(6-36) Espionage System Overhaul

[azum4roll]

Edited proposal: Added some game speed scaling for missions. Generally the espionage system should be game speed independent, but some rewards are worth more in slower speeds. Also added another new intrigue type against human players only.

Rig election multiplier should have a cap so it doesn’t become the biggest influence source.

Rig success rate keeps dropping when there's another spy present, so it should be fine.

NP cost and effect/cooldown/yield amount cap durations should scale with game speed.

Very few need to scale since the system acts on missions in constant intervals, regardless of game speed.

Steal gold should have some cap from many complaints in the past.

Players shouldn't stockpile that much gold to begin with. The AI doesn't, unless they have literally nothing to spend on.

Security from missions should have some decay mechanic (maybe removed after xx turns of no missions)

It's intended to be permanent, to slightly counteract the ever-growing population. The main source is still buildings and policies.

Maybe some NP/Security bonus for leftover Spy points?

That would be too fluctuating in an uncontrollable way.

 

[Phosphoraptor]

Rig success rate keeps dropping when there's another spy present, so it should be fine.

Then can the AI be made to always send another spy when someone gets a large streak? This seems to assume that some player is always alert/free with their spies enough to stop this, and can be exploitable.

That would be too fluctuating in an uncontrollable way.

This is not meant to be a significant controllable bonus to be played around, but a small one that allows policies/buildings/map settings that give awkward amounts of Spy points to provide some value as compensation instead of the points being wasted. This would further smooth out the progression of “espionage resources” available to the player and allow more fine tuning of things giving spy points.

 

[azum4roll]

Everything giving Spy Points gives at least the amount needed for one spy. It's never useless.

 

[Revolutionist_8]

This is a really simple - yet complex enough not to be boring - idea, I really like it!

Just one question: counterspy missions such as extra yields to specialists or extra happiness and reduced unhappiness would be removed because... balance reasons? Thematic reasons? "Too many options" reason?

 

[azum4roll]

Counterspies shouldn't give direct benefits (only "reactive" benefits). Use them as spies/diplomats if you want those.

 

[Revolutionist_8]

Counterspies shouldn't give direct benefits (only "reactive" benefits). Use them as spies/diplomats if you want those.

Yup, that makes sense.

 

[adan_eslavo]

6-36 proposal is probably conficting with this one as it propose to rework coup quests you want to remove?

 

[azum4roll]

Technically not: whether that quest is nerfed or not shouldn't impact the voting decision making on this proposal. And if this proposal passes, that one's irrelevant.

 

[azum4roll]

Edited proposal:

The (election rigging) streak system only starts when everyone has at least one spy. Before that, rig influence is the same as now.

Number of votes per turn is nerfed from (Spy level)^2 to (Spy level), to give other civs a chance against England. (1/4/9/16 -> 1/2/3/4)

 

[Recursive]

The "skip turn" mission should be retained. It's pure QoL for human players and there's no reason to remove it.

 

[azum4roll]

The "skip turn" mission should be retained. It's pure QoL for human players and there's no reason to remove it.

There's no reason to have it. The initial spy mission selection is purely a reminder when it's available, and the reminder itself is a notification that's not turn blocking.
Unless you somehow want the spy to just chill there forever when you first assign it?

 

[Recursive]

There's no reason to have it. The initial spy mission selection is purely a reminder when it's available, and the reminder itself is a notification that's not turn blocking.
Unless you somehow want the spy to just chill there forever when you first assign it?

Wait, I forgot how the NP system worked. Never mind...

 

[azum4roll]

Edited proposal: Spy owners also get a notification if a spy mission has been performed in the city, and that no other missions can be performed in the next 15 turns. This does not have an NP requirement.

 

[Solic]

I quite like coups as a mechanic and would be sad to see it go completely. I understand you want to remove it because of the success rate element? What if we made it 100%, but added in more repercussions to curb its strength. For instance, decreasing your influence by X amount on all other city states or city states in the surrounding area. Or you could increase the diplomatic penalties associated with pulling off a coup. You could decrease the spy level back to 1 and lock it at the spy being level 3. You could also lock the action behind a policy/tenet so you'd have to invest into having this power available. It could fit well on Autocracy allowing you to very aggressively curry favor in city states either through military force in bullying with tyranny or using spy resources. It'd fit with the diplomatic oriented playstyle of autocracy too. You could potentially move the internal security bonuses towards order which is already more tailored towards counterspying instead. It's also more interesting in my opinion than just have more spies.

 

[pineappledan]

allowing spies to hurt a city or empire means that you have to satisfy a few conditions:

- If spies from different civs can be in the same city, then you need to be able to have up to 21 spies in a single city.
- 1 spy needs to be able to do enough harm that it is noticeable, but 21 spies need to do not enough harm to make the entire city, or wider empire collapse from the combined damage the espionage system can do.

I would posit that you can’t make spy actions strong enough to do both, and that any workaround you try to invent will just suck in the short term, and will have been a waste of time in the long term, after it is eventually scrapped.

This proposal offers a cooldown of 15 turns between actions. If 21 spies queued up for actions on the same turn, each taking an action every 15 turns, it would be 315 turns before the 21st civ got to do his first action in that city. If he loses all his NP if he moves then he is caught in a bind. He doesn’t know how many other civs’ spies are ahead of him, and so he doesn’t know that he should bail.

If you argue that is okay, because the passive bonuses are good enough that the 21st spy is fairly compensated, then what you are saying is the advanced actions are, at most, only as good as the passive benefits of taking no action. In which case Why have active missions at all? If passive missions are that good then active missions are useless, and you have made an entire mechanic that is worse than doing nothing.

If you raise the failure rate of subsequent spy missions, or make each subsequent action do less, then you are shortchanging every other civ except the 1st one to get his action on that city.

I just don’t see how you can make these mechanics work. They will feel awful no matter what you try. The longer the community spends trying to recuperate this dead end system the more time is wasted just to reach the obvious conclusion: offensive spy missions that hurt host civs cannot ever be balanced.

 

[azum4roll]

Edited proposal: Changed how cooldowns work (see section "Mission cooldowns" for details).

 

[pineappledan]

Summarizing my thoughts on this:

Advanced actions are just the Events in disguise:

• That's just literally what it is. It's the events system in a form that can't be disabled without hollowing out a larger part of the game (impact on buildings, policies, etc).
• As someone who is rather cold on the event system this is tantamount to hostage taking. We have a proposal this congress to remove events as a default enabled game setting and here we are deliberating on how to put Groucho glasses on it, make it hurt more, and make it harder to avoid.
• The more players you have in a single game, the more foreign spies there are, so this event system now scales with number of players in a game, but only the bad events that hurt you.
• No one likes when bad events happen to them, they are pure feels bad, and this system is designed around making them happen to you constantly.

The Human player will ALWAYS be on the receiving end of any spy system

• In a standard 8 player game, you will have approximately 7 foreign spies for every 1 you have, and each of your cities is 7x more likely to be targeted by 1 of them than any 1 of your cities is to be targeted by 1 of yours.
• The end result is that bad events are 7x more likely than good events, and that ratio gets worse the larger you make your games.
• Players set the difficulty specifically so they can make sure they are playing a game that they can be reasonably sure to win, or at least to make sure they don't get pummeled.
• Most players won't continue a game if they aren't in the top 50% of civs. If you arent being spied on that means you are losing and you will probably quit soon. This means that the vast majority of games players experience is ones where they are high-priority targets for spying.
• You have to design the system assuming that players will be on the receiving end of it pretty much constantly, and most likely multiple foreign spies in multiple cities at once.

Creating a spy system that hurts cities is prescribing a difficulty and playstyle onto players, and disproportionately hurts casual play.

• The more in the lead you are the more likely you will be targeted by foreign spies.
• If you prefer to play civ games with a comfortable lead then you are guaranteed to be hosting several spies in your cities at once.
• Spies that can hurt cities and empires specifically targets players who like to 'sandbox' or play with confidence that they will win, ie. 'comp stomp'.
• The people who are least affected by these spies are high difficulty players and players that like to play tight games where they are "in the pack", and scrape out wins in highly competitive, close matches. Those people also happen to be the most active and loudest voices in the community.
• The devs need to be careful that they aren't creating a system that specifically sets out to punish newbies and people who aren't playing VP for hard games.

Spies being able to hurt cities will punish tall play

• The fewer cities you have, the more each city must contribute to your empire. which means the more damage 1 spy in 1 city can do to your empire.
• Wide is already designed so that it can absorb espionage hits better.
• I have not seen any discussion of tall vs wide in this discussion of espionage; I think that it needs to be established that people are specifically designing this system to hurt small empires disproportionately.
• If that isn't an explicit goal then something needs to be done to reconcile spy actions vs. empire size

Any system that has spies hurting their host cities needs to be scalable to 21x power.

• Civ is a game that has to be playable for anywhere between 2 and 22 players.
• It may not be balanced with 22 players in mind, but it has to be PLAYABLE.
• The espionage system has to be designed in a way that allows for the possibility that 21 spies will be in a single city at once. That has to be something that can happen without either
  • a) gridlocking every spy owner out of any actions as they queue up to punch the host city for the entire duration of the game
  • b) not grind that city down to dust by repeatedly dogpiling it. This assumes that one of the goals of the espionage system is not to simply make a game unplayable for that 1 player.
• It’s incredibly difficult, maybe impossible, to make 1 spy in 1 city will feel substantial, but 21 spies in 1 city not feel crushing.

 

[Stalker0]

MAGI: Needs to add a clause explaining how the "coup a CS" and "spy on civ X times" quests are impacted by this new system.

@azum4roll

 

[azum4roll]

MAGI: Needs to add a clause explaining how the "coup a CS" and "spy on civ X times" quests are impacted by this new system.

@azum4roll

Coup quest - removed.

Spy on civ X times is unchanged. You can propose something else next congress to balance that, if needed.

 

[azum4roll]

Summarizing my thoughts on this:

Advanced actions are just the Events in disguise:

• That's just literally what it is. It's the events system in a form that can't be disabled without hollowing out a larger part of the game (impact on buildings, policies, etc).
• As someone who is rather cold on the event system this is tantamount to hostage taking. We have a proposal this congress to remove events as a default enabled game setting and here we are deliberating on how to put Groucho glasses on it, make it hurt more, and make it harder to avoid.
• The more players you have in a single game, the more foreign spies there are, so this event system now scales with number of players in a game, but only the bad events that hurt you.
• No one likes when bad events happen to them, they are pure feels bad, and this system is designed around making them happen to you constantly.

The Human player will ALWAYS be on the receiving end of any spy system

• In a standard 8 player game, you will have approximately 7 foreign spies for every 1 you have, and each of your cities is 7x more likely to be targeted by 1 of them than any 1 of your cities is to be targeted by 1 of yours.
• The end result is that bad events are 7x more likely than good events, and that ratio gets worse the larger you make your games.
• Players set the difficulty specifically so they can make sure they are playing a game that they can be reasonably sure to win, or at least to make sure they don't get pummeled.
• Most players won't continue a game if they aren't in the top 50% of civs. If you arent being spied on that means you are losing and you will probably quit soon. This means that the vast majority of games players experience is ones where they are high-priority targets for spying.
• You have to design the system assuming that players will be on the receiving end of it pretty much constantly, and most likely multiple foreign spies in multiple cities at once.

Creating a spy system that hurts cities is prescribing a difficulty and playstyle onto players, and disproportionately hurts casual play.

• The more in the lead you are the more likely you will be targeted by foreign spies.
• If you prefer to play civ games with a comfortable lead then you are guaranteed to be hosting several spies in your cities at once.
• Spies that can hurt cities and empires specifically targets players who like to 'sandbox' or play with confidence that they will win, ie. 'comp stomp'.
• The people who are least affected by these spies are high difficulty players and players that like to play tight games where they are "in the pack", and scrape out wins in highly competitive, close matches. Those people also happen to be the most active and loudest voices in the community.
• The devs need to be careful that they aren't creating a system that specifically sets out to punish newbies and people who aren't playing VP for hard games.

Spies being able to hurt cities will punish tall play

• The fewer cities you have, the more each city must contribute to your empire. which means the more damage 1 spy in 1 city can do to your empire.
• Wide is already designed so that it can absorb espionage hits better.
• I have not seen any discussion of tall vs wide in this discussion of espionage; I think that it needs to be established that people are specifically designing this system to hurt small empires disproportionately.
• If that isn't an explicit goal then something needs to be done to reconcile spy actions vs. empire size

Any system that has spies hurting their host cities needs to be scalable to 21x power.

• Civ is a game that has to be playable for anywhere between 2 and 22 players.
• It may not be balanced with 22 players in mind, but it has to be PLAYABLE.
• The espionage system has to be designed in a way that allows for the possibility that 21 spies will be in a single city at once. That has to be something that can happen without either
  • a) gridlocking every spy owner out of any actions as they queue up to punch the host city for the entire duration of the game
  • b) not grind that city down to dust by repeatedly dogpiling it. This assumes that one of the goals of the espionage system is not to simply make a game unplayable for that 1 player.
• It’s incredibly difficult, maybe impossible, to make 1 spy in 1 city will feel substantial, but 21 spies in 1 city not feel crushing.

You're repeating the same point (lead player will be targeted by every other player and that is bad) multiple times there.
This is why diplomacy is a thing. Not every player will declare war on you just because you're winning. That would be even more unplayable, but nobody is trying to revamp or impose a cap on wars.
Friends don't spy on you; they put diplomats in your capital and go spy on their enemies instead.

The cooldown exists to make sure the same city isn't hit by too many missions, but in reality you aren't going to get enough NP for a mission every 15 turns.

Tall only has a strong capital so they only need to focus on security in one city. Wide often has several cities that don't want to be hit, and requires more investment on security. This is the intended balance.