I've posted most of this in the dev diary over various comments, but I'm gathering and organizing them here to be better seen.
Buildings
Overall I'm quite happy with how espionage is looking, atleast from the first peeks we've gotten. While balance and specific operations (*cough* pirates *cough*) might end up lacking, the system as a whole looks good, and so those problems (if they exist) can be easily fixed by a later patch. Considering that we haven't seen all of espionage, and indeed much of what we saw was using WIP interfaces, it's more than likely some of these features are already implemented or planned.
Buildings
- Commercial Hub - with building slots no longer being provided every 5 pops, the main appeal of the commercial hub, that it "paid for itself" in terms of giving jobs, is now gone. I'm not entirely sure how it should be changed to make it ever worth building, but some initial thoughts are having it give +1 TV to clerks, provide a merchant job at the base level, or give +1 clerks to city districts.
- Deposit Buildings (rare resource extraction, isolated valley, betharian fields) - As is, these buildings are often only a little better than normal buildings. Considering that these need both the discovery of a rare planetary deposit, and then a technology researched, they could stand to be far stronger, even more so now that buildings are more precious. Personally, I'd just straight up double the jobs produced by the rare resource extractors and betharian, and then give the alien zoo some sort of planet wide bonus: happiness, unity, or amenities. It doesn't particularly matter how these get buffed, only that they do get buffed.
- Luxury Housing - I have never built a housing building when playing. Even on a maxed out planet, It's just better to convert districts over to cities, and then use the building slot to get specialist jobs. The only place where they were at all useful was in habitats, as the districts are where you get jobs. With the new system of cities giving building slots, even with a fully upgraded lab for each city you still end up matching the researchers to housing. And even if you are fully built up with districts, I'd much rather have 2 scientists from a T1 lab than 3 housing for clerks. There is one situation where housing buildings would be used in the new situation. With Industrial districts giving as many as 4 jobs per district, and only 2 housing, that means the slack needs to be picked up by cities or luxury housing. But, if you've gotten to the stage where you've maxed out cities and industrial districts, that planet is going to end up as an ecumenopolis anyway, and so don't even need the housing. My solution would be to change luxury housing to give +1 housing and +1 amenity per city district. This way it's useful on crowded urban worlds. I'd also like to see an alternative housing option, "dense housing" or "slums", which gives 5 housing base, or +2 housing per city district, but also increases crime.
- Refineries - I've seen some people complain/wonder about how refineries would work, given that building slots are rarer and you can no longer just build them on an agri/mining world with a bunch of slots free. Personally, I think this is good, as making refineries worse would increase the value of natural resources. The optimal location for refineries will be on ecumenopoli, as they get all of their jobs from districts, and have all building slots unlocked.
- Habitat Trade District - Similarly to the commercial hub, this building lost a lot of value as providing enough jobs to open up a building isn't important. However, this building was basically never built in the past, as the other districts just flat outclassed it. Changing it to 2 clerks 1 merchant would make it super nice for trade focused empires, and have it produce a total of 12 tv and 9 amenities.
- Habitat Luxury District/Leisure Arcology - Minor quibble, but could the culture workers here be swapped for priests in spiritualist empires? Warrior culture gets the entertainer swap, and who doesn't want to build a massive cathedral planet, or habitats solely devoted to worship of the worm?
- Industrial Arcology - considering that "industrial" is now being used to mean a combination of alloys and CGs, this should probably be renamed to "Factory Arcology"
- Resort World - As pops no longer grant building slots, resort worlds have no way to support more than a token population. My solution would be to change it so they can only build city districts, and then either give like -12 districts or -75% districts. This way you have some urban areas for tourists to go to fancy spas and buy stuff from the gift shops, but then also those vast
carefully curateduntamed wilds to explore and adventure in. Resort worlds also REALLY shouldn't change habitability: Yes the tourists are going to enjoy everything, but the clerks are going to suffer on a tomb world. - Machine World- Machine worlds are incredibly boring. Planetary features, something almost completely ignored, get downgraded further to actually completely ignored. And in exchange you get 10% job output and -10% housing. I'd like to see Machine worlds changed to be similar to ecumenopoli, a heart of industry and something that requires a significant amount of build up, if maybe not quite as intensive as an ecumenopolis. Converting would require a planet to be fully built out and done through a decision, but I'm not sure if there should be district restrictions. These are just some ideas for the types of districts a machine world could have. I'm using "Layer" to differentiate them from the base districts, but any name would work.
- Nexus Layer - Housing and maintenance drones, same as currently.
- Generator Layer - Should provide more technicians, but otherwise the same.
- Industrial Layer - More Fabricators, but otherwise the same
- Calculation Layer - Provides some calculators, possibly evaluators?
- Network Layer - Provides coordinators.
- Hive World- Just like machine worlds, hive worlds are incredibly boring. Same downsides, and all you get is 10% job output, max habitability, and hive districts give twice as much housing. Hive minds have a significantly different flavor from machine empires, and I'd like this to be reflected in their special planet. Note that I didn't add industrial districts here, and I'm not sure if they should be in or not.
- Hive Layer - Housing and maintenance drones, same as currently.
- Agriculture Layer - Lots of agriculture drones.
- Garrison Layer - Soldier drones
- Spawning Layer - Spawning drones. Maybe something else to compliment them?
- Synapse Layer - Synapse drones.
- Bureaucratic Center - This is the only planet designation that is global across all planet types (besides colony), and while it does work it bugs me when the icon is different when compared to say, all the other habitat icons.
- Capital - Currently, the capital is the worst spot to have bureaucrats, as not only do you lose out on the bonus admin cap from the Bureaucratic Center designation, but bureaucrats are also one of the only jobs which doesn't care about stability at all, meaning that you lose out on the free stability from your capital. The capital of your empire should be the best place to do administrative work, not the worst.
- Urban World - The only use for this designation was building up planets for the ecumenopolis decision, and since you can now use industrial districts instead people will probably use those. This should be changed to something which helps with large amounts of pops: +1 housing per city district, -10% housing usage, -10% amenity usage, +10% amenity production.
- Trade World - Why isn't there a way to designate a trade world on a normal planet? Or for an ecumenopolis? Just because they don't have a dedicated district, doesn't mean my megacorp isn't exploiting the market as much as possible...
Overall I'm quite happy with how espionage is looking, atleast from the first peeks we've gotten. While balance and specific operations (*cough* pirates *cough*) might end up lacking, the system as a whole looks good, and so those problems (if they exist) can be easily fixed by a later patch. Considering that we haven't seen all of espionage, and indeed much of what we saw was using WIP interfaces, it's more than likely some of these features are already implemented or planned.
- Resources other than energy used in operations. While maybe the base cost and upkeep of a spy network should remain in energy, I'd love to see other resources come into play for most operations, as an option to boost success or potentially necessary for a step to proceed smoothly. The devs already mentioned using volatile motes to boost the starbase sabotage, so this should be easily doable.
- Bribing a potential asset: the asset wants a ludicrous display of exotic wealth: 70 rare crystals or 1 minor artifact
- Decoy shipments of CGs or minerals to hide weapons, bombs, or whatever else you need to smuggle in for an operation
- Exotic gases to fake a containment breach in a laboratory, giving you an opportunity of access.
- Usage of food to distract or attract drones when infiltrating a hive mind.
- Generous shipments of food/CGs as part of an extort favors campaign.
- Alloys to better arm privateers in more/stronger vessels.
- Dark Matter to amplify the effects of a Crisis Beacon.
- The ability to kidnap/rescue pops. I'd love to be able to play as a peaceful egalitarian, secretly smuggling enslaved populations away from slavers. Or alternatively be a malicious mega corporation, spiriting away pops only to sell them back on the slave market. I could see restricting this operation to only be usable on slaves, or atleast much easier or more effective, as normal citizens, or even residents, aren't going to just hop in the big white space-van promising candy and a better life. Considering how pops no longer affect building slots, losing a pop or two won't cause massive problems for a planet.
- Sabotaging planetary defenses. This wouldn't just be to soften up a planet for an invasion, but also to disable FTL inhibitors provided by Fortresses there. This would allow a tactical operation to quickly bypass an enemies defenses. Frankly, this is exactly what espionage should be used for (similar to the disable starbase option), so I hope this makes it in.
- Establish Criminal Branch office. Ideally, I'd like criminal branch offices to be established solely through espionage operations, so that their play style is diverged even more from normal mega corporations. It could just be an alternative method of establishing branch offices, one which is either cheaper or gives some other benefit. Either way, Criminal Syndicates should really lean into the espionage side of things.
- Aggressive Counter-espionage. The best defense is a good offense, after all. This operation would grant higher counter-espionage specifically against the empire this operation is launched against, and potentially let you know how much infiltration they have on you or even compromise one of their assets. It should be fairly risky and potentially high level, useful mainly once you already know an empire is spying on you (potentially not available or significantly harder unless you've caught one of their espionage actions?).
- An edict to strengthen Counter-espionage. The bureau of espionage edict is primarily focused on offensive espionage actions. I'd like to see a paired edict which gives counter-espionage, and a chance for any newly acquired assets to be compromised (similar to above). A comprised asset would notify you of any operation they are placed on (just the target, not the type), and you could either leave the asset to maintain your watch or spring a trap, causing the asset to be lost and the operation to fail in the most spectacular way.
- Have some interaction on the Defense side of espionage. It shouldn't be a ton, to avoid getting spammed by events, but it should give the defender the option of beefing up their security, but at some cost. For example, you get a notification about likely espionage activity within your research network (caused by the attacker failing a role). You can either enact harsh safeguards, which boosts your counter-espionage against that operation significantly but also gives you -10% research for 5 years, or ignore it and maintain your research. It gives the defender some warning, and it gives them agency.
- The ability to extract/exploit an asset. This would depend on the nature of the asset: people would be extracted, computer code or pheromones emitters would be exploited. Doing so would cause you to lose the asset, but gain a chunk of intel or some other bonus. Useful mainly for RP purposes, if you actually want to give that bureaucrat the better life he dreamed of.
- Javorian Pox Espionage action. Currently, you can only use the Javorian pox as a bombardment style, which is rather limiting. I'd love to be able to cause plague outbreaks on someone's worlds. An empire targeted by this should develop containment standards and treatment/vaccines, making repeated use of it less and less effective.
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