h2]

In the next dev diary, we'll see more places and modes of interaction with simulations. We will be also returning to them in the future, since simulations find their use also in significant political changes (eg. coup d'etat), interactions between players (eg. negotiations between intelligence agencies), rare events, and so on.

Among unusual uses (tested, not universally implemented at the moment), simulations take part in the Monte Carlo approach to AI - hundreds of runs featuring decision P and then decision Q can be compared by outcomes to provide statistical aid, not only universal between simulation types but also potentially predicting wider strategic choices (that's right, simulation approximating entire Espiocracy). This surely requires a very efficient engine, so let's peek under the hood to see one of the optimizations.

From the get-go, the number of available events/steps was recognized as a possible significant bottleneck. If we want really detailed simulations, they should feature hundreds of probabilistic checks as frequently as possible, and if every one more event/step decreases performance, designers and modders would be outright punished for fleshing out depth - an antithesis to the engine's purpose. This issue is also present in the whole game with thousands of grand-strategy-style events multiplied by dozens of players. Although the latter can be usually sidestepped by distributing checks in time (eg. a dozen of different checks every day), it doesn't work for dynamic and relatively short simulation where anything should be available at any tick. Solution? Balanced binary search trees with probabilistic weights updated externally (on change of factors), nodes rotated for optimal search lengths, and then performing usually a single check per tick for all events.

Removing a node from a balanced binary search tree. Attribution: Nomen4Omen

As with most optimizations, it doesn't exactly eliminate the bottleneck, and instead just moves it into a more convenient place - in this case away from the number of events/steps towards much less frequent and less important probability updates. Here's a practical comparison of two approaches, standard vs tree-based, nicely illustrating O(n) vs O(log n) increase in computational complexity:



Even for the vanilla case of 100^3, we're looking at a performance increase from 24 cycles per second to 61 cycles per second, and this does not include other optimizations such as concurrent simulation runs or reuse of similar trees. More importantly, beyond 100^3, designers of simulations are no longer (severely) punished for expanding the number of events or steps.

[h2]Modding[/h2]

Speaking of designers, simulation engine is a prime example of modding capabilities in Espiocracy. You can modify any existing type of simulation, create new ones, and attach them to most of the mechanics and interactions. This is a good excuse to now get really technical.

Type (blueprint) of simulation is defined by XMLs describing:

• Phases of simulation (eg. preparation, final approach, return - just a guidance instead of limitation, they can be easily shuffled during simulation)
  
• Roles and sources of participants (eg. an intelligence agency and a target)
  
• "Capabilities" of participants (eg. surveillance skills - mostly fixed parameters calculated from properties of participants)
  
• "Developments" of participants (eg. trust - parameters developed or decreased during simulation, serving also as flexible memory)
  
• "Objectives" of participants (eg. recruitment, guides autonomous agents and AI, can be null or changed during simulation)
  
• Available "actions" assigned to roles (initiated by one of the participants, eg. intelligence agency meeting the target)
  
• Possible events, simulation-wide and role-specific (happening to but not initiated by)
  
• Optional display details
  
• Setup sequence
  

As you can probably guess, actions form the beating heart of a simulation, suggesting a design lens again, this time: progress usually stems from active agents doing things, not just from sitting and waiting. Their various types are defined by a plethora of parameters (from temporal configuration to tactical intelligence requirements) and many possible effects. On start, when active, or on finish they can:

• Modify capabilities and developments
  
• Directly change probability of events
  
• Launch branches of parallel actions (non-interruptive, resolved outside the main thread)
  
• Launch another action from a probabilistically weighted set (with weights calculated from base value, capabilities, and developments)
  
• Expose a set of reactions, available to defined participants (including the player)
  
• Do just about anything because you can always attach a callback to another function in the game
  

Generally, simulations start with all participants launching a "background" action type appropriate for the role and the phase. In a usual operation, an intelligence agency starts with preparation in the background, the target - unaware of the battle - starts with simple enough "daily life" action in the background, and counterintelligence services go about their usual surveillance activities until they discover something suspicious. These background actions are always present and serve as the hook for an active agent in the simulation, with attached decisions (eg. approach the target or take a vacation), probabilistic steps, progress over time, and so on. When another action is launched, it can branch off as much as you want it to, including launching another simulation.

According to tests so far, this is an advanced enough system (a lot was refactored away) to simulate the gist of most competitions in the world. One of the examples, written for fun in one evening, is a very simple football match engine!

You probably have heard about programmer art but did you hear about programmer logs? Here you already get a seed of (sport) story from this simulation: after 1:1 in the first half, Blues quickly scored after the half-time, and then Reds reacted with two subs which led them to score the equalizer. Now just plug it into an event about West German - East German match...

This is how it roughly looks in the setup:



And from the perspective of the background action:



Note that it's the simplest possible approach - demonstrating how easy it is to boot up a new kind of simulation, and then how it can be elegantly fleshed out to hundreds of actions and events. With regular fallback to background action and unlimited connections between actions, it's also not as scary as it sounds, since we're not really designing a convoluted quest tree and instead we are closer to electric circuits or pseudoprogramming (and if these sound scary, check out quest trees even for fairly linear RPGs).

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

Now we're ready for continuation on guerrilla warfare - see you on August 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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"Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you are trying to do and perhaps find a solution. Now in so doing you may have stripped away the problem you're after. You may have simplified it to the point that it doesn't even resemble the problem that you started with; but very often if you can solve this simple problem, you can add refinements to the solution of this until you get back to the solution of the one you started with." - Claude Shannon

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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Modern guerrilla warfare was born between the 1930s and 50s, maturing right around the start date of Espiocracy.

Spectacular successes of insurgencies and revolutions - from Yugoslavia to Cuba - and dramatic failures of counterinsurgencies - from Indochina to Afghanistan - solidified popular uprisings as a nation-forming tool. These conflicts were often anything but clear, a stark contrast to pleasant war rooms of WW2. Here, irregular combatants were virtually invisible, cycling between hideouts and hit-and-runs, silently winning over villages, and corrupting local security forces. This messiness is common for most Cold War conflicts, where insurgencies erupted in reaction to other successful insurgencies, irregular forces evolved into conventional armies, military organizations employed guerrilla tactics, foreign states used civilians as disposable agents of influence, and the fire of civil wars ravaged entire countries for many years.

This developer diary marks the start of series about armed conflicts in the game. Today we begin at the most elemental level: conflicts where combatants can be indistinguishable from civilians. We will take a look at the general structure and course of guerrilla conflicts. Player agency and interactions are largely omitted - they will receive a separate developer diary.

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How did we go from this...

Lawrence of Arabia, frame from the 1962 movie

...to this...

Situation in Afghanistan around 2009. It's not as bad as it looks, the original presentation breaks that into 30 slides: http://www.willreno.org/Afghanistan_Dynamic_Planning.pdf

...in eighty years?

As per usual with Espiocracy, we begin by poking human psychology. What convinces ordinary people, civilians, to take up arms and risk their life?

[h2]Causes[/h2]

People need real reasons to volunteer. Usually, guerrilla conflicts in the game are propelled by multiple fundamental causes:

• Government perceived as illegitimate (eg. after a coup)
  
• Ethnic and historic self-determination
  
• Opposition to foreign interference
  
• Ideology (usually communist or anti-communist)
  
• Religious beliefs
  
• Severe political repression
  
• Economic crisis
  
• Power vacuum
  
• Weak opponents
  
• Access to tools of irregular warfare
  

The conflict starts in minds of people who wage whether violence can substantially improve their situation.

Sometimes people judge insurgency as not possible at all - postwar Germany is good example of a population that probably won't wind up in wider guerrilla warfare. Exhausted and starved crowds, fed by strong occupation authorities, receiving promises of rebuilding severely bombed country - they are not keen on assisting Werwolf or even opposing forced expulsion from western Poland. Moreover, large propaganda campaigns, enormous POW camps, widespread judicial and military actions were further proving that any resistance would be truly futile.

Other times, armed resistance can be possible but people usually require the last spark(s) to begin armed struggle. This may be a reaction to political change (which includes anything from lost elections to the death of the leader), widely popularized event (for instance activists killed by the government), introduction of highly controversial policy, or protests evolving into violence.

There is no arbitrary first day of a conflict. Fights can silently escalate, under the guise of criminal activities, beyond the control of local police forces, and lead to the loss of first villages and entities. Ultimately, population is funneling their will to fight via ubiquitous system of actors, which here focus on political parties creating military wings (like SWAPO), armed organizations (such as many postwar partisan movements), and obviously state actors.

[h2]Indirect Conflict[/h2]

There are two main resources acquired and spent in guerrilla wars.

People - recruited, trained, and fed. Even if the population widely sympathizes with the causes, organizations have to put a lot of effort into recruitment (historically, there were for instance only 7,000 insurgents for 1 million supporters of the Malayan Emergency). Low numbers mean that losing any of them can be noticeable. In addition to vital members, wider popular support provides food and hideouts for insurgents - or lack of these when people remain loyal to the other side. Last but not least, population is also a priceless source of intelligence for all sides of the conflict.

Weapons - acquired, stored, distributed, resupplied with ammunition. Their flow across borders, transport networks, and caches is directly simulated, which creates emergent defensive challenges and opportunities to strike for all sides. Postwar abundance of weapons favors civil wars early in the game but so do regional conflicts (leading to very practical waves of irregular wars), black market, or mass production of the iconic AK-47.

In a cycle of sorts, insurgents procure people and weapons and use them to get more people and weapons. At the same time, state actors try to deny access to people and weapons. Needless to say, actions constantly influence both factors in many dimensions, for instance, indiscriminate attacks or ill-disciplined members can anger the population whereas protection of villages against them can earn the support of local people.

Indirect competition is extrapolated into the wider game world. All kinds of neutral actors can be brought over to one of the sides with promises, protection, coercion, and alignment with the causes. Usually, they are more or less opportunistic, deciding which side promises better favors and has a higher chance to actually implement them (by winning the war) but these loyalties are highly fluid. Naturally, support extends far into the international world, with countries providing training, sanctuaries, and weapons. Here, borders take an extremely important role, with access to the border of an ally often making an entire difference between victory and defeat.

[h2]Direct Conflict[/h2]

The precise course of the war - establishing camps, conducting ambushes, raids, battles, patrols, sweeps, cordons, aerial campaigns, and other tactics - depends on multiple factors. In addition to people and weapons spent on attacks, local terrain plays critical role. Mountains, jungles, and forests provide necessary hideouts. Dense countryside can serve as a powerful base of members and defines main targets in the conflict (eg. compare Indonesian National Revolution in a country with 15% urbanization - to Cuban Revolution on an island urbanized in 60%). In more motorized countries, transport networks become common and very useful targets, providing and denying supplies.

Clashes between asymmetric belligerents or factions of civil war are tied to the notion of contested territories and cities. Without conventional army and law enforcement services, it's usually difficult to control vast liberated areas. This is true also for the state apparatus under pressure that leads governors to spread their forces thin. Oftentimes, one or more sides focus simply on undermining authority over the territories of their opponents. Failure to protect controlled territories may introduce the feeling of helplessness and betrayal, that can quickly turn into action motivated by the sheer need to survive, leading to entire villages, police units, and companies changing sides in exchange for safety.

Guerrilla warfare is the queen of ambiguous decisions. Villagers punished by the state are angered both at the government (as punishment is usually collective, indiscriminate, and/or based on false intelligence) and the insurgents (for lack of sufficient protection and being the ultimate cause of punishment). Patrolling activities can very risky and poor for morale (lowering for instance enlistment rates), especially in environments such as jungles, but lack of pronounced state presence breeds insurgency. Introduced repressions push the government into a spiral of harsher and harsher policies, in the fear that concessions would suggest weakness and grant legitimacy to the insurgents. Use of corrupted officials with poor morale - or mercenaries and foreign volunteers - can prove disastrous for the popular reception but can be necessary for the progress in combat.

[h2]Spoils of Guerrilla War[/h2]

Most irregular conflicts are about attrition that wears off capabilities of all sides over years. Unlawful combatants are generally too weak to push for decisive battles. Unless state authorities flee (which is often the case) or negotiate a peace deal (usually when the body count becomes too high), the main road to victory lies in conventionalization. This can happen in multiple ways:

• Establishment of state-like administration and military order (eg. communists in the Greek Civil War)
  
• Acquisition of heavy weapons (eg. Viet Minh in the First Indochina War)
  
• Conventional army units surrendering and joining the insurgents (eg. 2021 in Afghanistan)
  
• Creation of air and navy units (eg. Yugoslav partisans)
  
• Inviting foreign army, possibly under disguise (eg. little green men in Donbas)
  

The boundary between irregular and regular warfare is not sharp. A new conventional army can work alongside volunteering partisans - and, vice versa, a national conventional army in retreat or under occupation can resort to underground combat.

It's not required to conquer or hold the capital for any of the sides. Although it can lead to decapitation of government, generally governments do evacuate, and other sides can make any city a new capital of their self-proclaimed state. Further consequences of such a conflict play out equally on the ground - by rebuilding security infrastructure, preventing secondary insurgencies, disarming the population - and in the sphere of diplomacy, where international recognition can solidify the new status quo.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

In summary and as a follow-up to the Afghanistan graph:



The next dev diary, Guerrilla Warfare II will explore mainly the interaction and player agency.

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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"War upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife" - Thomas Edward Lawrence

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