Sending and recieving foreign aid is an important part of CyberNations, especially during times of war. I propse that a new spy operation be introduced that allows a nation to forcibly cancel a foreign aid offer between two nations before this has been accepted. The spy operation should be performed against the nation sending the aid (as they are likely to have greater resources, spies, etc.). If the spy operation is successful, the nations affected by the spy operation cannot send/recieve aid from each other until the next update.

For example:

NATION A sends NATION B $3,000,000.
NATION C spies on NATION A before NATION B accepts.
If successful, the foreign aid is cancelled and NATION A is informed. NATION B is not informed that a spy operation has taken place.

This has the potential to introduce a dynamic to the game where action have not traditionally been time sensitive.



Thoughts?

approved for discussion.

Great idea, but will they be able to send another aid or will they have to wait 10 days?

If they don't have to wait 10 days to send another foriegn aid offer, then this would be rather useless.

Seems pretty weak, and upgrading it to a few more days could make it hell on on "Nation B".

Make it three days and very expensive. Operation cost: Amount in aid Canceled * 2. Though this might mean the spy person could pay in tech, and I'm okay with that.

I agree that it's not strong enough to be worthwhile. A good idea overall though. I think it should be changed so that the aid slot is actually still wasted, but the aid gets destroyed. Then the same nation cannot send aid to NATION B again for 10 days, and it takes up one of their 4-6 aid slots.

should have the 10 day limit, even better you should be able to steal it.

Make it relatively inexpensive and have it only last 48 hours. Also make it so you could try the attack on either nation, with range limits naturally.

Two days might not seem like a lot, but aid sent during war like that is usually desperately needed right then. A 2 day block would be potentially devastating if you timed it right.


This also has another use as well. It's a great way to clamp down on rogues dumping after declaring or putting a stop the antics of tech deal thieves hiding in peace mode.

So make it a "green text" attack and it will be a lot more useful for policing the renegades.

I foresee people sitting around with nothing to do gleefully pressing F5 and hoping they can screw with people.

48 hours would be a nice figure before the aid could be attempted again if successful.

Giving the aid instead to the spying player invites a new form of raiding that is best not introduced...ever.

Alternative: I see this as something that should be part of a successful blockade more than a spy mission. Blockading player would have the option to allow or not allow aid to go through during the period of the blockade (the equivalent of strong economic sanctions). Secret aid (through FACs) would be unaffected by the blockade.

Yea

I'd rather be an extension of the aid slot, ie a nation can be targeted to extend 1 accepted and non-expired aid slot (chosen at random) by an additional 10 days. This operation can only be performed once per aid slot.

blockades would make some sense if aid couldn't be wire transferred and how that has anything to do with ships, idk. However, I think that a better option would be that neither person would be informed that the spy op took place. When someone tries to collect the aid it gives the message that the aid is no longer available and recommends that they delete the foreign aid offer (kind of like what happens with tech deals now). 24-hours is enough of a deterrent to be worthwhile, but no so crippling that it kills you.

I fully agree. I guess I didn't make that clear in my post above, but the attack I envisioned would simply be a blocking move.

Raiding has slowly become less profitable as time has gone on in the game. That's a trend I'd like to see continue.

I agree with these. Good idea.

For random aiding yes, for alliance-wide coordinated aiding, tech deals or friends helping friends, not really. It still has the problem of people wasting time hiting the refresh button and ulike all other spy ops requires the player to not only be lucky with being on at the right time, but also looking at the right nation. Spying on someone to remove a nuke generally doesn't matter when the player does it (unless they are spying it while they are purchasing/launching it). That's a key difference.

Also, if a message was for solider or tech, then a message saying "the aid is no longer available" is quite clearly checkable and if that's the case can be easily gotten around by canceling and resubmitting and contacting the player.

However having it extend a deal already done has far less drawbacks. It doesn't require the player to have perfect timing, does not allow an easy way to avoid it and bypass a successful spy ops

While using blockades makes sense, blockades are much harder to perform against someone than potentially just disrupting aid through a spy operation. Using blockades also means that you wouldn't be able to blockade people who have less than 1,000 infra and no navy. In my experience, it's usually the smaller nations who need the most aid to continue fighting, so if they don't qualify for a navy, disrupting aid using a blockade would be useless.

When I thought up the idea, I hadn't thought of making the effects of the disruptions last for more than a day. In fact, I was thinking they could still use the slot, just not between the same people. The reason for this the time sensitive nature of accepting aid. However, thinking about it further, I would think that making that slot unusable for both players the remainder of the day is a good idea.

To the issue of refrshing the page and doing it randomly... I doubt it will happen. The person will still need to be in your spy range AND you still only have two spy slots AND spying is often considered an act of war. The combination of these things will act as a deterrent for those who want to do it randomly.

Actually during peacetime that would be the best time to do it. You don't expect to get spied upon mostly and can mess up peoples tech deals and aids. Because your not needing to waste your spy slots on spying nukes away or defcon switching, you can spend your free time refreshing.

And it does far more than any other operation benefit those who actively refresh pages.

I can see people using this on tech sellers to stop large nations from receiving tech in peacetime.

This is actually a fantastic idea, especially if it becomes possible to divert aid to your own nation via spy ops/piracy. I would propose that it work just like secret aid, except only the new "receiver" would need the FAC for the aid offer to be hidden on his screen and in searches.



So basically it would allow you to redirect aid packages to your own nation. To make it even cooler, for the price of a second spy op, allow redirection of the aid to any nation. So you could monkey around with aid to have it sent to yourself (secretly if you had the FAC perhaps), or you could have someone aid their mortal enemy, etc etc.

there should be a middle ground, to avoid them just being able to resend, or it being abused the aid pack should be destroyed instead, the slot stays filled but the money is gone forever and is shown in red lettering as destroyed in the aid screen.

If it were possible to intercept the aid, would this not mean that an alliance could arrange more aid than is currently permissible, unless the slot is used for the 10 days (by deliberately sending aid out to be intercepted by the real recipient)

edit

ok yeah i forgot you have to pay for the spy op

Aid up until the days of wire transfer *had* to be delivered by ship or plane (and non-monetary forms of aid not covered by CN rules still do...though you could argue that the cash represents both cash gifts of aid and the cash value of aid), so that takes us up until at least the 1960s or 70s. Even then while wire transfers of millions (even billions) of dollars were possible, it wasn't until such transfers could be made ultra secure that they became more common (FYI: paper currency, as was the case with some of the American aid to Iraq, is still sent the old fashion way).

There is a reason you don't see aid to foreign countries diverted in transit electronically. If aid disappears at all, it is because it happens *after* it arrives in country, where corruption causes it to evaporate, or if you watch enough movies, commandos rob a bank . There is already a spy op for that called "Destroy Money Reserves" that covers anything that could happen to the cash once it arrives.