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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This is probably the most frequently asked question about Espiocracy: is the game more about espionage or more about the Cold War?

Although the or is not exclusive, this question often is asked in a less suggestive way, lined with the fear that it's "just a spy game" instead of a sufficiently complex Cold War grand strategy game. My answer - which did evolve over almost two years of development - is usually along the lines of: it's a game about the Cold War from the perspective of espionage. This point of view, instead of subverting gameplay, enriches it in many fantastic ways and is in my opinion critical step in actually capturing the essence of the Cold War ([1], [2], [3]...).

However, deep down in my heart, I'm fine with Espiocracy being (viewed as) just a spy game. The very best craftsmanship is dedicated to espionage mechanics - to make them stand out on their own, to provide strategic and immersive gameplay like no other game. In today's dev diary, we'll return to that part of the game, exploring the core mechanic of espionage: intelligence operations.

(As always, a "2.0" dev diary is not a patch note, you don't have to be familiar with the previous one. Enjoy!)

[h2]The Big Picture[/h2]

In the full UX flowchart of the game, operations occupy large and central area:



There are currently 8 (!) entry points leading into this world - eight distinct ways to launch an operation, from selecting actors to approving recommendations. By design, it follows a hierarchy of attention: the player can designate just a general operation category (eg. "eliminate X, I don't care how"), choose a particular operation type (eg. "murder would cause too much fuss, X should be expelled"), or go into nitty gritty of tactical approaches (eg. "burn agent Y to distance ourselves from the manufactured evidence").



In the spirit of Wittgenstein, operations in the game are defined by shared properties, not only inside categories but also in general. All operations have a target - influential actors, or any human, organization, or object (which means for instance that you can assassinate a witness, and then silence a witness of the previous witness' assassination). Among other universal properties of operations, all of them use prospective outcome which is a 0-10 score summarizing complex factors in one easily understood number. In the previous dev diary, it was tied to probabilities but this is no longer the case (more on that in the next section), as the current prospective outcome is more of a guidance that is both descriptive (takes into account factors that may become important in the simulation) and causal (influences paths taken by the simulation, especially the final attempt at achieving the objective). Here's the combination of targets, scores, categories, and types in the wild:



Once an operation is launched, it can be handled autonomously by operatives but it (again, by the same design principle) oozes with optional player agency. Available decisions include:

• Meaningful temporal dynamics - operational pause means staying low for some time and losing the tail, whereas aborting the operation may require a daring escape
  
• Reactions - operatives asking the player to choose one of the few approaches, options, spend resources, or resolve issues
  
• Calls (example below, note that they aren't fixed and evolve during operations) - modifying the operation, covers, priorities, or choosing A over B in trade-offs
  

As Mark Rosewater, a veteran designer of Magic the Gathering said: "Be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them!".

[h2]Simulations Upon Simulations[/h2]

Hairy dev diary about simulations already spilled the beans about the new shape of operations. To recap in a more literate manner, every operation spawns its own simulation, characteristic for the category and type, which proceeds step-by-step towards the final attempt at achieving the objective, which is usually resolved by at least one other (sub-)simulation. For instance, a recruitment operation progresses day-by-day through preparation, intelligence gathering, preceding meetings, all the way to the final recruitment pitch which is simulated minute-by-minute (beware, radioactive work-in-progress interface):



Practically, the availability and quality of the operational culmination depend on parameters such as tactical intelligence or trust, so operatives increase them through continuous (eg. surveillance) and discrete (eg. breaking in) actions.

That's it. This simple idea, however, contains the entire universe of emergent simulations - hundreds of possible steps and events, actions depending on anything from operative's traits to carried gear, conversation simulation flowing into car chase simulation flowing into shootout simulation, operation A launching operation B, involvement and interactions between many types of participants (journalists, police officers, or even third-party actors)...

[h2]A Game of Information[/h2]

Espionage is about information - who's who, what's happening, why it happens. Espiocracy tries to capture this angle in many mechanics (such as secrets or coup plots) but one of the most, I have to use this word, brazen implementations lies at the heart of operations.

Sticking with the word "participant" introduced in the previous section (unofficial term, that's just how these variables are called in the code), classic operations have three participants: attacking intelligence agency, target, and defending (counterintelligence) agency. However, participants may not know about each other, identity, motivations, or even about particular actions!



Each participant has the parameter of situational intelligence, increased via actions much like other parameters. Zero means no knowledge of the operation - targets and counterintelligence start with 0. First suspicions or rumors slightly increase it, then passive and active probing, acquisition of evidence or even direct contacts raise it further. As with any other parameter, it can be also changed externally in both directions, for instance leaving a false trace may decrease the intelligence of other participants, whereas poor tradecraft or reckless behavior might up it for others.

The strength of the cover and analogous factors determine how much situational intelligence is required to uncover a particular participant's what, who, and how:

• What - knowledge about the existence of a participant of a particular type
  
• Who - identification of the participant
  
• How - methods, objectives, and progress toward them
  

Furthermore, every action has an inherent requirement for situational intelligence, with half of this number required to see the existence of (blacked out) action at all, and values below that hiding completely the action.

Now, on to much-needed practical examples. Three primary perspectives:

1. As an attacking agency (eg. you try to recruit the target), you start with minimal but steadily increasing situational intelligence. Logically, you don't need situational intelligence to know the details of your operation but it will be useful in spotting (and reacting to) the actions of the target. Moreover, as the counterintelligence service starts sniffing, the higher the situational intelligence, the faster you'll know they're on to you. Although the "who" level here is irrelevant (usually a country has a single CI agency), it's critical to get to the "how" level and get a look into their progress (race with time on many levels) and objectives (eg. huge difference between interception that may just lead to silent expulsion vs ambush with possible casualties, arrests, long-term loss of operatives, diplomatic scandal, etc). Moreover, the full what-who-how path applies to other participants, for instance, press or police forces getting involved.
   
2. As a counterintelligence agency (eg. someone tries to recruit an actor in your country), you start with no knowledge of the operation. Usually, in the course of regular surveillance, you get a wind that something is brewing - an operation category, a target, or an agency, depending on calculated required levels of situational intelligence, which is communicated in appropriate notification. Then, counterintelligence operatives pursuing leads increase the situational intelligence to uncover any of the following: target's what (eg. a political leader), who (eg. actor X), and how (their stance and actions); attacking agency's what (eg. from country Y), who (eg. agency X; may be irrelevant), and how (their objectives, methods, progress, actions); other participants. All of these also directly contribute to available decisions and methods, sometimes like dominoes, for instance discovering the involvement of the press allows the player to pressure them into revealing situational intelligence collected by them which in turn reveals details on other participants.
   
3. As a target (eg. someone tries to recruit your operative; the targeted player also controls counterintelligence so you can pull off an operational game with two entities simultaneously), you also start with no knowledge about the operation. Generally, targets remain more or less clueless until the final approach (or until a major slip-up of the attacking agency), during which situational intelligence is immediately boosted above what-who-how levels, with the exception of active covers.
   

For the sake of readability, I omitted active covers in the examples up to the last sentence. Active cover is false what-who-how which overrides required levels of situational intelligence. It's an expensive approach to an operation, where a participant (usually an attacking agency) can hide under the cover of another why, another who, or even another what such as the press, with the entourage of false actions, false objectives, and decisions (eg. change objective for a false-cover-agency while pursuing another real objective).

[h2]Behind The Scenes[/h2]

► At some point in development, operations were also launchable against any process in the game world but it was a tad too abstract, especially with the activity and what-who-how of participants. The UX option remains ("fund a coup") but mechanically it's always about entities engaged in the process, in this case, funding coup plotters.

► Among other tested & shelved ideas, I temporarily implemented the use of situational intelligence even for operations launched by the player. Instead of inherently knowing what our operatives did, they would first have to communicate that to the player - with the ability to manipulate the communication (a.k.a. lie). This was mainly tested in the context of conversations, where contents would be generally hidden from the player, except for the parts revealed by the operative during debriefing. It turned out to be too much of a balancing & debugging pain in comparison to gameplay gain, at least for now - and redundant to better mechanics that handle operatives going rogue.

► "Infiltration" is not the best word to describe break-ins or wiretaps but alternatives ("penetration", "intrusion") work even worse as nouns and verbs in the UI...

► Operations, in a way, are at the forefront of Espiocracy's game design. They are prone to difficult bugs, degenerate strategies, poor UX, or beautifully collapsing simulations. In some cases they resemble a Rubik's cube - the entire game has to be slightly shifted to solve operational issues. As an example of such a case, early prototypes evoked strong fear of missing out on opportunities to launch interesting operations. This was mitigated not only by the improvement of UX and introducing new features (such as, literally, "opportunity" mechanic) but also by shifting code architecture to allow efficient & automatic & regular calculations for all possible prospective outcomes, both for the human player and for the AI. This in turn, initially created an obvious degenerate strategy (regularly launch all the ops with top scores), so new features and shifts followed here. Then, this strategic complexity proved to be challenging for a standard approach to AI, so I started working on an unusual AI system that can handle such operations. Then... you get the picture.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

Operations will definitely receive "3.0" DD in the future, not only because I'm constantly working on them but also because I still didn't mention quite a few interesting angles (such as operatives traveling on the map, operations with evolving objectives, or post-operational fallout).

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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"Challenge between intelligent people on both sides" - Aleksander Makowski, a spy who tracked UBL, on what makes intelligence operations thrilling

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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"Elephant in the room" is one of my favorite English idioms. Game development seems to be filled to the brink with such elephants - important features that should be addressed but were pushed to the side. I've been using this phrase frequently enough to coin the abbreviation "EITR" in the design notes.

After addressing significant EITR two weeks ago (precise gameplay progression), it's time to meet its sister EITR: the economy. This dev diary, however, is not titled The Economy because the system developed to flexibly represent economic factors turned out to be a fantastic framework for a much wider game world. Now, the economy is just one of the 8 sectors of national assets.

Assets in Espiocracy represent infrastructure and objects of national importance. They are passive (non-actors!), exist on the map, provide local effects, can be developed or destroyed, sometimes even stolen. The player, an intelligence agency, has a few modes of interaction with them, but assets primarily are an orchestra in the background, playing a symphony of differences between countries.

Let's jump straight into examples to get the gist of the system.

[h2]Examples of Assets[/h2]

Deposits are the prime type of national asset. There are three types of deposits: fossil fuel, strategic minerals, and uranium ore. Originally (unless the 1946 situation was different), these assets are dormant, located in predetermined areas on the map, and have defined depth/size of 1 to X, relative to other deposits around the world. A state or private entities can invest into upgrading them to extraction facilities, which then enable internal effects such as driving the expansion of civilian infrastructure, and international tools such as an ability to sign trade agreements or enact embargoes.

As a part of mentioned civilian infrastructure, we can look into electricity. It's an asset measured in national coverage from 0% to 100%+, representing popular access to the electric grid (with a surplus over 100 generating international income). Its effects are a not-yet-refined web of influences on other assets and aspects of the game world, including for instance changing the spread of dissent, following the example of North Korea literally keeping people in the dark.

For a more unusual national asset, let's discuss significant works of art. The game features internationally known pieces as physical objects, which are protected, can change hands, or be destroyed. Some of them can be even a matter of diplomatic dispute - for instance, collections of the British Museum. These assets are represented both as concrete named entities (eg. the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin) and in abstract numbers (eg. 2,000 historical paintings). Instead of passive effects, they have intrinsic value (can be stolen by actors, including the player, and sold on the black market), also in terms of the status quo (eg. loss of a significant piece after a break-in can lead to changes in police forces).

[h2]Full Landscape[/h2]

Current full landscape of assets, subject to change:



This system combines in a simple leap quite a few interesting contexts:

• Postwar damage and theft (eg. many European countries start with severely damaged cities, airports, etc)
  
• International control (eg. Czechoslovak and East German uranium deposits are de facto controlled by the USSR)
  
• Economic ownership (a subtle attempt at modeling differences between a command economy and capitalism, we'll see how detailed it will be)
  
• Development over the course of the 20th century and beyond (eg. electrification)
  
• True motivation for destruction (eg. terrorists targeting concrete significant buildings)
  
• Famines, shortages, and other crises
  
• War targets and spoils of war
  
• Counterintelligence of critical infrastructure
  
• Actors originating from non-acting sectors (eg. an inventor from strong academia or a political leader from local government structures)
  
• Pretty wide modding opportunities
  

Development of some assets is driven by the population (eg. changes in the city size). Others need a direct investment of the government (eg. new seaport) which is handled by a mass negotiation mechanic: government members, including the player, propose upgrades, developments, rebuilding, and establishment. These propositions make it to a single list, where they are backed by the influence of proposing actors divided by the magnitude of expenses. In alignment with interests and other views, some actors may vouch for expanding housing whereas others may push for funding economic incentives. Top propositions inside the spending scope are then implemented.

[h2]Behind The Scenes[/h2]

► The sheet with asset types includes only somewhat tested and implemented ones. I'm experiment with a few other interesting types such as average kcal intake, riverine transport, or currency strength.

► Technically, national assets evolved from actors. For a long time, I struggled with representing anything close to an economic system based on the very limited number of actors (eg. two top companies in the country). What's worse, these actors didn't meaningfully act, taking the place of more interesting actors. That doesn't mean however that economic entities are completely inactive - they are now represented by more personal actors, such as business leaders, who have more logical & interesting actions, and even expand decision space (eg. business leaders may be subverted by affecting their economic assets).

► The system, in its simplicity, explores an interesting gamedev riddle. Where should we place the boundary between hardcoding and flexibility? The former is much faster to develop (at least in a complex strategy game) but it's not only a matter of making mechanics as flexible as time allows - as I've seen in a few iterations, mechanics can be too flexible, become bland, interchangeable, throw the player into the Euro-gaming pit of the same ten games with slightly different themes. At the moment, national assets are implemented by highly flexible code (modders can basically replace all data points, including all sectors) but for the purposes of interconnected gameplay, it slowly contracts into less flexible form (eg. requiring the transport sector to build transport graph). It's like a live experiment in approximating the most optimal position of hardcoded-flexible boundary.

► Some features were directly inspired by high-quality discussions on our discord server. Thanks, folks!

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

Naturally, all national assets can be targeted in intelligence operations such as infiltration, subversion, sabotage, or even cooperation (for instance with foreign underworld!). Moreover, they create a very palpable environment for all indirect actions, where for instance operatives land in a newly built airport, use a reconstructed seaport in a smuggling network, or utilize a denser road network to exfiltrate an agent by car. This will be the topic of the next dev diary - Operations 2.0 on December 9th.

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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"Germany's war potential should be reduced by elimination and removal of her war industries and the reduction and removal of heavy industrial plants. (...) The plants so to be removed were to be delivered as reparations to the Allies" - J.F. Byrnes, US Secretary of State, 1946

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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(This dev diary is more dev and more diary than usual)

How do you precisely achieve progress in a game of Cold War intrigue?

Better yet, to invoke a one-liner decorating walls of my office: in a full psychological Cold War intrigue maturely exploring espionage, nuclear strategy, ideologies, politics, and conflicts. How do you measure goals in that, what are the main resources, how do you weave feedback loops, and what's the tick-to-tick strategizing in the game?

This should be probably the topic of the first or the second dev diary. Instead, it was described briefly a year ago in the 8th DD, and then mentioned only between the lines. The reason is simple: elemental progression and basic resources are so fundamental to the game that I was in the middle of the endless cycle of implementations, playtests, and course corrections. Reconnaissance-in-force. We could follow Mozilla versioning scheme and discuss Intelligence Agencies 52.0 instead of 2.0.



The answer, on the surface, is surprisingly simple: as the player in Espiocracy, you're the master of people and funds.



These are further divided into a set of 6-18+ basic resources used by every player.

[h2]Money[/h2]

Espiocracy leans into the plethora of interesting contexts - from origin to legality - around money. While this aspect is kept mathematically simple (make no mistake, it's far from a money-heavy management game!), the game world, much like our real world, essentially revolves around cash.

The player, as an intelligence community of a single country, has a set of contributors who monthly subsidize the intelligence enterprise in exchange for access to intelligence reports. In a typical case, these are Department of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Department of Justice. The extent of funding depends on the departmental budget (stemming from the total state budget which in turn is extrapolated from SPI) multiplied by an unorthodox parameter of "trust and need", separately tracked for every contributor.

SPI (State Power Index) is a purely competitive parameter, increased by overtaking other nations in almost any measurable aspect of the game world, be it quality of the military or shape of the economy. The player has limited indirect influence on SPI (for instance by conducting military or economic espionage) - it's more of an asymmetric landscape between nations than a basic vehicle of progression.

In contrast, trust and need are directly controlled by the player. Trust, naturally, is gained through operational successes and lost after failures. Stealing blueprints of strategic weapons increases the trust of military circles, whereas failure to prevent a terrorist attack decreases trust across the board. Here's also where things get interesting - the same parameter tracks also the need for intelligence. Terrorist attacks definitely increase the need, as do regional wars, international tension, or hostile activities. By combining these two aspects into the same coin, Espiocracy explores the uneasy inflection point between real fear and fear-mongering, between failing upwards and making yourself obsolete by being too good. This paradox was the bane of worldwide intelligence funding which peaked around 1989 and was dramatically slashed just a few years later, rendering many intelligence professionals no longer needed... Find what you love and let it kill you.

Contributions, counted in millions of dollars (usually with an accuracy of $0.1M), are divided into three pools: operational, restricted, and illicit. An operational account accumulates the main legal resource - money that can be spent on expansion, improvements, agents, bribes, special operations, and so on. Restricted funds are dedicated to particular areas, for instance American player receives restricted funds from the Department of Justice which can be spent only on the expansion of the FBI. Illicit money comes from breaking the law on the ground, shady contributors, and covert governmental programs along the lines of Iran-Contra. The last kind of pool can be spent only on already covert activities (eg. bribes), more overt expenses (such as hiring staff) first require laundering illicit funds into an operational account.

At the heart of spending money in Espiocracy sits a radical solution: upkeep is abstracted away, all expenses are one-time expenses. Players don't babysit monthly changes in account balance because there is no maintenance cost. Instead of worrying about salaries, you spend money on a hiring campaign that brings in X new operatives. Lore-wise, salaries and other upkeep costs are handled by contributors (you're a part of state apparatus, not a business, after all) but fuzzy explanations aside, it makes for very fluent gameplay with swift feedback loops, skipping straight to the fun, and moving anti-snowballing mechanics into the vicinity of competitive challenges (eg. more operatives means larger attack surface for foreign infiltration).

Speaking of which, contributors form a kind of contributor economy which takes the role of (also) a negative feedback loop, traditionally implemented by upkeep costs. Symmetrically to large successes rewarded with an injection of money, large failures may require covering the damages (eg. of a diplomatic incident). Further significant loss of trust and need leads also to discrete "downsizing" events, where the player has to single out scapegoats, cut down the staff and sprawl in general, to regain the trust. If that fails (or the loss of trust is dramatic), it may lead to the reform (large changes in the structure of the intelligence community, along with purges and downsizing in general), or even loss of contributors. Changes in the composition of contributors can also happen along political changes - for instance authoritarian one-party systems may feature The Party as the main contributor, some totalitarian countries love overarching Ministries of Internal Affairs that heavily depend on the intelligence community, and small democratic states may almost completely do not care about intelligence, leaving it to a single governmental body such as President's Office.

[h2]Staff[/h2]

People form the second half of resources in the game. Almost all tasks are implemented directly by the staff. You can get by (temporarily) without money but falling to 0 operatives is a game-over condition.

The bulk of staff consists of regular operatives - working mechanically as a currency with internal dynamics. Regular operatives are divided into agencies (eg. for British player there are three separate pools of regular operatives: MI6, MI5, GCHQ), hired with funds, and then (somewhat cynically) thrown in numbers at issues, operations, expansion, and other actions. Each pool is characterized by an average tradecraft level which is increased by training, improvements, engagements on the ground, cooperation with more skillful players, and allows classic quantity vs quality decisions. In addition, regular operatives have limited but impactful office life that includes spontaneous factions forming around views and ideologies, even up to said faction potentially refusing actions, pressing demands, going rogue, or defecting.

Beyond regular intelligence officers, players develop specialized operatives in cycles similar to classic technology trees of other strategy games, with the addition of irregular mandatory investments. Currently (subject to change) there are 12 capabilities - optional specializations:

• Social Engineering
  
• Politics and Diplomacy
  
• Science and Technology
  
• Business and Economy
  
• Media and Culture
  
• Digital Devices
  
• Guerrilla Warfare
  
• Military
  
• Direct Combat
  
• Criminal Investigations
  
• Philosophy
  
• Deep State
  

They are tied to many contexts in the game world: directly contributing to operations (eg. securing better evidence for espionage trial), unlocking available structures and tools (eg. paramilitary training camps tied to guerrilla warfare), influencing events encountered by the player (eg. leaning more into politics or more into military), feeding into asymmetric positions (eg. British player starting with highly developed direct combat thanks to commando experiences in WW2), mirroring the population (eg. less literate countries having a hard time expanding more sophisticated capabilities), and so on.

And then we have top operatives who already received larger separate dev diary. In this, close to the final, iteration of basic resources, top operatives are slightly more impactful operatives who can be both proficient at tradecraft and specialized in a few capabilities. They are definitely not hero units, their main role still belongs to the storytelling layer, but they are embedded in the progression with rather an unconventional mix of mechanics. Instead of the standard choose one out of three random character cards known from many other strategy games involving characters, new operatives are created by the player from a set of positive and negative traits that use a pool of points, not far from character creation in C:DDA. You can increase the number of available points by choosing an alcoholism trait and spending the excess on higher specific skills - or invent a candidate less skilled at the moment but having cheap large potential for the future. As with all other resources, these points will be tied to local contexts and the game world, namely by different weights of the traits. Although it is a departure from the usual realism-first approach, this mode of player agency and flavorful strategic decisions that influence the next decades of storytelling is too good to not feature in the game.

[h2]Behind The Scenes[/h2]

► Implemented, tested, and dropped ideas included various mana pools (from political influence to approvals in blanco), realistic fiscal years (yearly popup with budget negotiation, yay), worktime of operatives as the primary currency (sort of action points but in real-time), full bookkeeping experience along the lines of Football Manager, and even RPG-like progression in levels from 1 to 100 based on Fallout: New Vegas. Some were bad, some were acceptable, and some contributed features or themes to the current system.

► What about intelligence? Is there an information economy? Yes, it exists but not globally - it has ephemeral, local, discrete value. Experiments on resources included many different approaches to the quantification of intelligence, from counting the number of produced reports to chasing numerical requirements posed by the government, but they all reduced the game to euro-gamish manager of an intelligence mill (and as a bonus, were biased, confusing, and too often broke immersion). In later iterations, I consciously replaced quantity of intelligence with quality. It's a wider question of what this game is about and the answer was never about production chains or chasing green numbers. A smaller or larger number of infiltrated actors doesn't matter when you rewrite history by stealing Khruschev's "Secret Speech", procuring uranium for your nuclear program, and pulling off a coup d'etat on your eternal enemy.

► Note on the realism: IRL state funding of intelligence agencies is diverse, murky, and full of contradictions. Aside from the riddle of representing state funding at all in a game (which is somewhat immersively solved by the simple equation of SPI x Trust and Need), there's an entire ordeal of policies, authorizations, approved items, programs, oversight, competition between departments, red tape, and so on. Some of that made to a game in the form of contributors but I cut off most of these to avoid developing a bureaucracy simulator. Yes, in some parts of the modern world spending money without all these points is a big no-no (until you scroll to the "Controversies" section on Wikipedia), but I'm not too subtle about players playing less as 2022 state enterprises and more as the middle of the Cold War, "we lost accounting books and this sum was spent to weed out traitors who tried to sabotage moon landing", espiocracies!

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

Next up, National Assets on November 25th.

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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"Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany, to bolster labor unions there. He tried undercover techniques to keep me from finding out how he spent it. But I had my own undercover techniques" - Thomas W. Braden, 1967

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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Biological and chemical weapons (BCW) are sometimes called poor man's atom bomb. According to a comparative analysis, BCW can inflict similar casualties as a nuclear bomb at 1/800 cost per square kilometer. This crude calculus pushed unorthodox nations - Canada, Rhodesia, Iraq - to develop their own programs and devise insane plans, such as Chile poisoning the water supply of Buenos Aires in case of an Argentinian invasion.

BCW integrate surprisingly many walks of geopolitical life - military, diplomacy, treaties, and political opinions. Usually, they are handled also more or less covertly and near intelligence agencies. Espiocracy utilizes the unusual player persona, an intelligence community, to allow direct engagement with BCW in the game world:



Their development will be one of the viable strategies for some countries and situations. Their existence, a forgotten threat that was taken seriously during the Cold War. Their cruelty, known but not condemned until treaties of the 70s and 90s arrived. Their proliferation, always problematic for both state and non-state actors up to the modern times.

[h2]Postwar Stockpiles and Progress[/h2]

WW2 has seen the production of BCW in enormous quantities. The game, starting in 1946, will feature these stockpiles as standard world entities on the map - they can be found, moved, stolen, used, or destroyed.

Most of these are already protected by the military and, following the history, soon to be destroyed (by dumping them in the sea). However, their proliferation can become an issue right at the start of the game, with some players even starting the game with active counterintelligence operations. Numerous armed organizations can try to solicit BCW and use them in devastating attacks, with the prime example of Nakam's operation to poison a camp for German prisoners of war in April 1946, which can be intercepted by American intelligence community operating in the occupied zone. (Starting historical positions can be randomized in the initial configuration, allowing the player to avoid the benefit of modern hindsight. Here, gradual randomization can change positions and size of stockpiles, the timing of Nakam operation, target, extent, or even various chances of dropping it and/or replacing it with a different operation.)

In a slight stretch of history, player's intelligence agency is responsible for the further eventual development of new BCW. As suggested by the screenshot, BCW reuse spy gear mechanics (in the meantime spy gear evolved into a more general inventory-like system):

• Modeled weapons include mustard gas, tabun, sarin, novichok, ricin, botulinum, anthrax
  
• Availability depends on developed capabilities (skill-like parameters and specialized staff of player's intelligence community)
  
• Development program requires budget, staff, and time - to research, test, create strategic materials such as blueprints, and establish production lines; after the initial phase, stockpile can be produced at much lower costs
  
• Engagement with BCW universally constitutes a secret (breach of policies/ethics/etc by the player that has to be protected, actively solicited by other players/journalists/actors, causing backlash if revealed), more severe late in the game when counterproliferation treaties are signed
  
• Blueprints and stockpiles can be used not only on the ground (next section) but also as a currency, following the historical case of British services trading VX chemical weapon for US thermonuclear blueprints
  

[h2]Use of Biological and Chemical Weapons[/h2]

BCW slightly expand player agency in intelligence operations. Minimal quantities of stockpiled agents can be used during assassinations, with the classic example of an almost perfect crime utilizing ricin-tipped umbrella. However, the cost of development is still substantial and these operations on their own would hardly justify it as a viable strategic choice.

The main potential use of BCW lies in military operations - especially in defensive plans. BCW are one more building block of the stalemate in the Cold War, prompting the other side to always take into account possible biological and chemical retaliation. Even before 1946, the UK already developed plans to "use sprayed mustard gas on the beaches" in case of an invasion The following decades have seen similar plans, even among the superpowers, with the primary example of the Soviet Union developing robust chemical and biological programs as an important part of deterrence. Actual use of BCW in the game world follows a no-nonsense approach similar to nuclear weapons, where all living entities - operatives, actors, and population - in the targeted areas are directly affected.

Cold War madness: warhead carrying 356 bomblets, each with 500g of sarin. Median lethal dose for a human being is close to 1g.

BCW can also make it to the hands of terrorists. As the staple of the late-game challenges, terrorism will be described in an extensive dev diary in the future - here, it's worth mentioning that from the diplomatic POV, significant terrorist attack utilizing BCW can push the world to rapid counterproliferation actions.

Speaking of which, game world starts with poorly enforced Geneva Protocol from 1925 - prohibition of chemical and biological warfare. The UN and politicians over decades will tend towards proposing a treaty that prohibits not only warfare but also the production of BCW (IRL 1970s), and then further extension to establishing a new special actor for proper enforcement, possibly extended also to destruction of extensive stockpiles (IRL 2000s). Players can try to evade these prohibitions by more extensive counterintelligence protection, infiltrating the actor (as did Russia a few years ago), limiting the actual use of BCW, and other tools of espionage.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

The next few dev diaries will revisit some of the previously described (already year old!) features near the core gameplay. We'll start with Intelligence Agencies 2.0 - to be posted on November 11th.

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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"Forms of chemical and allied warfare are more humane than existing weapons. For example, certain types of 'psychochemicals' would make it possible to paralyze temporarily entire population centers without damage to homes and other structures" - U.S. Department of Defense in the 1950s

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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To paraphrase Fightclub, we meet at a very strange time in world history. This developer diary yearns for "a work of fiction" disclaimer. For all escapism offered by the Cold War, current threats undoubtedly taint the design of Espiocracy and will shape your reception of the game. It is certainly a work of its time.

Stuart Brown eloquently argues in a fantastic essay that video games as a whole are a work of the Cold War times - "an unintended harvest, a nuclear fruit". From the development of game theory, wider rollout of military wargaming, all the way to the progress in computing, simulations, or networks, the work on weapons of mass destruction was always uncomfortably close to gaming.

It is striking, then, that no video game explores nuclear brinkmanship in depth. A few existing attempts either hand the player a nuclear bomb as an inconsequential eraser tool or reduce sabre rattling into a simple board-game-like race with a doomsday clock. During the period of extensive research & prototyping, I almost fell into the same pit, likely for the same reasons as previous developers. When you peer behind the curtain of global fears and look at scientific details, calculations, tests, and usefulness, you can almost feel... disappointment!

Actually deployed warheads had considerably lower yields than weapons from movies and books, simulated damage and casualties were not far from WW2 strategic bombing, radiation is Pandora's box of popular incorrect assumptions, and nuclear winter has a shaky basis. Modern historians even argue that the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki played merely minor role in the Japanese surrender. Academic books are full of similar findings that downplay nuclear weapons. Their implementation at face value inevitably has to trivialize (already virtual!) nuclear bombs - and what's the point of brinkmanship if you're not afraid of the brink?

Espiocracy has ambition to be the first game that renders the highest kind of justice to nuclear brinkmanship. We follow the words of Janne M. Korhonen: atom bombs are fundamentally psychological weapons. The game will focus less on the scientific modeling of explosions, and more on the exploration of human psychology confronted by constant existential threat. This is, after all, a work of fiction.

[h2]Psychological Conflict[/h2]

We start our tour de force of design with Herman Kahn. In the 1960s he published the famous escalation ladder:



Yes, it's rather unrealistic but the entire long paper features many bright observations. The game builds on them and the ladder itself to create an intelligible backbone of otherwise immensely complex psychological conflict:



Every country in the game world has at least two positions (!) on the ladder. There is a real position, usually known to the leader(s) responsible for nuclear weapons in the country, and then there is externally perceived (probable) position, known to other leaders, actors, and entire populations, set by the combination of threats, statements, credibility, evidence, including also actions of other players. In rare cases, other nations may be privy to the third, secret perception that follows special insight or agreements.

Following Kahn's ladder, steps are not meant to be followed one by one, and instead, merely present possible options of escalation or de-escalation from the current position. Steps are by design very different, some acting as one-time events (a threat is forgotten if not repeated after some time) whereas others serve as default fallback points (past tense and infinitives, eg. after a nuclear test a country returns to expanding stockpile). Admittedly, a ladder is not the best analogy (but it sounds nice and has historical weight). A better analogy can be found near poker chips - as a player, you can bet any amount equal to or higher than bets of other players, you can refuse to bet, you may be forced to bet blindly, and over time you may acquire more chips and therefore be able to place higher bets. Most importantly, during the cycles of bidding you build mental models of other players, and get to know their modus operandi, level of aggression, acceptable risks, limits, bluffs, and mistakes.

Directly understood nuclear brinkmanship happens between real and perceived positions. Play truthfully to establish credibility. Use credibility to bluff. Downplay escalation to surprise the opponent. Decipher the real positions of other players. Beat the drums of war by exaggerating the perceived position of the enemy.

[h2]Real Proliferation and Preparation[/h2]

Distance between positions on the ladder is limited by logical constraints. It's impossible to wage nuclear threats without any real work on the nuclear arsenal - or to threaten with global thermonuclear war with a stockpile of five warheads. Beyond constraints, a larger distance is harder to establish and defend. Completely noncredible threats at best may be ignored and at worst laughed off, leading to the demise of a warmonger's political career.

The real position remains the bedrock of nuclear brinkmanship.

The economy here is clear, brutal, and realistic. Advancing real nuclear posture is always costly, it requires much more effort than advancing perceived posture. Real progress relies on expenditure combined with previously introduced mechanics and corresponding modes of interaction:

• National interests and views motivate the country and actors to pursue a particular level of preparation (also in the context of other countries, especially when countering main opponents)
  
• Scientific and technological progress is achieved in Big Science projects supported by local influential actors, including the important role of global progression from clunky atom bombs ("WW2 with nukes") to MIRVs (full mutually assured destruction)
  
• Uranium is procured as one of the strategic materials, with the optional role of other materials such as stolen nuclear blueprints
  
• Governments assign funds for further expansion of stockpile and strategic delivery systems, decide about deployments and escalation/de-escalation in general
  

In addition to developing nuclear capabilities, nations can influence the real nuclear posture of other nations - with the prime example of non-proliferation efforts (treaties, inspections, anti-nuclear social movements, or even sabotage - historically Eisenhower considered sabotaging the French nuclear program). Indirectly, it also takes the form of (generally) nonescalatory preparation of warning systems, blast shelters, civil defense, and nuclear-proofing state institutions. On the other side of the spectrum, nuclear-capable nations can weigh in for their allies (eg. USA considering tactical nuclear bombing in Indochina to rescue encircled French units) or even be asked for nuclear assistance (eg. Mao asking Khrushchev to provide atom bombs for the invasion of Taiwan).

[h2]Perception of Nuclear Posture[/h2]

The most straightforward case of perception aligned with reality is simple only in theory. Change of posture has to be officially communicated which often sparks the reaction of the population (eg. protests), actors (eg. strong opposing voices), and nations (eg. escalation in response to escalation).

In the short term, it may be easier to downplay own nuclear position. Lack of any public communication and counterintelligence protection may be enough for some time but later will require special actions, costs, and possibly shortening the distance between real and perceived posture. The most famous nuclear scare of the Cold War - the Cuban Missile Crisis - falls exactly into this bracket. Soviet Union covertly deployed missiles near the USA with the intent to later present this as fait accompli (keeping perceived position far from real posture for some time). However, American intelligence community discovered the deployment, politicians contacted the Soviet side who denied the change in posture, services gathered more evidence, government debated on the response, and then in alignment with the conventional and nuclear-adjacent response, President Kennedy communicated the discovery of deception in dramatic televised speech. The crisis was resolved when the American side agreed to scale back nuclear deployment from Turkey and Italy - a move which, curiously enough, was also secret. Both the origin and course of this crisis will be emergently simulated in the game.

Classic brinkmanship of the Cold War usually relied on the opposite approach - rhetorical escalation beyond real assumed position. Up to 1962, virtually all presidents of the two superpowers employed these threats regularly with mixed results. From Truman exaggerating nuclear stockpile in talks with the not-yet-nuclear USSR to Khrushchev bluffing to strike the West over Berlin blockade, threats were met with individually different responses, and this is also the approach taken by the game - in addition to player's input, actors themselves will decide about the response to escalatory rhetoric. It's also worth mentioning that various moves and accidents can also escalate the tension without direct intent of any of the sides, with the primary example of the IRL events from the year 1983 (Operation RYAN, shoot down of a Korean airliner, ordinary NATO exercise, Petrov accident, misunderstood speeches, diseases of elderly Soviet leaders - truly explosive combination).

Third-party interference can take an unusual shape in the area of perception. It's no coincidence that acquisition or even sheer attempt to acquire nuclear weapons is regarded as an escalation - manufacturing evidence of such a position can be a firm casus belli. On the other side of the aisle, society also contributes to the perception: books and movies can popularize a particular country as a nuclear villain, widespread drills and shelters can instill in the population a perception of higher threat than real. In very rare but possible cases, society can even enter a state of mass panic and riots after perceiving particularly severe escalation - that was for instance the fear that caused the British government to block TV broadcasts of "The War Game" (1966).

Globally, the highest escalatory position reached by any country ever sets the bar for nuclear taboo. Breaking it usually leads, on the one hand, to international outcry and possibly even coalitions formed against the first mover. On the other hand, the world gets accustomed to this new level and others may be tempted to follow the steps if the original party maintained the stance and/or was not severely punished.

[h2]Nuclear Blasts[/h2]

Bulk of psychology aside, nuclear weapons in Espiocracy are a real existential danger to all entities in the game world. Nukes should and will supply players with a sense of paranoia, up to the point of losing the game in the case of the death of all intelligence operatives. In addition to nuclear brinkmanship, you can turn on a realistic game rule that enables nuclear accidents akin to Stanislav Petrov case from 1983, ready to derail the game on every single tick of full MAD readiness.

Preparation for nuclear war features a special on-map mechanic: you are responsible for nuclear plans. This includes the choice of precise escalatory step (from demonstration strike to global strikes), timing, warheads, targets, and their saturation. For a bleak flavor, other actors will sometimes weigh-in to amend the plans - as in the case of Kennedy who removed Warsaw from the list of cities to nuke out of private sympathy.

This is also a good moment to explore - in brief - strategic weapon types and delivery systems. Their details are covered by the scientific-technological mechanics but from the perspective of player agency, the game simulates large changes that may be not obvious to the modern audience. In the early decades of the Cold War, bombs are delivered only (and then still primarily) by bombers which take hours to scramble and then hours to arrive at the target, taking high losses on the way. Nuclear plans of the first decades called even for a few weeks of rolling nuclear bombings, a type of war never really depicted in any popular media. After the first 15-25 years, this evolves into a more familiar form of nuclear warfare employed by ballistic missiles. Severe mutually assured destruction arrives relatively late, initially with submarine-based missiles (which are universally hard to disable before the retaliatory strike, unless they are tailed underwater) and fully with MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles which feature multiple warheads per missile launched into space).

Tactical weapons, understood as weapons used to win battles instead of crippling entire countries, can be produced in mass numbers and can densely saturate deployed military forces, as was the historic case for Europe. Their use, however... is tricky. From the military perspective, it's not an eraser tool - real plans called for insane density of usage (eg. 136 tactical nukes on 100 km front in the 1977 plan) to achieve measurable results. In the spirit of alternate history, the player will be able to pull this off but the main intended role of tactical weapons in the game is centered around a flavorful menagerie of weapon types: nuclear mines, torpedoes, anti-aircraft rockets, or even Davy Crocketts!

Once the escalation reaches the highest levels and the world veers into launching nuclear strikes, the game takes a no-nonsense approach to the representation of the brief conflict, focusing on interesting points of historical divergence: actors taking direct responsibility for giving an order to strike, possible mutinies along the way, first strike wave and retaliatory second strike, along with the long-term spectre of eventual doomsday devices such as dead hand, dormant submarines, and stationary dirty bombs.

The adventure doesn't end here, at least not yet. Destruction takes various forms and affects all physical objects in the game, from infrastructure to people, through direct incineration in the blast, crumbling buildings, EMP (with different influence on older and more modern devices), flash burns, the spread of radioactive fallout, radiation sickness, entire states collapsing under the weight of casualties, nuclear-free continents preparing for nuclear winter...

[h2]Behind The Scenes[/h2]

► The first dev diary clearly rejected doomsday clocks. Hopefully, you can now understand the reason - a single global counter would not only significantly limit psychological exploration of the subject, but it would also reduce the role of unreliable intelligence, local contexts, readiness as a tool of its own, and even rob willing players of the real feeling of paranoia due to accidents looming over the world regardless of DEFCON level.

► Among the most interesting-disappointing controversies, nuclear winters occupy the top place. It's a very hairy story about human minds (which will serve as a small inspiration for an event or two in the game). In short, the notion of nuclear winter originated in the 80s from very early and simple simulations of soot from burning cities, with results highly hinging on a few numerical constants. Scientists, riding the wave of the 1983 nuclear scare, huge movies such as "The Day After", and nuclear disarmament talks, saw this as an opportunity to pursue noble anti-nuclear activism and they more or less succeeded, with the help of celebrities such as Carl Sagan. The world indeed believed that the Earth will freeze to death due to soot blocking the sunlight. Later real-world events (such as burning oil wells during the Gulf War) and more precise modeling never fully confirmed these warnings. The latest, most advanced modeling attempts produce rather timid results - 100 cities destroyed by nuclear bombs would simply cancel global warming, lowering global temperature just by 1°C. Even an enormous exchange of 400 MT would cause a decrease in global average temperature by 8°C for a decade, after which temperatures would return to normal... Notably, just two months ago Nature published detailed study that essentially dropped the term "nuclear winter" and instead focused on global famine (which still did not reach some parts of the world, such as Australia, even in the worst case scenarios).

► Nuclear weapons sit at the very heart of the inspiration behind the development of Espiocracy. In addition to mentioned Nuclear Fruit by Ahoy, I always find plenty of interesting takes in Fail Safe from 1964 (IMO the best movie about and from the Cold War), an indie movie by Ben Marking, and obviously classic Dr. Strangelove, always present in subtitles of the diaries.

[h2]Final Remarks[/h2]

Nuclear and adjacent UI is in the middle of reworks, hence no screenshots.

Next up, we'll continue the topic of weapons of mass destruction: Biological and Chemical Weapons in two weeks.

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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"Cold War kids were hard to kill
Under their desks in an air raid drill"
Billy Joel