Espionage is too underpowered. Let us adjust potency.

[Sinister2202]

I don't mean to parrot on purpose, but espionage is... meh...

For example, I find myself using smear campaign on 2 empires that have good relations with each other. However, most games they are about +200 or +300 relations by the time my espionage game gets powerful enough. This was especially true when my megacorp was competing against another megacorp, in a certain population-heavy empire. I was trying to get them booted out. Low relations = no more commercial pact.

However the potency of the smear campaign seem to be fixed and it can't get any more powerful than -80 relations impact. Not to mention the limited amount you can do it on the same empire. Which makes the relations target goal impossible to achieve through espionage. It's not like the game offers diplomatic maneuvers to make that happen anyway, or any other means.

My idea is for the game to allow us to adjust the potency of every espionage actions. Difficulty, encryption level, assets, time to completion etc all scaling with higher potency adjustments.

If we are allowed to use espionage in a more devastating effect rather than making it look like a small intergalactic "prank" or "troll" like how it is now (I mean it really is a joke), then perhaps espionage could be a bit more worthy pursuit.

 

[A2ch0n]

I've made a complete list what espionage needs to be useful... twice. And i really hope thats someday implemented. The main features for improve espionage in short (no need to repeat it again as a whole ) are:

1) Free target choice (not only three empires). I moded myself a bit and it's not hard to make operations that have a free target choice similar to the sabotage starbase operation with a list of all empires, ships, stations, megastructures and so on. This would be the first step and give you the oportunity to target one empire you really want (in case of smear campain especially).

2) Much higher, stacking modifiers with more impact the more they stack.

3) More operations that are able to manipulate other empires (ethics, resource steal, planet sabotage, fleet sabotage, unrest, a.s.o)

With this three options it would be really nice. The tradition tree is exceptionally good on it's own, but 5 x zero ist still zero...

 

[blahmaster6k]

I think most players (myself included) would like to see espionage buffed. The main reason Paradox didn't add more devastating operations as you put it, was to prevent unfun scenarios in multiplayer, when your empire could be sabotaged to a significant degree without being able to do anything to stop it. This is a very valid concern, and not one I can think of a solution to that would make everyone happy.

To have both strong operations and maintain multiplayer balance is quite a difficult problem.

 

[Bezborg]

I think a buff is warranted only when there's an equally effective way to defend yourself from it.

I agree that as it is now, it's unfinished and tacked-on in a shallow way, and is in need of a significant change, roots-up.

 

[Empire of Terra Nova]

espionage should be the aggressive gameplay pick for non-warring empires

it should be effective and lead to painful consequences like :

- assassination of the ruler (as a counter measure to the immortality buff to gestalts)
- guerrilla warfare against warmongers that took your systems/colonies (as some sort of revanchism tactic)
- space terrorism for ideological reasons (like the eco terrorists in civ2 call to power who would use nanites to destroy polluting buildings or disarm nukes)
- empire wide sabotage of your rivals' military capabilities like fleet size, ship damage, hit points etc. (as a means of enabling a well prepared offensive war, the kind that you would prepare a half century for)
- abduction of pops (why is it limited to first contact and scientists anyway?)
- regime changes ^^ and revolutions

the powerful operations are meant to be a complete substitute for war and not merely supplement it, for that they should be locked behind several ascension perks

i can also think of "general" espionage operations not targeted at a specific enemy but are meant to counter foreign operations or buff own military (for example increase evasion of shops) as well as specific espionage that can only be targeted at one empire at a time (some sort of arch rival that meet certain prerequisites like bordering your empire, very bad relations, previous wars, deployment of world-cracker and so on)

 

[Firehawk11]

Make Spies their own Leader type with Counter-Spies built into them. Give them the a trait to buff decreption or increption, cheaper operations, so forth. It would be amazing, if a operative is caught demand payment from the empire they are fun or use it as black mail, so forth.

 

[A2ch0n]

with Counter-Spies built into them

That would be one of the worst ideas ever... The reason is simple, all warmongering empires (players especially) would stack the envoys (or what leader type ever) in counter espionage and play their game like always with the difference that a spy focused player could do nothing against that despite of warfare on his own. And that's not the idea of a good Espionage system especially if you're specialized in it. Furthermore warfare already beats diplomacy (you can always declare a war, even if you like that empire). So espionage should win against warfare. In my opinion, please no active counter espionage!

Bring a rock paper scissors mechanic (i now i repeat myself from other posts). Warfare > Diplomacy > Espionage > Warfare. Everything would be fine.

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

Espionage is already very powerful when used correctly. The people claiming it's weak probably aren't aware of how to make use of it.

Espionage at baseline is basically a constant 10% research bonus + extra progress on random techs now and then, thanks to the backdoor event you'll always get once you get going with your Assets.

However the real hidden game-winning tool is Extort Favors. When combined with the Declare Crisis resolution, you can essentially force the entire galaxy to declare total war against ANY empire of your choice - even the strongest in the galaxy. And they'll even be voting for it themselves! This can turn any game around even if you are losing badly, as long as the target empire isn't stronger than everyone else combined. It takes years of setup to pull off, and feels like a true master plan from the shadows, just what you want from espionage.

The sabotage operations are bait. They're designed to be weak, and are basically just there for RP reasons. Once you get past that, you can start making good use of the system.

 

[Empire of Terra Nova]

buying favours isn't that costly, 100 of each rare resource and the ai owes you 10 favours. the problem is that you can only spend 1k influence per resolution which limits you a bit

the rng for getting favours when improving relations seems a bit odd too, i'm getting almost max favours while maxing out relations

 

[guiskj]

One reason I think Espionage is bad is sort of the same why the Galactic Community is also very meh.

Devs chose for those two things to be accessible to every empire, but ran into the problem of "what if the player is in the receiving end"

Most players don't like, multiplayer or single player, to be ganged up.

So both espionage and galactic community resolutions lack any teeth.

To me they should have looked at these systems as an avenue to win differently. Through diplomacy or cloak and daggers.

I would prefer that these systems have a small but good enough benefit so that players want to interact with it most of the time, but only let empires truly dedicated to it squeeze true power from them.

Traditions sound like they would be it, but we have too many tradition slots, so they don't really serve as a mechanism to specialise an empire.

Look at warfare and tech. If you make an empire tailor made for these, you can squeeze a lot of power from that gameplay. I just wish the same could be said about diplomacy and espionage.

 

[hart30]

I created a mod "meaningful spy operations" which adjusts the parameters just because it annoyed me so much, how useless e-spionage operations were designed.
One example. In the preview of nemesis it was claimed that u can break up feds with it. In reality not possible. But with my mod it is now.

 

[Archael90]

iirc devs shallowed espionage, cut some content and overall simplified whole system, because they thought it will be too complicated for players. Yet what i know from dev diaries, it suppoused to be great.

 

[siegeforvictory]

I'd not like the espionage system buffed.

imo in pretty much no 4x/strategy game ever is espionage a mechanic that contributes to the enjoyment of the game. most of the time it makes the game actively less fun. take for example eu4, where instead of adding interesting choices or strategies, the espionage/sabotage system just means you can be guaranteed you will be spammed by -30 unrest modifiers starting in a certain year, when every little one country AI nation unlocks the option.

ofcourse in an ideal game with human-level smart opponents, it would be a choice between appearing big and threatening (=attracts espionage actions) or playing the good diplomatic game, keep your reputation good with everyone, and deter espionage focussed on you. but the reality is that just the fact that you're a human player will lead a lot of ai's to target you even if you had no/neutral diplomatic contact with them. there is no point in trying not to piss them off to avoid spy-actions, and neither does it make sense to take action against that one spying mini-nation, because as soon as you utterly exterminate them the next one will start doing the same, not deterred by the example you set at all. so neither the carrot nor the stick can prevent espionage to focus on you, instead it just becomes an expected debuff that you further ignore.

the only game where I sort of enjoy it is in distant worlds, but that's only because I like to play the intrige-focussed species and then steal all the species-unique special techs from other empires to make super-ships which would otherwise be not possible.

and ofcourse in crusader kings it works, but there the whole game is built around making intrige work well and be fun, and it's a very different sort of game. I don't think it will be possible to get CK level intrige into stellaris. I do have to put on homnorary mention here though that crusader kings is a game where I really enjoy playing intrige, still my favorite game was one where I started as a count in frisia and worked my way up to king of france without fighting a single battle.

and it's not just paradox. for example in civ the un-fun is limited, but still, the whole thing with espionage is either a tech gets stolen now and then (you can just ignore it. only becomes a little interesting in multiplayer), or you get the same kind of annoying spammy stuff like your dams blowing up once every while.

so already when espionage was announced for stellaris I was dreading stuff like that, and I purposely did not buy the dlc to avoid having the espionage mechanics in my games as much as possible. it's the only dlc I don't have. I'd kind of like to buy the dlc so I can experience the galactic emperor stuff, but it's not worth it if it means I have to enable espiobage too imo.

so, to me the way espionage turned out in stellaris is the best way it could have turned out: underpowered enough that it can be mostly ignored and is not too annoying, and luckily they put most of it behind the dlc paywall.
the reveal stuff they did add to the base game seemed fun at first, but now it's not so new anymore my opinion on that has changed. I now think it makes the game worse. by limiting the info on foreign empires they just become more of an anonymous black box, limiting immersion for me. and declaring war is just more of a gamble instead of a well-informed planned tactical choice. and in the mean time I just get around the lack of info from the intel system in cheesy, immersion breaking ways. for example the game does not tell me which origin an ai empire has, but just looking at the traits of it's founder species gives a lot of special origins away. and if you first encounter them and your scienceship stumbles upon their capital, you can just look at the planetview and see the 'propsperous unification' planetary modifier.
so where eu4 makes war more strategic and more fun by giving an overload of relevant, well-organised information in the ledger, stellaris just hides info away and makes info less accessible, leading to war being less strategic, les tactical and less fun.
(and I think it's also not that realistic that after fighting numerous battles against an empire, my ships flying up close to theirs, my scienceships looking through the debris afterwards, and still no one on my empire has a clue to even what type of weapons they use. after being hit that many times and looking at the damage on the armorplating while repairing ships should at least give a clue if the opposing fleet used lasers or kinetics, but no, apparently having a diplomat negotiate treaties far away from any sort of battlefield provides more info about enemy ship weapons than actuallyfighting said ships)

 

[hart30]

Ypu totally are able to buff the current e-spionage system without losing any fun. Instead u just gain fun. Its because the current system already considered in the effect, that the spionage victim should not be harmed too much, but then lowered the effect even further.
For example - if u become victim of a smear campaign u get 2 options, only one lowers the opinion. So stuff like that is easy avoidable. If the opinion malus would just be higher while declining in the same time frame it would be possible to break a fed with a bit of luck, but if a player is in said fed he still can avoid it easily.

Sabotage starbase destoys one module - there is no real harm if instead 5-6 modules are destroyed. Its a small tactical advantage considering the prize and time the operation needs.

Extort favor, here 0 harm is done to the victim no matter the amount of favors, so the chance can be increased.

Arm privateers. Here a bug is at play. The 13. Size privateer fleet is just missing from the code resulting in no privateers being able to spawn once the victims empires fleets surpass a certain size. Here the player just gets scammed. Even when fixed the max privateer fleet is just 10k, at a time the victim has already over 100k ships. So also not a big deal considering the time someone has to invest into this operation and the timer until this can be repeated.

Nothing in this becomes annoying, even when buffed, as the operations themselves were designed to not be annoying.

 

[BrokenSky]

I feel like the biggest problem with espionage is the lack of active counterplay. Consider the threat of Exterminators on your doorstep - even the most powerful espionage system is going to be less bad than what one bad war with these exterminators can do to you, so why are determined exterminators ok, but civil-war triggering espionage operations not? The answer is the counterplay; stopping a genocidal empire from total-warring you into extinction involves nearly every aspect of gameplay - military, economic, diplomatic, technological and cultural (in as much as tech and culture feed mil, dip and econ), whereas to protect yourself from espionage, what is there? putting an envoy or ten on counterespionage so you can passively not have to interact with the mechanic?

If we want to have any kind of decent espionage system I think we really need to start with overhauling how espionage gets countered too, to make it something you interact with when you counter it (rather than just making it a passive system).
For example, making generic counterespionage generally poor, but also making it so you can do specific counter-espionage related operations on other empires specifically (or even just making it so that having a large spy-network on other empires made it easier to detect or counter their operations), so you have more direct espionage counterplay options. Add in things like false flag ops. to direct your enemies into wasting resources fighting each other instead of fighting you and you get a skeleton for a more dynamic counter-espionage system. Of course this is just an example, there could easily be something better.

It might also help if there were a dedicated espionage UI for monitoring your spy networks and what you're doing with them (inc. the ones without active envoys).