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Espionage Overhaul


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Maybe have a cap of 100 spies and the rate at which an operation would be completed would depend of the number of spies, 20 spies = 20% speed, 80 spies = 80% speed etc

Also with the alliance spy operation thing, we could have all alliance related spy operations use Alliance spies that the Alliances trains. Alliance spies would require an very high recruitment cost and  upkeep. So there would be 2 types of spies normal and Alliance

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Eh, spies are underwhelming but if used effectively by a coordinated alliance they can be pretty effective support.

I'd just reduce the cost of spies missions and leave them alone. Last thing we need is something to completely unbalance the war system, we know how Alex has handled that in the past.

Most of the proposed features to replace the current uses for spies are even more useless than the current features and don't really justify changing the whole system around. Spying on messages is not a feature that should exist, especially when 90% of the important conduct happens in discord, and hidden trades give cheaters a way to hide their cheating from the public eye.

 

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4 hours ago, Psweet said:

My Proposition:

Remove all of the military damage missions.  Seriously, just trash them.  Spies are not military weapons.  The times in history where material damage has been inflicted on a force by actual spies are not very numerous - especially in the modern era, which we're assuming this game takes place in.  

Dramatically reduce the effectiveness of spy assassinations.  It currently takes almost a week to recover from someone attacking your spies *once*.  A concerted effort against your spies means you get zeroed with no recourse or options.  

Add in more info that can be stolen via missions.  Messages sent and received in-game, for example.  Allow spying on alliances to reveal parts of bank balances, and/or bank transactions.  Implement the ability to anonymously conduct trades, and allow spies to uncover them.  Show many spies the opposing nation has, of course.  Show some recent alliance announcements (past month, maybe?), even.

Make missions occur gradually, over time.  Given the importance of the information and the curtailing of spy-slaughter, it would make sense if operations were more like policies than missions.  You set them, and then the benefits (info) accrue over time.  Depending on the spies and policies contending your penetrative attempts, you might start seeing small amounts of info right away, followed by larger chunks of intel... or it might take weeks to uncover anything at all.

Uncap the number of spies people can have... but keep the low recruitment rate.  Removing the ability to dramatically deplete your opponents' spies means that you need a different way to get a leg up.  The way to do that is by recruiting more spies, which I figure is a simple abstraction of being willing to fund equipment, personnel, and training further.  

 

I'm sure that there are many holes in what I've proposed.  Feel free to poke them, then we can find ways to close them up again!

 

First point -  Why?  Your reasoning doesn't make sense for the game.  In fact, they were buffed in this area.  It's "ok" as it is.

Second point  - This is tricky, because if you reduce the effectiveness, you remove the one tool that is good against nuke/missile stocking nations.  Basically this would effectively remove spies altogether in the game if you change this area.  While it is a pain to recover from spy assassinations, keep in mind that 1 spy can completely ruin an operation, no matter how many spies you have (Especially with nuke sabotage).  You also have a 50-75% chance of success on Extreme for Gathering Info with 1 spy.

Third point - I'm not oppose to this idea, but most of the messages done about the game is done in Discord or other likeminded chat programs.

Fourth point - Interesting idea.

Fifth point - This is going to be beaten down.  It's been brought up several times in the past.  I feel removing the cap would  probably ruin the somewhat balance we have now.  The only way how things get out of hand is from coordination.

 

I do like Sketchy's idea of lowering the costs overall though.

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5 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

First point -  Why?  Your reasoning doesn't make sense for the game.  In fact, they were buffed in this area.  It's "ok" as it is.

Second point  - This is tricky, because if you reduce the effectiveness, you remove the one tool that is good against nuke/missile stocking nations.  Basically this would effectively remove spies altogether in the game if you change this area.  While it is a pain to recover from spy assassinations, keep in mind that 1 spy can completely ruin an operation, no matter how many spies you have (Especially with nuke sabotage).  You also have a 50-75% chance of success on Extreme for Gathering Info with 1 spy.

Third point - I'm not oppose to this idea, but most of the messages done about the game is done in Discord or other likeminded chat programs.

Fourth point - Interesting idea.

Fifth point - This is going to be beaten down.  It's been brought up several times in the past.  I feel removing the cap would  probably ruin the somewhat balance we have now.  The only way how things get out of hand is from coordination.

 

I do like Sketchy's idea of lowering the costs overall though.

First point - Fair question.  They don't really have to be trashed so much as I think it's ridiculous that that's what spies do in the game.  Trash them or leave them, however, the other things should be instituted and, I think, should be the actual purpose of having spies.

Second point - Tricky perhaps, but combined with the later proposition of removing spy caps, it becomes less a simple formula of wiping out enemy spies and then sabotaging, and more a matter of gradual wearing down and penetrating.  Performing a spy blitzkrieg is both simplistic and not terribly balanced.  While one spy can disrupt an op, your opponents are fools if they leave you with any spies at all.  It's far too easy to zero someone out, and there's zero defense against it once you've already lost one op.

Third point - I do understand that, but some aren't.  Even with alliance announcements, if they're simply linked to a forum announcement, that's fine too.  The presence of the announcement is often as important as the content.  With messages, although you wouldn't intercept alliance-level diplomacy, you would still get a lot of things like attack coordination (I'm heavily discord active as well, but some people just don't, or aren't on at the same times), petty extortion, small-scale dramas, and such the like.  It's not game-breakingly powerful like intercepting a "HEY LET'S GO ATTACK PANTHEON" message, but it's still useful, and a heck of a lot more interesting than what spies currently do.

Fifth point - of course removing the cap would remove the balance we have now.  I'm not suggesting that we remove the cap but keep the current system, I'm suggesting removing the cap in addition to the other changes herein.  That is to say, when you put it into context, espionage becomes more about time, focus, and investment than it does about blitzing each other's spies away asap.  If you remove the ability to assassinate tons of spies quickly, then everyone will just sit at 60 spies (or nearly so) forever.  This suggestion will enable the continuation of the Great Game by removing that arbitrary cap - nations can have as many spies as they can afford and keep safe.

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Spy assassinations should kill a percentage of your spies, maximum of 10% of your spies killed per attack, but that means you can't kill spies under 9 spies.

It shouldn't be possible to just permanently zero someone's spies for years

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No offense meant, but revealing in game messages or announcements seems like an absolutely awful idea to me.

There's plenty of other ways for people to communicate. It just makes one of the ways riskier. If that's a thing, no one halfway capable is going to put anything interesting in those places, and the end result is going to be there being astronomically low odds of finding out anything interesting anyway... to me it just seems like making an in game feature less useful for no real benefit.

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6 hours ago, Spaceman Thrax said:

No offense meant, but revealing in game messages or announcements seems like an absolutely awful idea to me.

There's plenty of other ways for people to communicate. It just makes one of the ways riskier. If that's a thing, no one halfway capable is going to put anything interesting in those places, and the end result is going to be there being astronomically low odds of finding out anything interesting anyway... to me it just seems like making an in game feature less useful for no real benefit.

I now want this feature to see what juicy secrets Thrax is concealing in his in-game messages and doesn't want us to find. :v

 

Joking aside, I won't address the rest right now, but I don't love uncapping the number of spies while keeping low recruitment. That's the way it was back when spies were originally released, and the end result was basically a massive disparity among spies. Some dedicated folks/alliances (I was one of them) built spies every day until they had hundreds and were basically untouchable on the spy front, they had great odds against everyone else and were basically impossible to take down come wartime, if enemy ops actually succeeded against low odds, then losing 10 spies out of 700 was inconsequential. In practice it meant a lot of people didn't even bother with spies as the guys who built two every day had baked in advantages. It's part of why spies were capped in the first place, putting everyone on an even playing field allowed for more competition, and meant some big nation with hundreds of spies wasn't the be all and end all. I think it's best if they spy cap stays.

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7 hours ago, Ogaden said:

Spy assassinations should kill a percentage of your spies, maximum of 10% of your spies killed per attack, but that means you can't kill spies under 9 spies.

Then nukes would remain untouchable.  1 spy left royally wrecks the chances.

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6 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

Then nukes would remain untouchable.  1 spy left royally wrecks the chances.

Then perhaps the solution is to change how spy ops work to begin with, which was the point of this thread?

30 minutes ago, TheNG said:

but I don't love uncapping the number of spies while keeping low recruitment. That's the way it was back when spies were originally released, and the end result was basically a massive disparity among spies.

I don't disagree, but you, too, are taking that one point out of context.  Obviously that's a bad idea if we leave the rest of the espionage system the same.  That wasn't what I suggested.  I suggested an overhaul, and that is but one part of it.

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15 hours ago, Buorhann said:

Then nukes would remain untouchable.  1 spy left royally wrecks the chances.

Why should nukes, which cost millions of dollars each in cash and resources, be destroyable by a cheapo spy op anyways?

I think spies vs nukes is massively OP at the moment, this would fix that problem.  There's still a small chance you can take out a nuke or two a day.

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5 hours ago, Ogaden said:

Why should nukes, which cost millions of dollars each in cash and resources, be destroyable by a cheapo spy op anyways?

I think spies vs nukes is massively OP at the moment, this would fix that problem.  There's still a small chance you can take out a nuke or two a day.

Because nukes could cost millions in repairs?

Its a counter, and the only one at that.

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6 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

Because nukes could cost millions in repairs?

Its a counter, and the only one at that.

It's an entitled attitude that people are entitled to not be nuked

Nukes already cost absurd amounts of money, resources and action points to build, store and use.  Spies can then zap them, in heavily fortified silos no less, for a few hundred grand.

The current situation is absurd.

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Where did the "entitled attitude" come from again?  You're coming off in the way that since you invest so much into something, that it shouldn't have a counter.

In order to successfully knock out nukes, you have to completely zero out the targets spies first.   That takes time, even when you're killing 15+ spies a hit (Eventually that dips with the more spies they lose).

I think at our last calculation of coordinating spy ops to knock out a person's nukes, it took 3-4 days depending on how the RNG favors you.   And that's without the person replenishing his spies back.

1 spy completely wrecks the chances of knocking out nukes.  Just 1.  Sure, it's still possible, but much smaller to be reliably effective.

With that said, that's 3-4 days of a nation capable of saving/throwing out nukes.

 

Of course there's other factors, such as if the targeted nation has Arcane setting.  Which increases the difficulty (Even if you have Covert).  While you're taking in the hard cost of a single op, you're not factoring in the time and coordination required to successfully and reliably knock out nukes.

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On 1/8/2018 at 7:42 PM, Pheonix said:

Also with the alliance spy operation thing, we could have all alliance related spy operations use Alliance spies that the Alliances trains. Alliance spies would require an very high recruitment cost and  upkeep. So there would be 2 types of spies normal and Alliance

This actually has merit as being plausible, I'll give it some thought later and see if I can building a working  module from the concept.

On 1/9/2018 at 2:02 PM, Spaceman Thrax said:

No offense meant, but revealing in game messages or announcements seems like an absolutely awful idea to me.

There's plenty of other ways for people to communicate. It just makes one of the ways riskier. If that's a thing, no one halfway capable is going to put anything interesting in those places, and the end result is going to be there being astronomically low odds of finding out anything interesting anyway... to me it just seems like making an in game feature less useful for no real benefit.

This basically, I'd literally just not use the system in question.

6 hours ago, Ogaden said:

It's an entitled attitude that people are entitled to not be nuked

Nukes already cost absurd amounts of money, resources and action points to build, store and use.  Spies can then zap them, in heavily fortified silos no less, for a few hundred grand.

The current situation is absurd.

Its an entitled attitude that nukes should be untouchable. Anything you can do to damage someone should have a counter if effort is given. And please stop trying to make RL practicality a requirement for game mechanics.

 

 

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And a person can save up MAPs till they have enough to launch a nuke.   Build, then launch.  Can't counter that unless you got a bot running or you're extremely lucky on catching it when they're logged on.

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11 hours ago, Buorhann said:

And a person can save up MAPs till they have enough to launch a nuke.   Build, then launch.  Can't counter that unless you got a bot running or you're extremely lucky on catching it when they're logged on.

Yeah against a single opponent, not 3 or 8

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I like the idea of spying being something used more than just in war, but as pointed out, secret trades will just encourage cheating and uncovering messages/announcements would just force people to use Discord and off-site forums when, IMO we should encourage more use of in-game communications (as many players won't bother with Discord or off-site forums.)

I think spies should get some tweaks to how many enemy spies they can kill, and perhaps buffs to the damage they can do to other units so that those are usable tactics. Ideally, you should be able to harass each other every day with spies for the hell of it. If it's too costly to do that, we can look at reducing the cost of executing spy ops.

One idea that may be beneficial is reworking spy odds so that spies have decreasing returns to scale in respect to their effectiveness, instead of the existing linear returns. To explain further: currently 10 spies has a value of "10" and 50 spies has a value of "50". If we used a logarithmic or sqrt scale, it could be something like 10 spies has a value of "3.16" and 50 spies has a value of "7.07". In this scenario, you can see how instead of the guy with 50 spies having a 5x advantage over the guy with 10, it's now closer to a 2x advantage. Still an advantage, certainly, but less drastic, and the gap between low levels of spies becomes far more similar.

Just spitballing as well here, but with a DRS (decreasing returns to scale) system, it may be feasible to once again eliminate the spy-range, so that any nation can spy on any other nation. That's something I've always wanted to do, was to make espionage a universal mechanic that all players could interact with all other players through.

In any case, thank you for posting the suggestion and I am offering my thoughts not only to contribute to the discussion, but to show everyone that I am still looking to work with you all (the players) to make the game better.

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9 minutes ago, Alex said:

One idea that may be beneficial is reworking spy odds so that spies have decreasing returns to scale in respect to their effectiveness, instead of the existing linear returns. To explain further: currently 10 spies has a value of "10" and 50 spies has a value of "50". If we used a logarithmic or sqrt scale, it could be something like 10 spies has a value of "3.16" and 50 spies has a value of "7.07". In this scenario, you can see how instead of the guy with 50 spies having a 5x advantage over the guy with 10, it's now closer to a 2x advantage. Still an advantage, certainly, but less drastic, and the gap between low levels of spies becomes far more similar.

I like this idea, but hopefully you'll tweak the calculations further.  Even with nearly 6x odds of the current system, one spy throws the percentage chance of sabotaging off more than it should.

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20 minutes ago, Holton said:

My thoughts:

 

Spies are capped at 60 if you buy a CIA.

Spy vs spy kill 10+ spies at a time.

 

Nukes are uncapped.

Spy vs. nukes can max out at one nuke per operation.

So, essentially the status quo?

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1 hour ago, Alex said:

So, essentially the status quo?

Sorry, that was really poorly worded on my part. :P

 

I was pointing out the mismatch between the two and how I think the sabotage nukes could use a buff since the amount you can build is uncapped.

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