Spy Rings, Espionage, And Intrigue

Gathering information about characters and provinces and plots

One of the key systems in Axioms in the Intelligence Network. You assign population, characters, money, and resources to this and then you deploy them on generally ongoing missions. Your network is required to gain basic information on provinces you don’t control as well as on characters and populations. In worlds where history has run for a while the character you pick to play will have an existing network and information. You only need to start from scratch if you start a game directly following the creation of the world.

Provinces And Population

You will need some level of team in every single province in most cases. Just population and money can handle most basic information gathering. Having even one character in every province would be prohibitively expensive in terms of resources since the game allows for so many provinces.

Every kind of information you can gather has a level. So basic province info on local populations is pretty easy to keep a live account of. Resources can vary from level 1 to 3 for more obvious stuff. Forests and lakes are hard to hide for example. Resources from exploration and other methods are harder. Intel can’t find non-basic resources unless their location is already known to someone.

Aside from base levels of required intel you and other characters can run various kinds of coverups and disinformation and so forth. This activity starts moderately expensive and can get very expensive depending on your goals. You can cover up low level information like information on populations but that is relatively more difficult and therefore expensive. Hiding 20000 people is not easy for obvious reasons.

Building can interact to some degree with various methods like building underground or cave settlements, building structures that can move information under the radar as it were, and stuff like confusion enchantments and unconscious aversion spells. Magical effects related to intrigue and espionage can technicallybe countered in non-magical ways but it requires extremely skilled agents or lots of agents or specific info that there is something magical going on.

Characters And Secrets

In 2013-2014 I developed most of the major ideas for my Intrigue super-system. Secrets and Desires are part of Consciousness, along with more normal stuff like personality, language, culture, and knowledge. Secrets are broadly similar to what many major commercial and minor indie games do under the same term. However they are far more varied in keeping with the detailed nature of Axioms. Discovering a secret generates a counter-secret. You can know that someone knows that you know and so on.

There are simply more things to have secrets about. Star Dynasties has secrets related to affairs, assassination attempts, warning characters of attacks by other characters and so forth. CK3 has a variety of secrets which I am only vaguely familiar with since I refuse to pay for substandard politics games from major companies after CK2. Axioms has secrets about absolutely tons of things including finding rare items, resources, populations, and anything related to exploring. It has secrets about relationships and intrigue. It has secrets about a variety of religious stuff including cults, cabals, heresies, and such. All of the dozens of Intrigue actions create secrets.

Characters And Desires

A special secret adjacent feature unique to Axioms is Desires. These can range from generally common desires like being wealthy or gaining land to more uncommon ones such as recovering parts of your historical family domain, gaining a specific title, marrying particular characters, or getting daughters into marriages with someone who will treat them right. There are also rarer randomly generated desires like wanting to gain great magical knowledge or power, wanting to found a magical academy or mercenary company, wanting to reform parts of society, and so forth.

Desires can be secret or public and function somewhat similarly to secrets except that you are generally making people happy when you fulfill their desires vs blackmail them with their dirty secrets. Many desires can have what might be considered a very outsized impact on the world. To fulfill the more interesting rare desires characters will take reputational hits or expend resources that are significantly greater than when you blackmail them or fulfill generic desires.

Some families will have familial cultures that make it easy to impact your relationship with all their characters at once. Generic desires like having all you direct family members be happy, wanting to support an honorable superior, and so forth are obvious ones. These are often defined in other games as Traits but Axioms uses a personality and culture system for this kind of thing primarily. And you don’t get bonuses like in Paradox games for personality traits.

Most characters have generic desires for their religion growing or gaining power, the same for their state, their superiors or vassals based on their opinion of those people and so forth. Ideology provides what are essentially generic desires like prestige from war and so forth based on their specific ideology. I’m not sure where I’ll actually put the code for these. Probably directly in ideology rather than indirectly through desires.

Characters And Espionage

Secrets and desires will have varying levels of discoverability. Generally desires are easier to determine since they aren’t quite secret per say. Characters can expend one off or ongoing effort to cover up there own secrets but also any secret they are aware of. A lot of this requires Intelligence work in locations relevant to the secret. You can also discover the intelligence activity of other characters. Typically you’ll want to investigate areas where characters you are in or could be in conflict with are active in with agents and resources.

Not only can you discover information obtained by others by surveilling them but characters can trade Intelligence actively. You can “connect” networks for low level stuff like province information and even do joint efforts. You can also directly share knowledge or secrets and/or desires.

There are also of course assignments/missions/tasks related to active efforts like assassination, getting information on enemy troop movements and even sabotaging or otherwise engaging with troops. The same applies to intelligence networks. You can figure out relations between characters including the obvious of high level operatives like the spymaster for a kingdom. Kidnapping or breaking free prisoners are options. Sabotaging buildings or resources are often fun. Disrupting trade. There are both military and espionage raids on trade caravans or supply lines or enemy communication networks.

Of course magic can be utilized in all these endeavors. Scrying, farsight, foresight, mental attacks, mind control spells, etc. The details are perhaps too much for this post so I’ll get into magical non-combat actions in a later post.

Conspiracies And Secrets

Conspiracies themselves generate secrets for all their actions. You can discover 1 or more participants, what they have done, some information on goals. Secrets from conspiracies are “connected”, though I’m still working out the UI stuff for this, and thus unraveling them, especially the really big ones, can be a lot of fun. the rewards for well run Conspiracies are incredible but the risks are proportional to the benefits.

Of course different characters, families, and states have different levels of capability, beyond pure resource investment for intrigue. Lots of stories have states like Mayene in the Wheel of Time that safeguard their existence purely through diplomacy and intrgue. My goal is for this to be a somewhat plausible strategy in Axioms.

Of course an even more prominent goal is to break up or usurp even large empires through shenanigans. And for this to often take centuries of concerted Conspiracy. States gain tradition/culture/instituional knowledge related to their focus on different parts of the great game. So you can’t be top tier in every aspect. Some states might favor a balanced approach. And it is possible to be a paragon of honor and loyalty and military prowess and defeat someone even though they are incredible at intrigue and diplomacy.

Game Design Goal

I would like to avoid the issue of a particlar focus being consistently superior. A major part of this is dminishing returns. The first 100 *points*(totally made up for this example and not a thing in the game) of investment get you 100 value. The next 100 get you 80 value. The next hundred get you 64 value, then 51 value, then 41, etc. So a state/character that invest 100 points evenly across all areas can compete with someone who went all in on intrigue or diplomacy.

However in most games Every point in military is worth 2 points, every point in economy is worth 1, and every point in anything else is worth .5 or .25. So that is what I am aiming to fix. Plus in most games there just aren’t that many actions involved in non-combat systems. A game like Star Dynasties resolves this by abstracting military heavily. I resolve it by bringing other areas up in level of detail to be comparable to combat.