Are spies too effective at scouting enemy formations?

[KingHalford]

I'm starting to miss something from classic wargames in Shadow Empire, and that's the fog of war. Sure, there's a dejure fog of war but only early in the game, where you and your opponent can nicely ambush one another, but defacto once you've gotten to a certain level of technological development and with a strong spymaster, it seems very difficult to be able to camouflage your formations.

The knock on effect seems to be that it effectively invalidates ambush and fighting retreat as viable strategies in the late game. I'd like it so that air recon and land-based scouting should still be important, not just for increasing combat odds, but for actually seeing what you're facing once your enemy has moved out of your immediate sight range, which is how most modern wargames work.

There could be two ways to help here:

a) technologies to help units remain unseen: increased camouflage, reducing enemy recon, sensor jamming etc.

b) drastically reducing the ability for spies to see military formations. I never liked this about Shadow Empire, because it feels very unrealistic that a half dozen spies could see 100 units across tens of thousands of kilometres so easily. I'd instead make it so that even a very strong spy network only gives a VERY small chance to detect military units, instead focusing on cities and assets. At most, they should only really detect a vague trace of a unit, and not detailed info on what is there.

A military goes out of it's way to hide it's formations as best as it can. I do understand that the huge scale of Shadow Empire does complicate things a bit, but I think as a gameplay mechanic it might be nice if we did have to rely on traditional methods of reconnaissance a bit more than just having a really strong spymaster that can flood the enemy nation with spies so easily that you can pretty much always see everything your opponent has.

I don't want to overegg the pudding here, the issue isn't that bad! Perhaps just reducing the ability of the spies to see exact military formations like they can would be a big help.

One knock on effect on gameplay that I can see if this is implemented is that it would slow down warfare a little, as you'd have to be a bit more careful about advancing through usually quite "safe" terrain. But I want to be able to use ambush more than I can now, and I miss my fighting retreat tactics!

[mroyer]

Yes, we had almost this exact discussion with my SE gaming group a couple weeks ago. It seems spies reveal too much battlefield recon. I think spies should be more about revealing enemy economic, government, social and strategic military level information with just a secondary effect on tactical battlefield recon. The latter info should come primarily from air and ground recon forces.

Indeed, the following post is an outgrowth of the discussion, including what we thought might be a related bug but Vic says no:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... &t=391707
-Mark R.

[Magirot]

In our mp games we've been using a mod that makes the maximum amount of spies per zone 3, which mitigates some of these issues. I was thinking of finally releasing it once 1.12 is out, but I guess I could sneakily throw it out here in case someone has anything to say about it before that. Requires any of the late-ish open betas because one of them changed the order of diplomatic stratagems. Excuse this wall of text I wrote earlier:


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This mod heavily limits the use of spies in the hopes that it will enhance the recon aspects of the game.

DOWNLOAD LINK
EDIT: Updated version available here!
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 0&t=398053


INSTALLATION

1. Extract limitedspies05.se1evlib to Shadow Empire\shadowscenarios
2. Start Shadow Empire
3. Go to Modlib Picker (lower right in the main menu)
4. Select Limited Spies and tick Use this Mod Library (lower right)
5. Start a new game

CHANGES

The spy cards – Send Spy, Send Spy Team & Send Spy Ring – have been modified thus that they don't add spies, but instead set spies to 1, 2 and 3 spies, respectively. For Minor Zones the values are 2 for Spy, 3 for Spy Team, and Spy Ring isn't usable.

This means you can never have more than 3 spies in a zone.

Spy Team and Spy Ring PP costs have been increased – Spy Team from 4 to 6, Spy Ring from 5 to 10.

Spy Ring base difficulty has been increased considerably, from 160 to 220. This is because there is a huge jump in utility when going from 2 to 3 spies - while you can get some sporadic recon 100 hexes even with two spies, they become a lot more common with three. It is still very usable with a good Secret Service Director, boosted with Shadow Spy.

Critical Success in these stratagems provides no extra benefits currently.

Critical Failure has been modified so that it doesn't result in a relation decrease, but rather in a loss of one existing spy, if there are any. This is to prevent the increased difficulty of Spy Ring from becoming an easy way to lower relations.



CONSIDERATIONS

* I couldn't think of any Critical Success benefit. Extra spies would be too powerful, and other effects I mulled over wouldn't really be in line with what Critical Success usually gives in the game. At least the game already has stratagems with no Critical Success effect!

* I recommend checking spy rules on pages 343-346 of the manual. Basically, the sum of total spies in all zones of a regime boosts zone-specific recon. Thus you can gather effective spy strength easier against a regime with a lot of zones.

* It's actually a bit easier to expand your general knowledge of the world compared to vanilla, since Send Spy sends 2 Spies to Minor Zones for the same cost/difficulty as before. (Otherwise you would get stuck with expanding your vision past your neighbours until you get Spy Team, which could be interesting in another way, but I didn't want to touch that part.)

* Fielding units with the Recon stat is a lot more important now, both so you can have a better strategic view, and to not give the defending enemy huge boosts for the first few combat rounds. Something like the Recon in Force / Retreat stratagem could even be useful just to go check on the enemy forces before your main attack.

* Selecting Governors with Secret Ops skill will cause a lot more problems to anyone spying on you, since they can't accumulate a buffer of spies. Any drop between 3 -> 2 -> 1 -> 0 spies is huge, and they have a chance to suffer that every turn with instant adverse effects. Replacing lost spy strength is also a lot more expensive than previously.

* The above point is my main worry about this mod's mechanic change in general – micromanaging and playing spy whack-a-mole can be more frustrating than fun. Extra frustration comes from that the game really should visually differentiate hexes with 1 recon and 100 recon without the player needing to click through them.

* But with this mod there is at least a chance of surprises. Depends on what you value more.

Here's to hoping Vic implements a more expansive spy mechanic at some point! I haven't played Decisive Campaigns: Ardennes Offensive, but I've understood it focuses a lot more on these aspects?

Table of all data modified by the mod

[Thrake]

I also think that spies are too powerful. I think a lot of this comes from the cheap PP cost. Increasing it wouldn't fix all the issues, but at least seing everything happening in the entire world wouldn't be so cheap. Also spy ring allows for 6 times more spies than single spies, for only a minor PP increase. A good spymaster even has a decent chance to get critical success.

On top of being very cheap, spies are very powerful. I see everything movement in enemy zones, but also I know the exact army composition, technology researched, diplomatic deals and how powerful their economy is. It's great to be able to get all that information but it's too cheap to get perfect knowledge about the enemy and to be able to figure out who is weak and who is strong, who would be defenseless against an attack now and who is likely preparing to attack me.

Another issue with spies is that 100 recon. Ambushes are not possible even in dense forest or mountains. Despite having a complex logistic system it's hard to interact as any attempt to sneak a force to cut it will be spotted immediately.

Perhaps spymasters should make the covert ops roll to detect spies instead? With a malus to their roll as we wouldn't want to make it impossible to have spies either. I imagine that if it is more expensive to have spies and they need to be replaced more commonly we may have a more interesting situation where having good intel is a choice and an investment rather than a given. Using governors to make the roll is bound to fail as they barely ever make rolls ie. have low skill growth on top of using so many skills that they never become good at anything. Besides the demand for good war leader is high with all the OHQ needed.

After all intelligence service deal with counter intelligence, so why is it mayors doing it in Shadow empire?

[Pymous]

+1
Spying is too powerful and can be summarized as everyone being able to see everyone, with no fog of war in 100% games. There are no real counter-spying solutions.

Intelligence gameplay should be improved if possible to make the game more interesting.

@Magirot, your mod concept is very interesting. Thank you for trying to fix this major gameplay issue."

[GazBot]

Yep this thread has it bang on.....Spying and its ability to 100% identify all enemy formations is way over powered and makes the game play and strategy far more linear than is should be...it removes all the strategy in terms of recon assets becasue you can simply rely on spies....

[DeltaV112]

Spies are also part of the MP complaints about ICBMs- they make it so that it's very hard to actually hide anything and therefore ICBMs can accurately target each other or SHQ in a first strike.

I would say that if spies get removed or nerfed, there should be expansion to recon as a mechanic. More techs and OOB that would be suited for a recon role would be my request, buggies and motorcycle infantry aren't really suitable for a mechanized battlefield. Ideally I think recon equipment should be a component choice like weapon, with its own weight... maybe we could get that if a pass is being done at model design in general?

[Vic]

Just a quick note hear that it is on my radar. Focussing on finishing Oceania first however

[Vic]

Oh... and next subversion will have some quick fixes & improvements as well.

[Pymous]

Good to know! Thanks Vic!