Seriously, the more I think about it the more the uselessness of spies becomes obvious. The limit of 2 actions per day offensively and defensively is artificial. The effects of almost all spy operations aren't worth the money you spend to use them. Gather Intel and Destroy Nuclear Weapons is about the only operations that are worth using. Gather Intel to check your enemy's warchest, and Destroy Nukes for obvious reasons.

There've been a lot of suggestions to make the other options more potent, which I strongly agree with. For example the change defcon and change government should let you choose what defcon level you want to set them at, or which government you wish to use. This would allow for targetted changing at critical times (for example a sledding target sitting at 19 days innactive being set to Defcon1 and changing government type to Anarchy can cause the opposing nation a lot of money)

The destructive actions all need to be buffed significantly to make them worth the investment. Destroying 1million dollars was a low limit when the spies were implemented, in todays day and age with billion dollar and more warchests, it's just a silly low amount. It should be something like 5% uncapped. Let those people with large warchests fear someone sending spies out to destroy their reserves. Same thing with destroying tanks etc, the amount destroyed is just too low to be worth anything to anyone. You can argue realism all you want, this is a balance issue of an option being useless. If you're going to make it useless to make things more realistic, just don't bother offering the option.





But these are things that have been covered by others extensively. So I'm going to go off on a bit of a different tack here and hope this catches a bit more favor.

You should get the ability to assign your spies. When you purchase your spies, for them to have any effect, you must send them to another nation, and that is where they're assigned to until you recall them. The initial deployment has a chance of being uncovered, but shouldn't be too hard to accomplish. Once spies are assigned, they must be recalled to be redeployed. After being recalled they cannot be redeployed until the following update.

Now while the spies are within the nation you have a passive gather intelligence effect. You can view the stockpiled money, standing military forces (speaking of that should be something else that is hidden without having spies deployed), etc.

Now here's the trick. Every deployed spy can get two spy actions off per day. Deployed spies do not count towards defense towards enemy infiltration and spy ops. This leaves you with a choice: Seek an advantage against enemies by deploying all spies against your enemy's nations, or keeping them at home to protect yourself against infiltration. Additionally the choice arises, do you send small groups of spies hoping the enemy has low defenses, or do you send all your spies to the one enemy you wish to keep the closest watch on? It gives a choice in strategy, which is sorely needed.


As an aside, you could also make a benefit for leaving untapped spies in place for extended periods of time. The longer a spy is undercover in his role the more believable the role is, the less likely he is to get caught. So say a passive scaling bonus to spy ops success rates the longer the spy stays there. So you're better off with spies deployed to a nation and keeping them there for months before they're actually needed to wreak havok than just sending them in and doing your spyop the same day.


Now like I was saying, every spy can get off two actions per day at most. When you declare an action you decide how many of your spies are working on that action. The more spies you use, the better the effect and the higher chance of success. However if you want to be a real risk taker you can take 500 different actions against someone, with 1 spy each. Just expect to fail with it.

Anytime an operation is failed there's a chance of cover being blown. If a spy's cover is blown and the sending nation is found out, all spies from that nation are sent back home, and the defender has a 25% bonus to defending against infiltration for the next week against that person. (or maybe 10% against all infiltration). So if you do infiltrate a nation with 500 spies and try to have them do one spyop at a time, the first one almost certainly fails and your effort is wasted. But having a handful of spy ops say 150 or so spies at a time will have a good chance at success, especially if the enemy has most of their spies deployed elsewhere. Or having the spies deployed to a handful of nations for 2 spyops each.

Or really under this system you could reduce it to one spyop per spy. It makes it easier to track in game and might help balance out the splitting up your spies for as many spyops as you're willing to risk.


Anyway, that's the general idea. It can be refined as needed, but the general concept of deploying spies for passive benefit and activating them for missions only after they're already there I feel is a good one.

approved for discussion.

I like this idea, I would suggest someway of improving the Intelligence Agencies and CIA Wonder with this to really make it dynamic.

Both of those already give enough dyanimcs to the system simply by giving more spies to play with. The beauty of the system is that the limit to your actions are governed entirely by how much risk you are willing to take, and how many spies you have. Adding more spies adds more potential options and thus more dynamics. If anything you would just need to add more ways for higher end nations to get spies (preferrably at the expense of getting other things, as opposed to the you can have everything style most things in CN are currently).

I dig this suggestion

I'm not disagreeing with anything else you wrote, but I must say that there are other useful spy attacks. Changing DefCon is downright handy. It's more likely the most common first spy attack in a war. Changing TL would be too if it was more persistent or there were more spy attacks per day. Some of the other attacks would be good if the cost was cheaper or the effects more destructive, in the case of attacking war materiel.

There should also be a "counter intelligence" operation where you sacrifice some or all of your normal spy ops to resist outside spy attacks that day.

Love the idea, but a few changes:
On each operation, you choose a number of spies to go on the operation (who will be all who are potentially killed, the rest being 'safe', but not contributing to the odds). You also choose which is the priority:
-Succeed at all costs: meaning your spies and identity are at risk, but will achieve the task
-Go with caution: meaning they may reveal your identity or fail the mission, but won't get killed
-Hide identity: meaning they may fail the mission and die, but keep your identity safe

Equally, the defenders have a choice on how to protect themselves from spies:
-Encryption: reduced chance of succeeding
-Fire at will: higher chance of killing spies
-Torture: increases chance of revealing identity

This was slightly based off the thing about war (with the defenders alo making a choice) and, like with DefCon, oyu can only change once a day.

Thoughts?

It'd be nicer if it let you choose. As it currently stands you get two operations. Using one of them to swap your opponent to defcon2 instead of 1 isn't going to be as useful in the long run as taking off one of his nukes, and one of his friends nukes.

Of course in this system where you can have more spy actions than that then yes it does have the potential to be useful.



Would be, yes. But that doesnt change that as they currently are they're useless. Im all for making them destroy more, but as I recall a recent suggestion to do so was shot down due to realism.



Well remember how I suggested that spies must be deployed? Any non-deployed spies would essentially be your defending force for counter intelligence. So if you want to resist enemy spy attacks it's simple, you don't spy on anyone else and keep all of your own spies at home to defend yourself against spyops.



I like this, however if the operation fails they should have a chance of the other spies being revealed.



The rest of your post is basically a whole new suggestion which is only tangentaly related to this, in that it affects the spy system but has nothing to do with the changes I have suggested. I would recommend taking that to a new topic.

How about a defensive option for a nation to periodically do a sweep of their own to try and find planted spies? With a limit on when/how thorough/effectiveness (improvements/wonders adding to sweep?)/etc. or something, including risk of just killing a regular citizen instead of a planted spy. [Edit: Or, run a purge of your citizenry for a chance of cleaning out possible number of planted spies. Success rate of those purged being planted spies increased by CIA & number of your spies at home or something. fail sweeps just kill your citizens. Could only run purge once a month or every 14 days or something.]. Only thing that comes to mind. Just to give a nation some defense option if they want to risk taking it, with these new/changed offensive options.

Anyway, I really like your suggestion.

So this would apply retroactively to spy operations within the past 30 days? For example. You get spied on one day, but do not catch the guy. You could then run a sweep a few days later when you have purchased more spies to find out who spied on you a few days back?


That would actually be really cool.

Yea, so you can always choose 5?

Anyway the idea has merits, but there must be the ability for a nation to actively scan for spies in their nation. It should have a cost associated with it that scales, so its not something people will do everyday as routine, but before a war, or if they have other reasons to suspect espionage, it would be useful.

And actually, while the success of an operation would increase, the chance of being spied also increases though at a slower rate. It also means you can't simply "deploy and forget".

in principle I think that your idea has merit. A few points.

• I agree with Jinnai and others that if you did this, there should be some type of counterintelligence sweep option.
• I think you should limit your spy activities to 2 per nation per day, regardless of how many spies you have there.
• I think that there should be levels of infiltration within the governments of an enemy. I would set up threshold amounts, that once you surpass those threshold levels, you can gain new free information in the government so long as your spies are still there. For example you could have a low, medium, and high threshold amount of spies. Low threshold amount could require 50 spy days. So if you had 1 spy, after 50 days he would have low-level access to the enemy's information (or 5 days for 10 spies, etc.). 200 spy days for medium and 1,000 spy days for high. Lots of fun here.
• I agree that any exposed op has a chance of getting your spies (used or not) busted.
• Finally, I think that whenever anyone sends in some spies, that anyone with spies in the host country have a chance of getting found. Spies can trip all over themselves. If the operating area is only so big, then they have a chance of exposing each other by accident. Would be nice if LAND were used to determine chance of finding new spies. More land = harder chance to find spies, less land = higher chance of finding new spies.

Uhmm, you essentially quoted and responded to everything in my post already. What else would be there to be considered "the rest of your post"?


I would like to also mention the most likely effect of a DefCon spy attack is to change it from level one down to level four. That's usually enough to make a difference in ground battles. The problem lies when you try it twice as it then bumps it back up to level two. I'd say the current DefCon attack is a reasonably effective one if you use it right.

I also like the idea of a dedicated counter intelligence defense option, instead of simply considering the remainder of unused spies as simply "on duty".

You'll note that comment was made in response to a quote from Doom Lord's post. His post included a suggestion that had nothing to do with this which is what I was referring to. Sorry about any confusion.



The intelligence sweep would need to be limited and have a cost attached, or else there would be no benefit to having long term spies with a higher success rate. A happiness penalty that lasts for 30 days similar to an event in addition to an up front cost similarly priced to spy operations would be appropriate. (The 30 day penalty discourages doing it every day, because it would add up if you did it repeatedly.)

But so long as it has restrictions attached, sure.



No. The point here is to open up more potential options for spies. If you're going to limit it to 2 per nation per day may as well just go with the other suggestions people have made to restrict to 2 per nation per day no matter what.

It's all about risk vs. reward. If someone wants to spy on their enemy 10 times in the day, let them. If the enemy is that poorly defended that spy attempts with only a handful of spies succeed, they deserve it. It's far more likely the first person who tries to get an excessive number of spy ops off in one day ends up totally blowing it all and losing a good bit of money in the process.



This, I like, and it goes in similar vein to what I already had. Though if you're measuring it in spy days you'd probably want the numbers a bit higher. After all, nothing's to stop you from sending all 800 of your spies into someone's nation. Maybe infiltrating small numbers at a time should be encouraged. Make it so initial infiltration the less spies you send the better the chances, but for actual spy ops higher number of spies in place makes it easier to pull off. This makes long range planning your best bet for actual spy ops (sending small numbers each day until you're ready to start causing real mayhem), meaning if you want it to play a major part in war you need to start coordinating who's sending spies where far ahead of time.



I'd say higher population density = harder chance of finding spies. It's easier to get lost in the crowd when there's thousands of people around you. It equates to basically the same thing you're saying, but population density is the better working variable.

However I don't think necessarily that everyone with spies in the nation should have a chance to be found out every time. If they do have a chance it should be much lower. When you're sending in new spies only the new spies should have a chance of being found out. The others should have maybe 1/10 as much chance of being caught just because someone new came in.



Okay I get it, everyone thinks a sweep should be done. Here's what I'm thinking it should look like at this point:


-Nation A sends spies to nation B
-Nation B's spies act as passive counter-intel. The more spies nation A sent the better chance nation B has of catching them
-Only spies that were sent can be caught (unlike other spy ops where unused spies can be caught as a result)
-If nations C and D have spies in nation B, they have a chance of being uncovered as a result of new spies being sent = 10% as much chance if they were being sent. (Round down to nearest percent, if there was a 1% chance of them being caught going in, they're not going to be caught in an accident from someone else going in)
-At any point nation B can get suspicious and choose to actively sweep their nation for spies. This causes a happiness penalty lasting 30 days (citizens don't like being pulled aside for random interrogation, and it can also cause unease about wire tapping and whatever else), as well as costing some money up front. This gives a new chance to catch any spies in the nation.

I like the general idea, but I think one operation per spy may be a little bit high. Perhaps a few operations per group of spies in an enemy nation, which would be more realistic anyway, I think.

Realistically anyone in their right mind would use groups of spies. By using one spy you likely have a 1% success rate. That other 99% not only results in the enemy most likely knowing who you are, that you tried to spy on them, etc, but also in possibly unveiling any other spies you had.

Sorry my idea for how to counterbalance that got cut off during an edit. Basically:

longer time staying = greater success %

however

longer time staying = greater risk of being caught in active scan

The rate of increase of being caught does not climb as fast as the rate of success though.

So if you manage to sneak through the border patrol a scan the next day is unlikely to catch you as your counter-espionage teams are smugly thinking "well we know no one got in recently..."

Yeah my post wasn't really for this topic, but just to see how much support it got (although it would need the other military thing which I based it off). Back on topic, I support it massively, although the spies not used on a task have a reduced chance of getting caught. I like evilgm's idea of stages, which I assume would allow you to do more advanced spy tasks. The damage done by the tasks definitely needs to be improved.

I was referring to a counterbalance to prevent someone from sweeping every day just for optimal security. Such as the happiness penalty that I suggested.

That said I feel that's backwards. The longer a spy has been there the higher of a position they have and the more trusted they are within that area. It should probably work on a bell curve where spies who have infiltrated in the last 4-10 days have the highest chance of being caught by a sweep. Roleplay wise, Those who have been there longer have managed to insinuate themselves into favorable positions and will usually be glossed over, and newer people just went thorough background checks to get into the nation. Balance wise, it gives incentive to having spies in a nation over the long term which is something I do really want to encourage heavily.

these are pathetic:

* Incite Religious Propaganda (New desired religion randomly chosen) = $100,000 + (3 x enemy nation strength)

Great for annoying religious people?

* Destroy Defending Tanks (Max 50) = $200,000 + (1 x enemy nation strength)

50 tanks out of 5600 whoa..... that will be an interesting edge

I don;t even know if 200,000 alone is worth destroy 50 tanks.

* Destroy Cruise Missiles (Max 5) = $200,000 + (1 x enemy nation strength)

stupid

* Assassinate Enemy Spies (Max 20) = $250,000 + (2 x enemy nation strength)

this one is awesome

* Destroy Technology (Max 5) = $300,000 + (2 x enemy nation strength)

Just unworthy, perhaps that should be changed to 50.

* Destroy Nuclear Weapons (Max 1) = $500,000 + (15 x enemy nation strength)

Don't know where to go here.

* Destroy Infrastructure (Max 5) = $500,000 + (5 x enemy nation strength)

just another example of what I'll probably never use

realistically, a bell curve is the more accurate. Game balancing, my idea i believe is more accurate. It gets rid of the "send and forget" mentality people will use their spies for.

here are some things to consider in the spy world. First, there are probably at least 10,000 nations in this game capable of spying. This is higher than the number of nations in the real world, but bear with me. Unlike the real world we have a fixed set of spying options, but like in the real world, the same thing that nation A is interested in getting is most likely the same thing that nation B, C, D...n is interested in getting. The more people someone has in their nation to work against, the more easily the various spies can mask their activity. The smaller the number of people to work against, the more the same target will come up on everyone's radar. Essentially, smaller targets = all the spies bumping into each other to get the information they want. This is why I went with land. Land is one of the least used items in the game, and giving it some type of usefulness would be nice. We could go with straight population, but spies need people, they need tech, and they need a place to operate. I chose "place" to operate.

Now consider that you could potentially have 10,000 sets of spies going into an enemy country. Even if everyone sent just a few spies each (granted it would have to be a political target of import), then this is something that would cause a serious amount of influx into a nation, and they should be tripping over themselves to an extent. Everyone going after the same targets, everyone a foreigner... You should be able to see my logic.

On the question regarding spy days to unlock more detail from an enemy, you COULD send in 800 spies, but then your nation would be completely vulnerable. I see no problem with this arrangement.

For the spy sweep, I propose an alternative to a happiness penalty. Make a spy sweep cost 1% of the population for a 5 day period. Because they were caught up in the dragnet, they are unable to do anything and as such it is a short-term pop loss. 5 days isn't too egregious, and 1% is enough to make people think twice. Additionally, you could allow people to do greater amounts of people being swept up in a dragnet (say each 1% you cough up gives a 10% chance to find any spies), but that it lengthens the time the real citizens are out of commission by 5 days each time. So if you did a 3% sweep for a 30% chance to catch spies, you would lose that population for 15 days.

A final question to ponder, would spies coming in show up as more citizens? Note that natural growth can cause some more citizens to come, albeit in smaller numbers. This would allow savvy people to notice a large influx of spies, but most would ignore a small amount.

I completely agree with what EGM has said. And to your last point, yes, that makes sense.

Whereas the "send and forget" is really what I'm aiming for. If someone sends their spies into a nation a month ahead of when they'll need them, they should be rewarded for that. They should not be penalized for someone randomly sweeping their nation a couple of days beforehand.



Population density would directly corellate with land, but is the more realistic number to base it off of, simply because it has normal expected boundries, which means you don't have to come up with a formula that's balanced to infinite, but just within the boundries of population density. Either one works fine.




That depends on how you're looking at it. If all of those spies arrived on the same day, sure, there'd be issues. However the chances of 10,000 people sending spies all at once is slim.

I wouldn't be against say a higher chance of being unveiled the more spies that have been sent by anyone that same day.

Or we can go with what I already suggested and say yes there's a chance of it being bungled due to people tripping over each other, however the new guys are more likely to get caught than someone who's already in, so the people already in have a much lower chance of being caught.



Any penalty that lasts less than 20 days isn't a penalty. People just won't collect while it's active. The population penalty rather than happiness penalty I'll agree with, but I'd set it with a base of 20 days and go up from there.



Even sending 350 spies (I'd consider 100-200 about the minimum you'd want in the nation to have any real chance of success), you'd hit your 1000 spy day mark in 3 days for high level information. I personally think it should take a bit longer than that if that's the route we're going.



While it would make sense, I'd have to say no, simply because it would be pretty easy to program a browser based tool that tells you exactly what your population should be, and flag you if it goes even one over that. (As I recall the natural growth population is a very stable formula with no randomness involved), at that point spies become useless again because everyone knows the second they have a spy in their nation.

That's not realisitc either though.

Another idea is to any time you get passive information, it should increase the odds of being caught then. That information has to get to your hands somehow and that somehow can be tracked. The more you'd request passive info, the better the chance of catching the spies they'd have. At the same time, sending them away for a long time without communicating with them until the exact date should have less of a chance of success as they've been cut off for a long time to suddenly have orders. It doesn't give much prep time.

Thus the time over there would rather decrease the chance of being caught on an active sweep and on mission attempt a lot and increase the chance of success a little (capped). Furthermore, each passive flow of info increases the chance of being caught in an active sweep a little and each attempt at a mission increases the chance of being caught on an active sweep a lot. Doing a mission decreases the chance of success of the next mission slightly as well.

The ability to actively scan for spies is a must and have a decent, but not guaranteed, chance of finding them as well, even if they were planted months ago is a must, unless you are giving some additional tradeoff besides time and the slight reduced risk to being spied upon yourself.

Cool idea!

But, one problem with that is how can the defender have a choice sence the defender doesn't know when the spy op is coming? The only answer I can come up with is that is added to the 'My Government Position' button.

There should also be an option where you can recruit spies in your enemy's nation. Foreign spies have lower chances of being caught since he/she is trusted, is a legal citizen, and has all of the papers. Foreign spies also has a better knowledge of the nation, increasing the success rate. However, there is a chance the foreign spy is working for your enemy nation, and that wouldn't be good.

For defending nations, they can set aside some of their spies to be recruited by enemy nations and be double agents.

In prolonged wars people generally run out of nukes to spy away, giving you more options. The DEFCON change is very useful, not only does it improve your ground and air odds, it also lowers theirs when they try to attack you. The threat level change is also useful as a defensive measure. If your enemy is spying away your nukes, lowering his threat level can have a significant impact on his spy odds, protecting your own nukes. Destroying money is kinda crappy.. it should be changed to stealing that money. Then it would be worth it, depleting your opponent's warchest while increasing your own (at least at lower NS levels). The remaining spy-ops are pretty much useless.

That's just what I've experienced in the war.

During the war, I had three nations that were attacking me and one nation that I was attacking. Now, I only had two spy slots, so I was only able to spy the two most vulnerable nations. Even with the updated spy choices, I would only pick the DEFCON alter option since I only have so many choices.

Another great idea! But shouldn't the attacker be able to set his spy to be double agents? And, foreign spies should cost three times more. What if you do recriut a double agent? Will your spy odds be lowered without telling you sence you don't you have a double agent? And how do you get rid of them? A spy sweep you you can do every 3 days costing:

(number of spys) X $100,000 = total cost of op

Would be one way of doing it. Doing that also gives you -3 happiness until next colltion and takes up one of your two spy ops for the day. If you a set one of your spys to be a double agent and your enemy buy that spy then you receve a message saying "(number of spys) have been recriuted by (enemy nation) and will secetly redued that nation spy odds by (percent)."

Sound good?

I've got to say that I really like this idea. I'm going to address a ton of stuff all in one post.



The thresholds mentioned here need to be increased but this addition has some real merit. I'd probably set the thresholds at something more like:
Low Level Intel: 600 spy days (2 days for an average deployment of 300 spies)
Medium Level Intel: 1500 spy days (5 days for an average deployment of 300 spies)
High Level Intel: 3300 spy days (11 days for an average deployment of 300 spies)
Ultra High Level Intel: 8100 spy days (27 days for an average deployment of 300 spies)
Top Secret Level Intel: 18000 spy days (60 days for an average deployment of 300 spies)
Area 51 Level Intel: 27000 spy days (90 days for an average deployment of 300 spies)

Only the spy days accrued in the last 90 days count towards your totals.

These are base numbers, in that if your enemy has completely deployed all their spies for 90 days when you infiltrate this is how long it will take to uncover the different levels of information. These base levels should be moderated by the "effectiveness" of an enemies CounterIntel systems. Effectiveness would be determined by a number of factors, including:

• The number of spy days that have been used "at home" in the last 90 days by the nation (you need feet on the ground to perform CounterIntel)
• The amount of money that the nation is willing to devote to CounterIntel (% of next tax collection which is alterable only once per tax collection. So if I collect then any time from after collection to my next collection I can choose how much of that next collection to devote to CounterIntel)
• Whether or not the nation is being run properly (population happiness - a happier population is more willing to tell the authorities of suspicious activities)
• The pop density of the nation (more people per mile means that it is harder to detect oddities in your neighbours)
• The Threat Level of a nation (if a nation is on high alert they will be more vigilant)
• Length of time at a particular Threat Level (people have a tendancy to become less vigilant after prolonged periods of raised alert)
• If the nation is at war (Security is tightened during war time)
• The number of enemy spies currently in a nation (the more enemy spies there are the more likely your departments are going to leak like a sieve)

Now onto what sort of information the different levels would provide:
Low Level Intel Nation information like the nations environment rating, any events that are currently affecting the nation, etc
Medium Level Intel: trade partners
High Level Intel: trade partners, troop deployments, current collection amounts, current expensiture etc
Ultra High Level Intel: copies of pms that are sent to and from the nation, total expenditure and total income of the nation, etc
Top Secret Level Intel: Nations to whom there are currently operatives deployed, last log in time of the ruler, etc
Area 51 Level Intel: Specific numbers of spies deployed in each deployment, last 10 log in times of the ruler, etc

Now obviously more gradients could be added to this system but I believe that this is about right for the information that would be gained and the leevls that the information is gained at.

Nations that run at very high effectiveness levels for the full 90 days could also have a higher chance of catching spies at home when they actively sweep a nation. Nations get one sweep every 4 days but each sweep reduces population by 5% until the next tax collection, for a potential maximum of 20% population loss. The chance of catching enemy spies increases with the number of sweeps done since the last tax collection.

If this was to be implemented nations would need to be given a 30 day grace period in which to build up their counter intel effectiveness before the system went live.

Additionally since spies are usually sent in in cells the average size of the cells of the enemy nation's spies could be based upon the number of spy deployments made to the home nation. As a nation should only get 1 spy deployment per day (of however many spies they wished) per nation up to a maximum of 3 spy deployments in a day to limit the potential for abuse. Furthermore each deployment should bring with it a risk of the spies getting caught (based on the home nations counter intel effectiveness level). Ditto for removing spies from a nation (a number of high profile people in sensitive positions would cause suspicion in the home nation that something was amiss), the risk of your spies getting caught when they are removed should go up the longer they stay in the nation (with a cap of 90 days in the nation as the longest that CN counts a spy being in a nation for). Same goes for each time and "active" spy op is run.

This way there is an automatic counterbalance to keeping spies in for long periods of time.

If it should even be allowed that should be Area 51 level.

they were just suggestions to give people an idea of what I was talking about.

I like that idea. Very well thought Emares