Espionage and Intelligence in Civ IV

[Sirotnikov]

Espionage and Spying
======================

So what exactly is it and why do you need it?

Espionage is what you do during times of war, and often during times of peace, to improve your strategic position in the vicious world surrounding you.

Espionage ensures you know how well your rivals (even friends) perform.
Espionage ensures you know what threats you are facing.
Espionage ensures you are better prepared for war as well as important trade / diplomacy.
Espionage sometimes includes clandestine missions to move the strategic balance to your side - by either getting important stuff for yourself, or depriving your rival of stuff.

Espionage continues, sometimes even grows during peace time as you:
1) Always prepare for a possible unexpected war (or sometimes make preparations for a war you intend to initiate)
2) Want to know when you're "out played"
3) Want to out-maneuver / hurt your rivals, but can't (or don't want to) use tanks and howitzers for that.

What is this "intelligence" you speak of?

As I see it, there are several "types" of intelligence:
A. Strategical Intelligence
1. Alarmative Intelligence
2. Informative / Descriptive Intelligence
B. Tactical Intelligence

A. Strategical Intelligence is everything you know about the power of your rival that is usually not represented on the map. It usually is important during peace time, and alerts you of possible threats, like "war" or "missing a wonder" or "losing a space race". It is the info you have about the intention and abilities of your rival players.

1. Alarmative intelligence - informs you of important enemy moves and decisions (somtimes, before they are put into action, sometimes afterwards) that you need to know and that affect you. Basically - this means you get 'alerts' of 'changes'.

Think of the Civ II popups you got:
"Regime changes in Nation A"
"Nation A and Nation B declare war / peace"
"Nation A and Nation B sign secret pact"
"Nation C close to finishing wonder"
"Nation C builds wonder"
"Sneak Attack by Nation B"
"Nation C captures Nation A's city of GREATCITY"

This could be brought to your attention by a popup, a scroller or a screen where there is a list of messages for this, and the last 3 turns. It would be nice to control the presentation and have rules such as "popup messages about anything that involves nation a" "scroll all messages relating to wonders and wars".

How do you use it in game?
Think of how you'd like to be alerted of sneak attacks, or on your rival's regime changes, war and peace declarations or wonder projects. These are things you need to be alerted on, to take action. You could exploit your enemy going to anarchy to conquer him or buy his cities. You could 'rush' your wonder if you see your rival is close to finishing. You could preemptively attack, if your rival changes to fundamentalism, and has just discovered nuclear weapons

2. Informative / Descriptive Intelligence - This is like your foreign embassy info panels. Infact, think of that as getting access to the advisor panels of your rival nation. This is where you check what are his known technologies, how many cities he has, what is his units statistics, what is his regime and economic situation, its budget distribution and of course his diplomatic relations and treaties / wars. Think of this as informational "Digests" that your espionage analysts compile.

How do you use them in game?

You need to trade technologies? Whom with? For what price?
You want to know if your rival is leading over you in his technological advance?
You want to to know if your rival has any pacts when you're thinking of attacking him?
You want to know how many cities he has, and what is the relative size of his army?
You look at your foreign relations panel, and you look at your embassy screen. This is all "intelligence".


3. Tactical Intelligence - This is everything which involves information relation to things on the map. It ranges from the type of the terrain, to the city location and city info screen. Not to mention unit placement and their missions (movement, fortification). This is what you collect during (or prior to) a war, to help your units.

If you're about to attack a city, you can do it blindly, thereby wasting your attack force.

Or you could use units with a large line of sight (spies, explorers, and aircraft) to scout his territory and note his cities and fortresses and airfields. You can then use spies to see the city screen, to know how well is it defended with units, walls and what is it building. You can even perform "special operations" (more on that later) to change the balance.

How is it already represented in Civ?
1. Automatically seeing your rival civ's terrain
2. Inspect city
3. using line of sight units to scout terrain and defenses

Basically, it is already quite well integrated into civ - many of you just never thought of it.


Special Operations

This is a unique category. These are means and methods which are active and dangerous to get intelligence, but more often these actions are meant to tilt the balance in your side by changing stuff. It's the "third way" of getting things done in the game (the other two : diplomacy, war).

Special Operations exist for strategical and tactical levels and it burrs the line.

What does it include?

1. Scouting: Want to know where the enemy hides his planes / nukes? Want to know what are his target city defenses? Go to his city and view it. Want to know what his army stack consists of? Look at it using a spy!

2. Bribing: You want to convert an enemy city? You wish to bribe his units during a war?

3. Stealing: maps, technologies, unit designs, funds, maybe even 'lighbulbs'.
This is usually considered 'strategic' as it is vital to you on a national level.

5. Sabotage: strategical - spaceship project, technology advancement and wonder production (you don't want the Koreans getting nuclear now, do you?);
Or tactical - destroy city production, buildings, roads. Cause civil unrest! The city will be much cheaper to bribe / convert / conquer.

6. Terrorize: Kill city inhabitants by poisoning them. Sabotage enemy units, or kill them without taking the blame. Plant a nuke to destroy a city. Kill leader, to plunge the entire nation into anarchy!

7. Counter-espionage: You were attacked by an unidentified unit / spy? If you had a spy parked near by, you'd know the enemy's true colors! Maybe it would even be prevented. Spies parked in your cities, should drive up espionage costs up for the rival nations.

See how many routine, daily tasks can be classified as special operations? And that is leaving out a whole array of espionage tasks that we mainstreamed into the embassy / spy screen.

So how do we approach realizing this in-game?
Well obviously, strategical intelligence should be available in digests, and spy screens.

You should be able to control it by funding your foreign embassies in different countries differently, which would affect the quality of intelligence you get. You should also be able to control the alerts you get, as I had written before.

Special operations, in my view, should be left to mostly spy units - as most of them, in real life, require nations to set up spy rings and send out teams with special assignments. Removing the spy unit completely is less fun (less stuff to do), less realistic, and rids you of a good scouting unit for times of trouble.

I agree though, that many assignments (especially stealing, and strategical terrorism and sabotage) could be mainstreamed into a "Special Missions" screen with buttons, to reduce clutter in the spy unit's number of options when it approaches a city.

Possible Wonder: Echelon - which you build in the latest age.
Reduces the cost of embassies by 40% and of spy missions by 20%.
Each time your rivals discover or trade a technology, unit prototype or maps, you get a 25% chance of receiving it for free.

Communism (or if you wish highly "Ideological" regime) would obviously cheapen your spying and increase spy mission success.

[Trifna]

Sirotnikov, do some of your friends also those of someone called "Putin"?

I agree that Civ1-2-3 spying was not too... existent. A game like Spartan has more spying in its Ancient Greece setting that Civ3 in modern age. We're now suppose to be in the "Age of Information" for God's sake...


I think that players could perhaps simply put more or less funding for teams in a FEW different sectors. But first of all, one would need to pay to build his intelligence network.

Or then, the unit could build a network (as a military unit "fortifies"), and then only could it act. Of course, the embassy would have its role, perhaps of unequal importance (between present Japan and USA, it is not as in 1950 East-West Germany, or BC300 Greece). From there, the unit can be of general use (info gathering, etc.) or specialize its network:
- Steeling research points, paying dissidents/rebels, sabotage by mafia proxy, funding by proxy political figures which are nice to you, etc.

Incredibly simple with such a unit... and without the trouble of an infinite bunch of sectors.









Also:
From GalCiv's random events, I lurned one thing (which should be pushed further):
It's actually great to get examples of what we do.


Use this for spying:
When we spy or do some intelligence moves, sometimes give a report of something we do. Here are some examples:

*Top Secret crypted message*
You succeeded so well that even a Roman minister was in fact
funded, by local business-oriented proxies that you support.


*Top Secret crypted message*
Your funding of opposite radical groups within the English empire has leaded the empire to be in very hot and negatively twisted debates. It is believed that it may lead to hard to reconcile opponents. The old "Divide to rule" is still as good as it was.


It's in the news!
Your move to support local insurrencies has been detected... and the Chinese do not appreciate this!


*Top Secret crypted message*
Your support to groups that support groups that support groups that... supports the National Violent Uprising Clan is effective, and a minister recently got killed.


*Top Secret crypted message*
Your support of certain Spanish medias is undermined by your lack of funds in front of the Spanish's news "supported" by the state.




Of course, this is simply the reaction from what you actually do in a more comprehensive system.

[Sirotnikov]

Let me reword your suggestion and develop it a bit:

An Embassy would be upgraded by a "spy center" that would be set in the enemy's capital.

From there you could run most of the strategic actions (create unrest, steal stuff, ruin stuff)

It is quite interesting and in my opnion a better option to streamline special missions, than by putting it on a single screen (like civ 3), if only because it is "on the map" and you physically click an enemy capital to use it.

I still doubt how can this work when you are in war, or when you haven't established relations or embassy, so the spy unit should stay IMO, but it will naturally be less used, when you have a spy center.

So we start with a diplomat, and can build an embassy, and later upgrade to spies, and can build spy centers. Spies should later upgrade to special operation officers.

SOs would concentrate more on the tactical special missions and would have a special ability to increase the effectiveness of aircraft and artillery by using stuff such as laser locators.

Meaning - if you have a SO in a city, an airplane or helicopter would have 90% chances of taking out the specific improvement / unit you order him to. If you have an SO outside a city, it has a radius (of 2?) of increasing the efficectiveness of air and artillery strikes on enemy targets (simply increasing their force by 40%?)

[Trifna]

I'll put it in some other way.
There a few types of things to be built for spying:

- Units
- Embassy + foreign installations (intelligence network...)
- Central management (= national installations, as CIA)
- Wonders


The core of the system? Units: they act, and what they can do and the % of success depends on what they have. Bring a unit somewhere, and permit it to form the network in some foreign country (and get general misceleaneous info). . Bring another unit, and specialize it in "sabotage", by using the network already present.

The buildings help to be successful and add possibilities.

[Addled Platypus]

and what about electrnoic survelliance?

and to counter that with jamming ?

city improvements or UU ?

[Trifna]

Originally posted by Platypus Rex
and what about electrnoic survelliance?

and to counter that with jamming ?

city improvements or UU ?

I think that all this just goes as the rest. General physical infrastructure and human infrastructure, represented as
1- Physical infrastructure (central control, embassy, whattever)
2- Units (which specialize in whattever what , forming an intelligence structure; spy to counter-spy side)




So I don't see this as being excluded by the little system I thought of, it just gets included (within something even broader or as it is).

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by Platypus Rex
and what about electrnoic survelliance?

and to counter that with jamming ?

city improvements or UU ?

I thought about it and incldued it in a previous draft.

However - what really matters to us is the actual information and not means and methods.

The embassy / spy screen is merely a representation of the intelligence content. It can stand for both humint and sigint.

The spy unit is more natural (and more fun) to handle, than building an "surveilance center" - and it is much more mainstreamed - concentrating clearly on the target.

I think that the game shouldn't over emphasise intelligence as a goal but mroe as a (very widely used) tool, and I think that adding actual tactical requirements to develop a sigint network would complicate it.

I prefer to keep it simple - passive intelligence would be the embassy (later upgraded to spy center), and active intelligence (including special operations) would be the spy unit.

Btw - I'll add something I haven't mentioned - satellites have to be in the game - like a small wonder that gives you the option to view the full map, and possibly (for money) to see into foreign cities.