What do you want out of the Espionage aspect of a strategy game? Your espionage department – Information Services(IS) – contains agents with a set of stats and skills. At present I plan on using a simple system of choose a target and choose mission for agent use. There are three types of targets VIPs, Organizations, and Facilities, the actual values in those lists change as the game progresses. Once you choose a target you can then select the type of mission to perform. The types of missions you can perform depend on the type of target. For some mission you can also select a specific objective. Example: Target – Ares Industries Mission – Acquire Data Objective – Rail Gun Technology Then you simply wait to find out the outcome. But here is the thing I want IS to one of the four key aspects of gameplay. It is a vital department that should not only provide you with intel on rivals and also crucial intel on facilities in order to plan tactical missions. But also allow to advance you own objectives What more do people want out of Espionage in a strategy game? And what Ideas to you have to improve it? One possibility is a more detailed objectives system, or orders system. Perhaps some mission could be ongoing meaning that the agent remains in place providing intel and can be given new orders while in place. For instance you could have an agent infiltrate a facility, and then use them to steal and sabotage when you need them to. This could allow for coordinate missions between IS and tactical. What about double agents?

Here a couple of my ideas:

A spy can only be assigned tasks from the central command, once they leave the central command they can only be recalled once they have arrived at their destination and re-established communication back to base.
For a sabotage lasting a certain time length, the spy returns after completion.
For intelligence gathering and infinitely timed sabotage the spy remains until recalled or discovered.

Training:

Spies can be trained to varying levels of skill, progression to a more advanced skill level takes time, and funding. Spies are also promoted 1 level on the successful completion of intelligence gathering, and 2 levels on successful completion of sabotage.
As a spy becomes more proficient in the art of espionage, their chances of getting caught are reduced.
Level 1 spies have a 50% chance of getting caught on approach, 60% on intelligence gathering, and 70% on attempted sabotage.
each %age is lowered by a predetermined amount for each level.

Operations:

Military positions
Intelligence: Once a military command outpost has been infiltrated, the current positions and movements of vehicles and troops are visible in the game view.
Sabotage: The player is able to approach the command outpost undetected, the units will not set off the outpost alarms, and only become visible upon entering an opposing units FOV.

Flow of resources
Intelligence: Production buildings can be infiltrated to gain details of the opponents resource levels by way of a chart showing the specific resource level against the past x minutes.
Sabotage: Production at the specific building is halted for 10 seconds, and at half efficiency for 30seconds.

Alliances and communication
Intelligence: Getting information on the alliance connections with the player's opponents and allies allows forward planning and preventative measures against sneak alliances and pacts. A spy planted in another player's communications centre will allow viewing of all their outgoing messages.

Research
Intelligence: Once a research establishment has been infiltrated, the spy will transmit details of all research in progress, a single research can be selected for transmission of all details on completion.
Sabotage: The spy can be issued orders to halt research for 15 seconds.

I'm planning to do something like this in the game I'm working on:

When the player wishes to recruit a spy, they are given a list of spies, their monetary demands (an incremental payment), and their positions in the enemy forces (Research, Construction, Intelligence for double agents, etc.).

To use a spy, they must be paid regularly. Spys will initially offer only information, providing more details as time passes. Eventually, spies will be able to sabotage, and other more active tasks. Their abilities are based on their 'level of trust' within the enemy forces. The less suspect, the more they can do for you. The more extreme an action you request, the lower their level of trust drops. By taking no actions, the level of trust will slowly rise.

Additionally, the higher the rent, the higher the starting and maximum levels of trust. You get what you pay for.

I'd like to see a game where you can detect and/or capture spies, then feed false information to their masters. Make the rebels think you've got an undefended shield generator on the forest moon and then BAM here comes the imperial fleet.

It'd be nice for spies to actually work.

They always seem to be either too powerful [giving a rich player even more of an advantage] or too weak [and nobody uses them] rather than a resonable tool.

I aim to make espionage units more effective in proportion to the advantage the target empire has over you. Thus spies/others act as a moderating force, keeping one player from walking away with the game.

More interesting relationships between usage of spies and defending against them, and other aspects of the game.

I often find that spy type units are too easily thwarted to be of much use. In reality, spies can be virtually impossible to defend against without *heavily* cracking down on security, which can reduce efficiency and happiness.

Thus, defending against spies may be a case of hiring special agents and setting a security level - perhaps on a per item basis. So for example, if you want rail gun technology to stay a secret, but don't care who gets to use flamethrower technology, you can set the former to high security, and the latter to low. However, there's a tradeoff - high security will make the technology more expensive and time consuming to obtain benefit from, since keeping it secret requires all manner of security measures to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. flamethrowers can be built in any old factory, or even contracted out to the lowest bidder, but the railgun can only be built in a high security facility with extensively vetted staff, and may have all kinds of special security features to prevent the tech from being reverse engineered from equipment lost in the field. It would also make the tech harder to research in the first place. Agents can be assigned to manage the security in a particular areas, and will have different strengths and weaknesses.

As someone using espionage, I think it would be useful to flesh out the spies with different abilities and strengths, and also define the length of time the spy has to work with for a given mission. A spy who has plenty of time to prepare for a mission is very likely to succeed, as he has plenty of time to work his way onto the inside by gaining the trust of the target, and may even be able to complete the mission without blowing his cover, and remain a 'sleeper' for another mission in the same area. A spy with very little time has to be very experienced, and must somehow figure a way to get access to the target quickly without getting killed. This has a much higher chance of failure.

Not only do spies get more experienced, but they may get a 'background', which can be traced by a special agent and used to blow the spy's cover. Thus, for some missions, it may be better to employ a rookie spy, for the simple reason that they have no background in espionage that can be traced.

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Original post by nuvem I'm planning to do something like this in the game I'm working on: When the player wishes to recruit a spy, they are given a list of spies, their monetary demands (an incremental payment), and their positions in the enemy forces (Research, Construction, Intelligence for double agents, etc.). To use a spy, they must be paid regularly. Spys will initially offer only information, providing more details as time passes. Eventually, spies will be able to sabotage, and other more active tasks. Their abilities are based on their 'level of trust' within the enemy forces. The less suspect, the more they can do for you. The more extreme an action you request, the lower their level of trust drops. By taking no actions, the level of trust will slowly rise. Additionally, the higher the rent, the higher the starting and maximum levels of trust. You get what you pay for.

I had planned that recuriting a sy would consist of a list of free agents, where use choose the one you want based on stats, skills and cost. But reading the replies thus far has got me thinking what if in additon to experinced agents you could choose from a list of possible candidites? You could then recruit and train the candidite assuming you had access to a training facility. The more time and money you invest in training the new recruit the better their starting skill levels will be, also a newly trained agents would have a higher loyalty rating then an experinced agent you've hired to work for you.

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Original post by Sandman More interesting relationships between usage of spies and defending against them, and other aspects of the game. I often find that spy type units are too easily thwarted to be of much use. In reality, spies can be virtually impossible to defend against without *heavily* cracking down on security, which can reduce efficiency and happiness.

Depedning on your tech you can enter into some extreme forms of internal security, even going as far as modifing your employees behaviour.

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Thus, defending against spies may be a case of hiring special agents and setting a security level - perhaps on a per item basis. So for example, if you want rail gun technology to stay a secret, but don't care who gets to use flamethrower technology, you can set the former to high security, and the latter to low. However, there's a tradeoff - high security will make the technology more expensive and time consuming to obtain benefit from, since keeping it secret requires all manner of security measures to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. flamethrowers can be built in any old factory, or even contracted out to the lowest bidder, but the railgun can only be built in a high security facility with extensively vetted staff, and may have all kinds of special security features to prevent the tech from being reverse engineered from equipment lost in the field. It would also make the tech harder to research in the first place. Agents can be assigned to manage the security in a particular areas, and will have different strengths and weaknesses.

You will be able to set security levels for facilities and sections in a facility, which will limit access to those areas to only personal with proper clearence. But I hadn't thought of assigning projects and items a security rating, this is defentitly an interesting idea. Assign a high security rating to a new research project and the work progress more slowly and because less staff and facilitis can be devoted to it.

What about the loss of high security items? By assigning a high security rating to a project or technology shouldn't this limit the number of copies of the data available? If so, what if an enemy agent steals/destroys this data or the only prototype? Should the greater the security rating the more likly the that the tech will have to be research again? There could be a new type of research project created called data recovery that would allow you to reconstruct some of the data, but ultimitly the tech would have to research again involving the loss of a great deal of time and resources. Bare in mind if I go with this idea it will apply to both the AI and player.

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As someone using espionage, I think it would be useful to flesh out the spies with different abilities and strengths, and also define the length of time the spy has to work with for a given mission. A spy who has plenty of time to prepare for a mission is very likely to succeed, as he has plenty of time to work his way onto the inside by gaining the trust of the target, and may even be able to complete the mission without blowing his cover, and remain a 'sleeper' for another mission in the same area. A spy with very little time has to be very experienced, and must somehow figure a way to get access to the target quickly without getting killed. This has a much higher chance of failure.

Currently there are 6 skills that agents possess, with each agent having a skill level from 0 to 10 in each skill. An agents rating in each skill determines the sort of mission they are sutiable for. So an Agent best suited to stealing data from high security facilities, might not be the agent best suited to investigating an internal security leak, or subverting an organization.

The experince question though is one I have been unsure how to handle. At present I have no form of experince, but I agree with your assessment that experince should play a role in things, but I'm not sure how.

To give you basic idea of the mechanics behind the game most tasks work like this:
Skill : difficulty/Threshold.
ex. Conversation : 7/3
means that you test is against the agents conversation skill and they need a 7 to get a success and need 3 successes. For each point an agent has in a skill they get to roll a d10. There will be modifiers to the die roll based on equipment, but for agents equipment will be abstracted meaning that an agent will have the best equipment they can afford/acquire with mission operating budget. Rather then a system where the player has to assign gear to an agent in advance.

But how should experince work? Having experince act as another modifier would make things to easy for agents I think. Hmm.. What if for experince level the agent had they recived an automatic success? Or a reroll? Or extra die, and if I went with that, should the bonouses be per test or per mission,

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Not only do spies get more experienced, but they may get a 'background', which can be traced by a special agent and used to blow the spy's cover. Thus, for some missions, it may be better to employ a rookie spy, for the simple reason that they have no background in espionage that can be traced.

I like this, now I just have to figure out how to use it in the game.

How is your map going to be arranged? This might impact ideas you have in terms of representation and ease of use.

What I'd like to be able to do, along with Sandman's idea of security for projects, is set up false projects as bait.

The idea of being able to spend money on one or more employees proportional to how thorough I want to check their background is also appealing because it makes it something of a risk. If spies are characters, scientists and other folk should be as well.

Some way of getting a sense of "what's happening out there" in the realm of spies and trafficking would be interesting, as well. This way, if I get some information like "a big heist is about to go down, target unknown" I can choose whether to up my security (cool for multiplayer vs.)

I would like spy decisions to be based only partly on money and partly on human factors. Can I get access to anything the spy cares about (kidnap his/her loved ones at the risk of alienating them)? Can I try to bribe the spy to test their loyalty, set up a false rendezvous, then assassinate them? That could be interesting, but it would depend again on how things are represented on a map.

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Original post by Wavinator How is your map going to be arranged? This might impact ideas you have in terms of representation and ease of use.

I probably should have mentioned this intially but the game I'm working on is not a strategy wargame, it is more of a Buisness(?) Empire building(?) strategy game... You an executive in the bioweapons divsion of a ruthless multinational corporation, called Cappella Corporation. You use R&D to develop new products both legal and illegal, as well as espionage, and tactical forces to expand your powerbase and increase your and the companies wealth. If you do well you move up in the company increasing your territory and providing access to more of the companies asset.

there is a world map that shows known facilities, territories, strategic resources, and biomutant infected areas. But I don't think thats what you ment by a map.

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What I'd like to be able to do, along with Sandman's idea of security for projects, is set up false projects as bait.

Hmm, I think players might find that a waste of resouces to conduct false projects. But what I could do is allow you to store dummay data which confuse agents or commondos attempting to steal data. They agent could return with the dummy data with the belief that it was the correct data. There could even be several levels of dummy data, based on your access to computer technology.

Level 1 - garbage data - Contains the same headers and refrence of the acutal set of data, but the data itself is just garbage. Low risk for onsite verification.

Level 2 - falsified data - Similar enough to the actual data to pass a simple test, however data reconstruction will ultimitly prove the data to be useless.


Level 3 - Trojan data - identical to falsified data with the added effect that it data has special virus encrypted into it, which will allow offsite access to whatever server the data is loaded onto.

Dummy data would require the same amount of computer storage as the regular data, and access the corresponding computer technology.

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The idea of being able to spend money on one or more employees proportional to how thorough I want to check their background is also appealing because it makes it something of a risk. If spies are characters, scientists and other folk should be as well.

What do you think the advantage of vetting an employee should be? Would it give you an idea of their intial private loyalty levels? Or would it in additon to this provide perhaps a risk assessment rating. The higher the rating the easier the employee would be to manipulate either by you or an outside party.

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Some way of getting a sense of "what's happening out there" in the realm of spies and trafficking would be interesting, as well. This way, if I get some information like "a big heist is about to go down, target unknown" I can choose whether to up my security (cool for multiplayer vs.)

Can do, it would simply be a matter of the head of Information services providing you with information current activity in the criminal an intelligence world. This might be useful to help you make strategic decisions. For instance if you discover that company X is close to completing a cure for heart disease, you could decided wether or not to discontinue your own research or perhaps the better idea of just stealing it from them.