Poll: Alternative bonuses for when turning off the espionage system

[KlHannibal2]

Currently, you can disable the espionage system in the game settings. Doing so, however reduces value of several game components. Mostly policies / tenets and England's UA.

How about implementing alternative bonuses for those components that come into play if espionage is disabled? Like porcelain tower has a bonus for research agreements and an alternative bonus if these are disabled.

My issues with the spy system is that it has too many weak options and it is changed too often to bother with it. I want to gauge, if there is a significant number of players who prefer disabling espionage. If this is the case, we could start working on alternative bonuses to current espionage bonuses.

 

[Solic]

I would never turn the current form off personally. That might change if any of the reworks pass, but I'll only really know that after playing with it. I'd suggest a poll if you want to see what's the interest in alternative bonuses.

 

[Recursive]

Currently, you can disable the espionage system in the game settings. Doing so, however reduces value of several game components. Mostly policies / tenets and England's UA.

How about implementing alternative bonuses for those components that come into play if espionage is disabled? Like porcelain tower has a bonus for research agreements and an alternative bonus if these are disabled.

My issues with the spy system is that it has too many weak options and it is changed too often to bother with it. I want to gauge, if there is a significant number of players who prefer disabling espionage. If this is the case, we could start working on alternative bonuses to current espionage bonuses.

I don't think this needs a poll.

 

[Stalker0]

This was a recent point of discussion on discord, and I think we can support such an effort if someone wants to craft a proposal.

The areas that you would need to update primarily:

• Constabulary
  • Siam Wat
• Police Station
• Military Base
• Covert Action (Freedom
• Double Agents (Order)
• Shadow Networks (Statecraft)
• Police State (Autocracy)
• National Intelligence Agency
• England UA
• Empiricism (Rationalism)
• Foreign Service (Statecraft)
• Bletchley Park
• White Tower
• Public Works

 

[CppMaster]

Can buildings just be almost useless when espionage is disabled? Some buildings are far less important than others anyway.

 

[KlHannibal2]

Can buildings just be almost useless when espionage is disabled? Some buildings are far less important than others anyway.

Yes, I feel the issue most pressing with statecraft and England tbh.

 

[Solic]

I think it'd be more interesting to poll who turns off espionage as opposed to who is for or against implementing alternative bonuses as I'd expect hardly anyone would be against that. The results might also shed some light on the popularity of the system regardless.

I'll motivate my no vote here then as well not being likely to turn espionage off since I enjoy the system. Any development time/effort going towards alternative bonuses would take away from things that could improve my personal experience. Having said that, it's also not something that should impact my experience, so it's definitely not something I'm going to fight hard for and look forward to see what you come up with.

I'd also agree that England UA and Statecraft are the most important. Ideologies are at least at a symmetric disadvantage and buildings are more modular than intertwined policies. A trade route civ should still want to go statecraft for instance.

 

[pineappledan]

If there were robust compensations for all of the things like policies, buildings, and civs that simply become non-functional when espionage was turned off I would get rid of it in a heartbeat.

 

[CppMaster]

If there were robust compensations for all of the things like policies, buildings, and civs that simply become non-functional when espionage was turned off I would get rid of it in a heartbeat.

You almost seem like you don't like espionage system very much.

 

[pineappledan]

Not in its current form, certainly not. It's overwrought and distracts from more polished systems.

 

[hokath]

If someone wanted to do this then I think a modmod for playtesting first is a good idea.

 

[youngsteve]

I don't use it most of the time, though I feel I am losing a big part of VP by turning it off. It certainly weakens England & Statecraft, but the upside is not have these annoying spies wrecking your economy, with nothing you can do about it. Gets worse as the game goes on as more spies come into play, which many for some reason voted having more of in game. Rather have vanilla system, & never usually say that about anything in VP.

 

[Stalker0]

You almost seem like you don't like espionage system very much.

hehe I mean to be fair I would expect the participants in this discussion would on average not like espionage that much

 

[axatin]

The question here is not "Is the espionage system in its current form good or bad?" but rather "Should there be a game option to turn it off that offers alternate versions of every building/policy related to it?"

My answer to this is no because I see several problems with using advanced options in such a way.

1. It makes it harder to balance the game. Such an option would mean that we basically have two England civs with different abilities in the game. The same would be true for the long list of espionage-related buildings and policies provided by Stalker. Depending on the strength/weakness of espionage, turning the option on or off would have at least some effect on how the late game is played. All of these contribute to a fragmentation of the game that makes future balancing efforts harder.
2. It's not well compatible with the congress system. Having a gameplay element hidden behind an advanced option seems to deter people from making congress proposals. In the one year since the start of the VP congress, we've had exactly one proposal to change something related to the event system (and that is turning it off by default). Maybe in this particular case the reason is that most of the people actually don't play with events on, but we've had no proposals to change the strength/functionality of research agreements or of tech trading either.
3. It causes problems in the UI. For England and the espionage buildings we'd need to state in their descriptions both the standard abilities and the alternate abilities if espionage is turned off. That would make the texts long, complicated and hard to read. It would also be harder to display abilities in a non-text form in the UI if they were only active when using certain game settings.

For these reasons, I think advanced options shouldn't be used for such far-reaching changes. If there's interest in playing the game without espionage, a "no espionage" option should be offered in a modmod. This would solve all the problems mentioned above, the modmod could easily change abilities and texts and also rebalance other parts of the game if necessary.

We're having some proposals in this congress session to rework espionage and I'd like to encourage everyone who's unhappy with the current system to contribute to the discussions and vote for your preferred option (or make your own proposal if you don't find the existing ones convincing). For example, Stalker has made a proposal that would move the espionage system closer to how it used to be in vanilla.

Lastly, if you think that the game would be better without any espionage system, please use the opportunity and make a congress proposal to have it turned off by default and to have England and the buildings/policies reworked. If that proposal passes, it would be an espionage system that could be offered as an optional element in a modmod.

 

[Recursive]

but we've had no proposals to change the strength/functionality of research agreements or of tech trading either.

We had 2 proposals to modify tech trading last session.