GEM: Espionage first draft

I agree that tech stealing is powerful. As is city state election rigging. That's why I think espionage works well. It has powerful effects that are strategically significant. Each espionage decision really matters. That is precisely why I wouldn't want to create lots more 'things to do', because as you say then each thing would have to be toned down.


Can we agree on "less consequential than tech stealing or election rigging as currently implemented"? I think we agree that if you had many more things to do, each thing would have to be less significant, for balance reasons.


The flavor that I enjoy from espionage is the imperalism/cold-war feel of messing with city states. I really enjoy replicating the Great Game, and the kind of meddling that occurred in so much of Latin America, Africa and SE Asia through the cold war.

This is the most persuasive argument against many new options. Especially with the CS effects and the fun that can be had in diplomacy.

A possible compromise is to give espionage more frequent or possible small returns than a few big ones but within the same total yields, or have the big returns as options but with higher risk (as coups are versus just election rigging).
 
If I were to summarize, I get the impression that Ahriman doesn't like changing the bones of the vanilla game very much without some compelling necessity for balance or fun for features that aren't working very well. If he thinks espionage is doing what it is intended to (I don't see him suggesting that he doesn't use it for example)
This is a good summary of my position.
[Though; no-one has to argue anything, and if Thal disagrees with my perspective then he should ignore me. But I find from my previous mod design experience that mods work better when ideas are subject to challenge and debate, and where at least 90% of proposed ideas never make it into the mod. IMO feature creep is the biggest threat to a successful game or mod.]

Given that the game already removed trading techs for trade deals that improve science over time, it might be simpler to go with a system of stealing science yields than techs
The game kept research agreements that give a lump-sum tech boost and has whole-tech stealing rather than incremental tech gain. I think some of the underlying reason for this is precisely because it feels more significant to get a lump of stuff all at once than to get a small incremental yield each turn.
It also allows us to have a notification trigger and diplomatic consequence from the discrete event of successfully having a tech stolen, which would not be possible (or would create clutter) from creating an incremental flow of beakers.
And it also makes espionage defense more interesting if killing the enemy spy halts all their efforts on tech theft for that spy, rather than just slowing their incremental beaker income. This makes counterespionage feel more meaningful.
 
I think a system stealing science a la RAs could work better than one with tech stealing.

some people like the minimal espionage approach in G&K, some others would like to get more involved with it. that's perfectly reasonable.

a system with a less rigid number of spies ( and spies generated like GPs ) and more actions available to them would allow to cater more to each category of users, as the player can choose by himself how much effort he wants to dedicate to espionage.
 
@Ahriman
We are clearly approaching this from different viewpoints. For example, I didn't know the CS cold-war type aspect was so important to you - for me, the only time I send a spy to a CS is for counter-espionage in contested CS, risking the spy on a coup never seems worth it and election-rigging of little value; as a consequence I nearly always send spies to major civs or leave them at home for defense. If I cannot gain any techs from another civ (from their defenses or from my tech dominance) espionage might as well not exist. Perhaps I should play around with coups more frequently. :)

So the biggest issue for me (and many others given the thrust of this thread and the complaint threads in the G&K forum since release) is that there is not enough content for espionage. I think there is a definite call from the community for espionage to be fleshed out more. I'm sure we can reach a compromise if we are both willing to view each others' arguments with a positive attitude. Is there really nothing you would like to see added to the espionage mechanic, or is the status quo that good in your eyes? I cannot be certain about Thal's plans with espionage, but I think I can safely say that some aspects of the mechanic will be changed - chief among them more things to do with spies. Since there is a near-consensus that stalling production, limiting growth, etc. are not very fun options, equalizing opportunities to the level of tech stealing is an option, though it seems quite hard to balance.

So in summary, if we assume (a) there are more things to do with spies in major civs' cities being added to GEM and (b) we wish them to be of roughly equal value (interesting decisions) I guess the question is do we want them to occur with more frequency than typical in G&K? I think that is where we disagree most (I would certainly not mind implementing mystikx's idea of more frequent low risk/low reward opportunities vs less frequent high risk/high reward options a la coup vs rigging in CSs).

@Gekko (and Ahriman, I suppose)
"Infuriating" was a little exaggerated, I admit - "frustrating" would have been a more apt word. Hope I didn't offend you, Ahriman.:/

@mystikx21
I agree with most of your post #40, and your suggestion for varied risk/reward levels suggested in #41 (as mentioned above). I would disagree with the second paragraph wrt time consuming arguments - it strikes me as more time consuming to hash out the details before looking at the big picture than vice versa. And for the record, I read almost every word in this forum and keep up with most debates.
 
This is a good summary of my position.
[Though; no-one has to argue anything, and if Thal disagrees with my perspective then he should ignore me. But I find from my previous mod design experience that mods work better when ideas are subject to challenge and debate, and where at least 90% of proposed ideas never make it into the mod. IMO feature creep is the biggest threat to a successful game or mod.]


The game kept research agreements that give a lump-sum tech boost and has whole-tech stealing rather than incremental tech gain. I think some of the underlying reason for this is precisely because it feels more significant to get a lump of stuff all at once than to get a small incremental yield each turn.
It also allows us to have a notification trigger and diplomatic consequence from the discrete event of successfully having a tech stolen, which would not be possible (or would create clutter) from creating an incremental flow of beakers.
And it also makes espionage defense more interesting if killing the enemy spy halts all their efforts on tech theft for that spy, rather than just slowing their incremental beaker income. This makes counterespionage feel more meaningful.

Agree with both here, lump benefits are more fun and momentous, and feature-creep is something we certainly need to watch out for. I don't think my proposal adds so much new content as to be categorized "feature creep" - do you?

[to_xp]Gekko;11831322 said:
a system with a less rigid number of spies ( and spies generated like GPs ) and more actions available to them would allow to cater more to each category of users, as the player can choose by himself how much effort he wants to dedicate to espionage.

Exactly, thanks for summing that up so well.:)
 
And for the record, I read almost every word in this forum and keep up with most debates.

- I did not mean to imply that you yourself don't keep up. There's obviously a lot of lurkers and you've been active on this mod personally.

But there are also a lot of people who drop by mid-debate by the look of some debates, especially on a topic like this one where it's a discussion about possible new feature additions (Thal's page drives some traffic to debates like this one from the look of it). I can see where that's an issue if someone drops into the middle of intense philosophical approach discussions to pop in with a quick details comment or new strategic suggestion.

It can mean their idea gets blasted to smithereens. :) The context matters.

I think the major forum members will have a fair idea of what their goals for the mod are if they're reading frequently and posting so there's a tendency to have maybe brief nods to philosophy and drop into the details. I think this can slow down progress by arguing over the precise figures (as you suggested), but it's also potentially faster at getting something practical done if there's an implied agreement that something is to be done. It can even show that something's impractical and move on to other things. There's a plus and minus to it.

If we have to go back to the philosophies and goals constantly where there are big gaps between people, we should probably carry out a few debates in the goals thread.

I think it's enough to note that some people will be conservative with what can or needs to be added, will be cautious about what will work and won't, and that any objections may not be gold, but that they're things that may need to be considered before running into it to do something. There's sometimes a "we need to do something, this is something" aspect to some of our suggestions (adding new buildings has stalled for instance). Others get fleshed out somewhat and might show some promise as compromises. Like the policies debate over specialists/wide/tall.

For this instance, I think some smaller more frequent options alongside some wider and riskier moves would be fine. Get a lump sum toward a tech you don't have, a lump sum of science generally (possibly sabotaging theirs), or try to get the tech. Something like that.
 
a system with a less rigid number of spies ( and spies generated like GPs ) and more actions available to them would allow to cater more to each category of users, as the player can choose by himself how much effort he wants to dedicate to espionage.
I don't think this is true. Adding more spies and more possibilities and increasing the power of espionage means than an "optimizing" player has to use them. Having a modmod with more advanced espionage allows players to select whether they want an advanced system or not. But I don't think it is reasonable to put in espionage options and just say that the player can choose not to use it.

That would be like adding a bunch of extra wonders or units or buildings to the game and then saying "if you don't like them, then don't build them".

If they're in the mod, then they're in the mod, and they affect how the mod plays.
risking the spy on a coup never seems worth it and election-rigging of little value
I find election rigging to be very valuable. They give me city state alliances for free, and coups can help if another player reaches just a bit past me for an alliance.
This saves a lot of gold on CS alliances - which are now quite expensive to try to maintain with gold.

Is there really nothing you would like to see added to the espionage mechanic, or is the status quo that good in your eyes?
Please read my comments earlier in the thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11825460&postcount=8

But in general, no, I would not like to see the espionage mechanic make more complex. More is often not better.

I don't think my proposal adds so much new content as to be categorized "feature creep" - do you?
Well yes, I do, incrementally. It takes a feature that IMO works well and makes it more complicated, with seemingly no more motivation than to have more things to do. But that is just my opinion.
 
BTW if the idea is to use them for smaller missions, like culture grabs or gold stealing, alongside some riskier big ones, I see a couple benefits
1) It places a (somewhat) higher priority on police buildings in more than just high science cities. These buildings are pretty lame right now, especially in a wide empire. They could also lower yields for stealing on top of making it harder to do so.
2) It could be combined with spy leveling in a more obvious way.
3) It's a fairly persistent mechanic that you probably could just setup and forget for most of the game if desired.

The downside
1) They may be hard to balance (stealing a tech or coups will be high value spy missions). Too powerful and it requires a lot of attention, too weak and you'll just do the big dogs and ignore them.
2) They're potentially disruptive (unfun if it's a tiny civ doing it to you, as it encourages squashing everyone).
3) It's hard to construct a rationale for what this represents. I suppose it's like violating international IP law issues or something to steal "culture", or "gold".
 
Downsides
4) It would require a significant amount of work from a UI and code perspective, and it may not be technically possible.
 
I don't think this is true. Adding more spies and more possibilities and increasing the power of espionage means than an "optimizing" player has to use them. Having a modmod with more advanced espionage allows players to select whether they want an advanced system or not. But I don't think it is reasonable to put in espionage options and just say that the player can choose not to use it.

That would be like adding a bunch of extra wonders or units or buildings to the game and then saying "if you don't like them, then don't build them".

If they're in the mod, then they're in the mod, and they affect how the mod plays.

I disagree. if all the options available are fairly balanced, that doesn't improve the power of espionage. it just makes a few more options available to the player.
what would work is having abilities work passively where possible, like rigging and tech stealing do, while still having some active choices more akin to coups.
 
I don't think this is true. Adding more spies and more possibilities and increasing the power of espionage means than an "optimizing" player has to use them. Having a modmod with more advanced espionage allows players to select whether they want an advanced system or not. But I don't think it is reasonable to put in espionage options and just say that the player can choose not to use it.

That would be like adding a bunch of extra wonders or units or buildings to the game and then saying "if you don't like them, then don't build them".

I don't think this is a fair analogy - it's more akin to situations where investing into culture or military might not be optimal play. There are whole lines of buildings not built in every city, adding an espionage building line would be similar. I think active involvement in empire growth and strength is generally better than passive involvement (re: free-spy-at-era mechanic).

Please read my comments earlier in the thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11825460&postcount=8

But in general, no, I would not like to see the espionage mechanic make more complex. More is often not better.

The first part of the linked post is regarding negative offensive espionage actions, which we have already rejected, and the second suggests lowering the involvement with espionage (one defensive spy covers the whole empire) - but in this instance I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, the cat-and-mouse game is a bit silly (though that's where the counter-espionage buildings come in). Though I'm somewhat agnostic about increasing higher level spies' capabilities in the current system, I can see some value in playing around with the numbers here.

Well yes, I do, incrementally. It takes a feature that IMO works well and makes it more complicated, with seemingly no more motivation than to have more things to do.

That is certainly a part of it; a longstanding criticism of Civ5 is that there's little to do when not warring. The introduction of religion and espionage was, from my understanding, intended to alleviate this criticism but religion is by far more successful than espionage, because there aren't many actions associated with espionage atm.
 
I don't think this is a fair analogy - it's more akin to situations where investing into culture or military might not be optimal play.

There are whole lines of buildings not built in every city, adding an espionage building line would be similar.
I don't understand the first part of this. I'm not saying that you'd have to build these in every city. I'm saying you can't put a new mechanic into the game and say that will satisfy everyone, because you don't have to use the mechanic if you don't want to.

The second part seems to support my point; adding a new espionage mechanic would be just like adding a new building or unit line. It is rather like adding vanguards; even if you don't build any vanguards yourself, they're still part of the game, and you can't opt out.
That's why I think that significant core mechanic changes that aren't an obvious improvement should be limited to modmods.

regarding negative offensive espionage actions, which we have already rejected
Isn't stealing gold or culture a negative action? I lose gold, you gain it?
 
I'd like to see some clarity on what's to be proposed to steal as well. Is some small mission like a culture grab or lump sum of tech/gold just a free lunch effect or is it diminishing your opponent in someway?
 
That hasn't been discussed afaik - I'm open to either, though I lean more toward making it a zero sum game.
 
since we already have coups I don't see an issue with negative actions, as long as they're not outright annoying to the player.

I think the line there can be drawn between stealing ( zero sum game ) and damaging/destroying. this way the chance you'll be the one doing it negates the one where you'll be the one suffering it.
 
since we already have coups I don't see an issue with negative actions
The difference is that the probability of coup success is a function of your own CS influence. If you have little influence with a CS, your chance of a successful coup is very low. So coups are not effective for small/weak/backwards powers who will have little CS influence, and there is a means of protecting yourself from coups by having high influence in the CS yourself.

Any further negative characteristics would need to have this kind of design, where you can protect yourself against it (and not just by building useless espionage buildings or by stationing spies locally who may not do anything ) and where it takes economic investment in order to be able to trigger the attack.
 
you could have the probability of each new negative action succeeding be a function as well. how long the spy has been in that city should be important, but other factors could also apply.
 
I would set the following three maximes from experiences in civ4 and 5:

  1. The simplicity of the Civ5 system is the way too go. The late game already has very many decisions for you to take, it has many cities, big cities, and warfare gets more complicated as well. Simple systems are also much easier to balance.
  2. As VEM has with its Opportunities, civ5 espionage only provides positives result. This avoids frustrating players, even if some negative effects may provide good balance if they act against reaching victory goals. Nevertheless, I feel it's better design to support yourself in reaching a victory rather than keeping an AI from.
  3. Every Decision you take in your game should be important. To be important, there need to be distinct choices, ideally between 2 options.
  4. Every Game System should have its own place in the game mechanics, it needs to be integrated, not tacked on.

Where I feel Civ5 G&K fails is point 3. There's very little distinction between a "peaceful" and "military" missions for spies. If you are tech leader for example, the tech stealing doesn't help you at all. If you know have no interest in city states, your spies are just "defending", sounds unfair. Also, Tech Stealing is the same as Military/Information Service like Reconnaissance missions.

Thus, I would disentangle the various missions and add a few, so:

place a spy in a major civ:
  • Tech Stealing : If you need to catch up, this is a 'peaceful' mission
  • Explore the land of the civ: This gives you line of sight with not only the city the spy is placed in, but based on experience and turns spent there shows you the map/line of sight of the whole civ/more and more cities
(If done against you, you don't lose anything, your own map and your own techs can't be stolen, whereas sabotage on a wonder production, great person or spaceship part would be a pain in the ...)

place a spy in a citystate:
  • If you need allies, the rigging elections and coup functions stay the same, they work.
  • If you don't need allies, you can set the spies to "extract" ressources for your empire. This isn't a negative effect as you yourself cannot be targeted that way. The results would be dependent on city state type and take time as rigging election does (propositions): Military (+2 exp for all units), Culture (every further Social policy is 3% cheaper), Maritime (+3% Growth in every city) Mercantile (+3% gold in every city), Religious (+5% production on spaceships - to make religious cs worthwhile late game)

place a spy at home:
  • Defend against enemy spies (passive)
  • gain experience if city has constabulary/police station (passive)

I don't know if those are possible but I feel this already adds enough to the core game.

Additionally, a good way to make espionage different between civs and allows for certain civs to excel in espionage is to increase the experience levels available for spies from 3 to 10 or so. Also, every mission should give experience.
 
great post, the points I'd disagree with are:

1) I feel G&K is weaker in your point 4 than 3, as espionage currently DOES feel a bit tacked on imo

2) religious CSs boosting spaceship construction make no sense at all... I'd rather have them give GP points for example since faith can be used to buy GPs in the lategame.
 
Having now read through the whole thread (rather than the first half of the first page and the last two posts), I'd want to expand a bit more.

Too many features/espionages missions are bad, because they will get inconsequential (no big effect) or unbalanced (one is clearly preferable). Additionally, they take a lot of time to code and the AI will probably not understand them. It's better to have few big options. BUT, there does seem to be a need for an option that helps a peaceful player, who is maybe a tech leader (or maybe not) that doesn't want to invest into city states. Right now, there is none for this type whereas there are options for backward civs, conquerors and cs-coalitionists. But what could that mission be? I'm not sure, that's why I proposed the CS-based yield-stealing. In my opinion, any kind of stealing should just duplicate the thing, and not take it really away from the civ/city-state that got stolen.

Besides that, there seems to be a consensus that defensive spies should defend the whole civ (or maybe the biggest 4 cities and the next spies the next 4 cities?). Also, I'm now really wondering wether my proposed "more levels for spies" is codeable, as that would add the variation requested. As to Gekko's points:

1) I know, I added the fourth point in afterwards. In truth, the current espionage system is only really tied into City States and I guess, one could do a lot here to make the Diplomatic Victory more interesting. However, any kind of such system (like "voting points per rigged elections/missions") would result in a total overhaul of the Diplomatic Victory which btw. still hasn't been "fixed" imho. So this seems to be something for later. Or do you see another possibility where one could integrate the espionage system?

2)The Spaceship proposal was a simple proposition to make religious city states worthwhile in the late game. So it's a total gameplay proposal ;) But the problem persists with the great fitting Great Person Points booster, as those lose significance in the late game as well...
 
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