I'm fairly certain we're getting an espionage Story Pack followed by a diplomacy Expansion Pack after 2.2. Going by what the devs have said before on streams and the following DD, it's fairly reasonable to assume diplomacy and espionage are coming sooner rather than later.
This list is from before Distant Stars, so I've crossed out DS and teased 2.2 content. What's interesting is that all the new goals bar one will be completed with 2.2. Also, if they don't come with 2.2, chances are living systems never will due to performance constraints.
There's 3 main reasons why I think espionage will be part of a story pack. With 2.0 and now 2.2's additions there'll be a lot of places to hook espionage into, story Packs generally focus on something cool and specific over general things and diplomacy is important enough to have a full expansions worth of content.
With 2.0 alone, there wasn't enough content to warrant the addition of espionage but with 2.2's additions, shit can get real. Here's some random thoughts on how the new mechanics make espionage juicy:
- FTL Rework: Every empire now has the same FTL. So the devs will have an easier time implementing and balancing points of sabotage and players will know said sabotage affects everyone the same. You could mine wormholes, hack enemy gateways to make them spit fleets to a random gateway, hide hyperplanes with a chance to detect them based on sensor strength etc. There's tonnes of possibilities now and they don't have to be balanced relative to each other. And let's be real, a balanced strategy game is a pipe dream so the less balance required the better.
- Border Rework: Understanding border growth is no longer a dark art, plus space stations are nice. Currently, Stellaris gives you almost full knowledge of other empires the instant you meet them. They could add a sort of infiltration level to the diplomacy screen where the higher it is the more knowledge you have of their systems, starting from most distant from their capital to least. As system's are infiltrated you "unlock" their survey data get the option to sabotage the starbase/system. You could cripple shipyards, induce system wide penalties, increase FTL-windup etc.
- War Rework: While I doubt we'll see anything like this, the new war system does have some interesting possibilities, such as ulterior motives. So you'd choose and go through with a cassus belli as usual, but instead of getting it's rewards, you get the ulterior motives rewards. E.g. going to war with Space-Iran via a fake Stop Colossus CB but instead of stopping their "Space-WMDs" you get that sweet Space-Halliburton money (Make Tributory?). Also, in general there's a bunch of things they could add for war/space combat like cloaked fleets or fake fleets (the red [!] icon).
- Pop/Planet Rework: This is where shit get's real. You could fund crime syndicates, slander nobles putting them out of a job, decrease worker happiness, fund terrorists to drop stability/create tile blocker, sabotage buildings (which naturally will have knock on effects now), increase weightings for negative trait pops to grow next etc. Due to how there'll be a bunch of interacting systems and how much more organic planets will be you could have some really cool things happen. For example, you fund crime and terrorism on the enemies forge-world world making them enact martial law, dropping their output significantly. Then you could kick the planets rulers out of their jobs pushing the planet towards emigration and causing their pops to decline, making the output stay nerfed even after you stop funding crime/terrorism. You could even use espionage on your own planets to decrease ethics divergence or as a way to limit the impact of crime jobs without suppressing crime.
- Trade: While it will be fairly basic in it's initial implementation, trade routes represent a great avenue for espionage. Even without any changes, going by what we know currently, the espionage update could add the options fund piracy, sabotage efficiency of trade value transfer or cause "traffic jams" increasing FTL-windup along a route. With the diplomacy update they'll probably add the ability to join up with your neighbours/allies trade routes. The code for which could be used to add a siphon trade value ability to espionage, re-routing part of a neighbouring routes trade value to your nearby trade-station.
- Galactic Market: This is where it gets tricky. I see this as being a nightmare to balance while not having anything meaningful to hook espionage into. From what I understand, everyone is hard-coded to see the same market prices, with the only difference being their market fees. Being able to modify other peoples market values seems a bit OP and you can already manipulate resource costs by simply buying/selling on the market. Which leaves nothing other than who gets the market capital every X years, which isn't that meaningful for espionage (an option to spam influence is enough).
And this is ignoring research, empire management, diplomacy, factions etc. It might seem like espionage is meaty enough to be an expansion but if you think about it, espionage isn't really a mechanic, it's more of a unified UI for interacting with existing mechanics. So there's no need for a large rework or introduction of a hefty new mechanic. The dev's could just add an espionage screen and slowly hook things into it over time. The only real changes needed would be the removal of hard-coded perfect knowledge of systems, ship designs, species traits etc. They could, for example, refactor knowledge to be represented via economic units.
Why am I writing all this in a twitter teaser thread, you ask? Because it's been 6 days without a Wiz teaser, I'm no longer the same man I was 6 days ago.
