Help needed: Espionage mod project

[Mylon]

Okay, I got my teeth cut on modding with a couple of mod components. Now I'm looking to make a more significant mod for Civ5, this one centered around espionage! All those interested in helping out with this project should post here.

Goals of this mod project: Provide an extra layer of strategy on top of the base game through the use of espionage. Reduce the amount of 'free' information given to the player and give that information back to them through accumulating espionage points. Apply an additional use for gold through covert operations. If possible, not modify the base game so that it may be used in conjunction with other mods (this may conflict with the part about concealing information given freely in the base game).

Basics parts of the mod:

• Additional buildings. Spymaster for classical era production and a Customs House for medieval or reinnasance era (mixed with gold) and an embassy later still. Names are subject to change.
• Additional unit, the spy. This is an invisible non-combat unit that can undertake missions for gold.
• Espionage points. In keeping in line with Civ5's style to keep things more simple, espionage points are not divided as they are in Civ4. They apply to everyone equally and once certain thresholds are reached, they provide different benefits like information on the enemy's military, information on their current production, information on their cities, and a reduction in spy mission costs, and an increase in enemy thresholds required. These will decay over time, however, so it is possible to ruin an enemy's espionage capabilities. Thresholds for nations currently at war with are higher as they are on guard. This can cause the loss of some information on a war declaration.
• Missions. Missions include building destruction, production sabotage, unit defection, unit assassination, relationship snafu, city poisoning (population reduction), suitcase nukes, counterespionage, city defense reduction, unhappiness creation, improvement destruction, culture attack (reduce progress towards next social policy).
• UI. Add UI elements such as a spymaster screen which provides information on other empires, thresholds required for certain bits of information. Will also need buttons for the new actions.

So it's a pretty big project, all in all, but I think it can be tackled! The XML is flexible enough to allow the inclusion of a new yield type and saveutils can be used to track espionage points. The missions themselves are mostly pretty simple. Deduct gold, kill unit for example.

Positions needed:
UI programmer: adding the buttons and screens.
Art designer: Art for the mission buttons, the spy model, building icons, and espionage symbols.
Lua programmers: Programming the missions and game logic. I can handle this, but more won't hurt!
AI programmer: Adding information so the AI makes use of these new changes or at least emulates this through occasional forced undertaking of espionage actions.

Let's make a mod that everyone will want to use!

 

[Gangor]

That sounds a lot like some of the functionality I'd like to have in my Star Wars mod. Since you're already doing this, would you like to also contribute to my mod?

 

[Montov]

How does one accumulate Espionage Points (EP) in your system?
I would suggest every population contributes 1 EP, executing Spy Missions would contribute more, and the Spy buildings could enhance it further.

Thresholds and decay is no fun, imho. Why not a similar structure as Social Policies? Spy Policies. You could have 4 branches: Intelligence, Sabotage, Diplomacy and Military. EP can unlock policies in the same way as Culture Points unlock Social Policies. Those Spy Policies could unlock new missions to perform, and provide various bonuses as you suggested with thresholds.

I think you would want to control this system as much as possible with Spy missions and policies, and keep the numbers of building low, because of balance. 1 Spy unit and 2 Spy buildings would be enough, otherwise you need to rebalance other builds.

I think starting a embassy would also be a Spy mission, which you can do at other capitals.
Also, missions with/against city states would also strengthen the overall diplomacy and the diplomatic victory.

 

[Mylon]

Huh, I did not think of how this might apply with spy policies! So perhaps someone could buy the intelligence branch to gain vision. That would be a fairly simple way to handle it, but this may prove to be an oversimplification. On the plus side, espionage point tracking and adding an additional social policy style mechanic would have a lot of overlap with my planned Religion mod.

As for point generation, I intended to use per-population generation through specific buildings. Much like how libraries produce so much research per population. I find this mechanic to provide a nice, non-ICS friendly means for producing yield/commerce. It's entirely possible to also add espionage focused city states.

As for your Star Wars mod, I was already planning on helping you with your space stations, doing the code/xml for that. So much fun stuff to get around to... Adapting this to your mod would be a low priority, but not particularly difficult.

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

Mylon, may I suggest to change espionage point (EP) to sthg broader, more encompassing. This way, you can plug more components onto a single mechanism. Let me explain !

If you look at how culture works, you can see it is counted toward the city & toward the empire.
Why not emulate this with sthg new ( for the time being, let us call it "potency" by default of a better name ).
Here we go, we have this new counter which start to accumulate in your cities & empire. Now a city fill its jauge, what happens ? a menu appears where you can choose :

1= spread a religion
2= train a caravan (mini merchant-engineer hybrid)
3= create a corporation branch (from industrial era onward)

Next the empire counter becomes full, the choices you get are :

1= found a religion
2= establish a governmental civic
3= found a corporation HQ
4= increase standing

these choices at the empire level are facultative and a percentage of it is thesaurised permanently in order to provide a contre-espionage/awareness standing against all oponents.

City 1 is available for each religion that have been found in the known world and is repeatable until the conversion limit is reached
City 2 is available at any time and can lightly spread religion based on the state religion or main religion of the birthplace
City 3 is available for each corporation HQ in the known world and can be reinstalled if removed by a competitor

Only the 3 most followed religion apply to a city. The converion limit is max percentage of follower allowed )

The link between all these is leadership ( government, business, faith ) so I think the associated specialist should be the ruler and the GP the gret ruler.

For the symbol, I think of either a wax seal or an olive branch. The color code should be red, and the unassigned citizens should remain green (what was firaxis thinking breaking their own color code ?).

Don't hesitate to ask if I let sthg in the dark !

 

[Mylon]

Mylon, may I suggest to change espionage point (EP) to sthg broader, more encompassing. This way, you can plug more components onto a single mechanism. Let me explain !

Wow, that sure is quite the departure from typical Civ mechanics! Well, not really. I think having one pool govern all of these would be a bit much, it would be like combining culture, research, and gold into one yield type, but not splitting them up immediately like Civ4 did with Commerce.

Copying the social policy style for espionage meshes well with the existing game, as well as providing a fairly straightforward design approach. However, I'm not sure how to combine Espionage Policies with missions, unless missions cost gold exclusively.

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

If you can come up with 5 other names for the espionage branch, I'll think about effects for them.

Let's try it with the branch opener :

Espionage - gives a free report on capitals of civ with less standing point and a spy unit appears near the capital.


I see espionage mission mainly with gold but there is no reason to not have some mission requiring those 'potency' points in a well thought amount.

I'm not sure if governments, religions, corporations ,etc... fit the scope of your intended mod but what about a core that can be extended later into what I suggested ?

 

[Moriboe]

Had some thoughts about an espionage system myself. As is the case for snipperrabbit!!, I would also put it in a greater context. I propose intelligence, which would be increased not just by "espionage points", but include technological factors (satellites, code breaking, ...) as well as social (foreign nationals). For the latter cities should be able to have a mixed ethnic composition; something previous civs had - and an important step towards revolutions! With an emigration mod already available, this doesn't seem far-fetched to me.

Anyway, for the core espionage aspect I would like to see an entirely new concept, as one of the trends in Civ5 to me seems lack of duplicate systems, e.g. happiness/health, and the removal of the slider. I also don't (didn't) like the idea of running around spy units, this might get cumbersome with 1upt (or break the current implementation of it). What I propose is a board-game like approach. It can be composed in ways that are already in the game or in available mods. Intelligence points come in (more on that later) and can be spent on two things:

First is the recruiting of agents, e.g. intelligence agent, access agent, facilities agent, ... (yes, I read wikipedia). After hire the agent is domestic (deployed for counter-espionage) and can be assigned to a civilization (much like citizens in the city screen). An agent is an RPG-like character, with stats for cover, experience, loyalty, ... which get increased by simply being under cover, missions, other agents, ... (not by manual picking). The idea is to combine agents in ways that facilitate certain missions more than others, requiring planning. As said, try to visualize this by thinking of the city screen and of mouse-over information (buildings and units) for the spy's stats.

Second is the advancement of spying expertise. As proposed in this topic this would be social policy-style. But I don't want to copy things I like the look of the pyramid system of markusbeutel's NiGHTS mod. A new expertise can be taken from tier 1 to 4, in way that you always need a base of lower tier expertise before being able to build on it by adding an expertise one tier higher. Examples that come to mind are social engineering, secret pacts with/funding of barbarians/terrorists (there already is revolt code in the game!), honor code (suicide over being captured alive to avoid diplo hit), ... With enough of these, each game becomes truly unique.

Sounds complicated? I think it is very simple at its core: recruit and assign agent, pick expertise. That's it! Though teaching the AI how to use may be a different matter. But so what provides intelligence points? Some ideas:

• open borders
• embassies
• foreign nationals
• certain buildings & specialists
• technologies & projects

As for the missions: these should just cost gold. Cost and success factors (mission, survival, maintaining cover) depend on the agents active in the civilization.

Hope you enjoyed reading and actually reached this sentence I don't want to be the worthless "ideas-guy" and this is the kind of project I'd like to work on, but I just can't commit myself at this point (also, I need more advanced experience). Even if we could find common ground, I'll have to see what real life brings first.

In any case, the best of luck with this project!

 

[Chewybond]

Update humbly requested.

I'm just getting started with modding Civ5 myself and can't contribute anything just yet, but I'm very eager to see this project fulfilled.

 

[Mylon]

Sorry, not a whole lot of progress being made. The API for Civ5 seems much more restrictive than in Civ4. Or maybe I was spoiled by having DLL access. That's not to say this isn't possible. The biggest hurdle is doing the interface, which is always like a big intimidating factor for me.