Caecus

Spies. They are the edge of the knife that often fight wars before front line troops even see the enemy. There are many instances in history where spies and special forces have determined the survival of entire nations and empires. There has been a lot of talk about how spies are an unfair aspect of the game. The biggest concern is that someone with more spies can kill several days worth of spies in a single attack. This is a discussion whether this is a legitimate problem, and solutions to that problem without making spies useless. I admittedly sit in the top 10 page for spies, but hear me out and why the system before the war formula overhaul update should be maintained. My first point: Spies are expensive. $50,000 per spy, with an upkeep of $2,400 per day. I broke 100 spies around 1 and a half months ago. The upkeep at 100 spies per day is alone $240,000. Multiplied over the month and a half I've had that many spies (45+ days), I have spent at least $10m in upkeep. That is excluding the costs of purchasing more spies and those added upkeeps. If I did not have this many spies, I could have easily purchased the Missile Launch Pad and built enough missiles to lob at everyone the BoC was at war with during the Great VE War. Twice. 100 spies is at least $1m in operation costs at only Quick and Dirty (Q&D). My current upkeep for my spies borders $400k per day. My point is, if Jon (currently ranked 1st in spy count) decides one day to kill my spies, he will have spent at least $2.5m in operational costs (for a very crappy percentage success rate at Q&D), or around $6m for a more reasonable success rate. This is entirely excluding the upkeeps he has been paying over the past couple of months. If you calculate it out, it turns out that for the past several months, he's paid at least $40m in upkeep and purchasing of spies. If he is willing to break the bank to kill my spies, he more than well DESERVES killing every one of my 100 spies that I would have lost in the old system. My second point: the point everyone is making about spies is a double standard. When someone doesn't build an airforce, and then gets rolled by someone who does, we don't think that the game is unfair. We think that the nation was just plain incompetent. But, flip it around, and when someone with more spies attacks, people think the game is unfair. If you think about it, it really isn't any different from a guy who lost all of his aircraft, and is limited to building just 1/6th each day only to get squished by the guy who actually bothered to build an airforce. It's only because it takes forever for people to get back their spy counts. I think it's fair to apply this standard: If one nation had more foresight than another to recruit spies, pay for them and their upkeep, and had siphoned the resources to squish the unprepared nation, the unprepared and ill of foresight should pay the penalty. My third point: 100>50. That is a mathematically true statement. What it means in PnW is that 100k soldiers will beat 50k soldiers. 100k soldiers will eventually beat 50k soldiers, no matter how many battles happen. Everyone should agree with this statement. Likewise, by that logic, 100 spies > 50 spies. Which means, at the end of the day, 100 spies should eventually beat 50 spies, no matter how long it takes. Everyone should also agree with that statement. In any way altering this fact makes war pointless. If somehow 50k soldiers on the defensive manages to beat off 100k soldiers in this game, war would be a dead aspect of this game. Likewise, if 100 spies could not kill 50 spies, spying would be a dead aspect of this game. So, the only problem people should have is not the fact that 50 spies can't beat 100 spies, but rather, people are losing those spies too fast. Plus, a nation can only take 3 spy attacks to them each day (which includes gathering intelligence). Each person is limited to only one of those attacks (2, if you have CIA, but only like 4 people have it). If a single attack destroyed half of your spies, you have to remember that the guy who did that was either very lucky (and got it on like a 50% chance) or spent the time and money to beat you in a game of resource and strategy. If you are afraid that you are losing spies over three separate attacks, it means that someone is obviously coordinating against you, WHICH IS PART OF THE GAME STRATEGY. If three separate people declare war on you and you get rolled, nobody is surprised by any means. The biggest problem people have seems to be that they lose spies too fast. One fix proposed right now is to decrease the amount of spies lost when someone attacks you. This alone is a terrible fix, because it means that people who have spent millions and had the foresight and strategy to think ahead are now left with an extremely expensive way to flick a stone at someone. The only way this fix works is if the upkeep of spies, as well as individual spy and operational costs, were collectively reduced to reflect the amount of spies killed. Another fix that was proposed is raise the amount of spies a nation can purchase. This alone, also, is a terrible fix. The entire point of using spies offensively is to get at someone's missiles or nuclear weapons. When someone, within two or three days, can purchase enough spies to make it unprofitable to sabotage, the offensive use of spies becomes pointless. An additional fix can be added, which also includes reducing upkeep of spies, and individual spies and operational costs (the later being the most important). Edit: Imo, don't change the system. Nerfing anything right now would risk the entire spy system.

Punch in the numbers Phiney. Killing spies is now something that you have to throw 2-3 times the money at someone to kill minuscule amount of spies. I don't disagree at all, there needs to be nerfing. Honestly, I have no idea how the nerfing should go. Spies are useful because they are a strategic weapon designed to destroy heavy enemy hardware (missiles/nukes/ships). Make that an economic impossibility, and spies become useless offensively. That being said, you can't argue that if you have more soldiers than someone else, logic dictates that you would be more likely to win right? With a variation of chance, of course. The same should be logically applied to spies. What you are saying is that people kill too many spies in one attack. The fact is, when someone has more spies and attempts to kill someone with lower spy counts, reason dictates that the person with lower spy counts loses. It doesn't matter how many attacks it takes, that is the eventual inevitable result. Same way if you had 50k soldiers and attacked someone with 10k. The inevitable result, doesn't matter how many battles it takes, is that the person with 10k loses. What you are saying is that Sheepy should nerf the spies so that the person LOSES SLOWER. What this update entails is not the change that you would want to see (i.e. "losing slower"). This update makes it so that the defender is so well entrenched that the person doesn't lose at all. Only with odds like 5 to 1 would you eventually win, and at a huge financial cost. This logically doesn't make any sense. It's like if you had sent your 1280 aircraft, using up 300t munitions and gas, to only destroy 100 of the 500 enemy aircraft. Not sure if the numbers are true, and don't care. The fact is, you spent a crap load of money and your returns make it so painful that going on the offense is pointless.

Just ran the numbers for espionage, you severely nerfed spy assassinations. It used to be that if you had 224 spies, you could assassinate 100 enemy spies with 99% success rate. That percentage dropped to 66%. If spy battles were similar to wars, that would be fine, but that means you have a 33% chance of failure. Which means loss of your own spies without assassinating a single one of the enemy. Not to mention that the numbers punched in doesn't even come near to the 50% of the enemy spies killed. Edit: The outcome is that spies are now once again useless, and you might as well remove the CIA project. The amount of money it takes to drop an enemy's number of spies (along with how many days) is now so insurmountable that it is pointless to use spies offensively. I somewhat agree that spy assassinations need to be nerfed, but these numbers are so severe that it may be just pointless for anyone to build more than 50 spies. The offensive capabilities of spies are now limited to the only real successful operations: sabotaging soldiers (which, if the cap remains at 3000, is also pointless) and gathering intelligence. This is a randomly generated report of 224 spies against 100 at Q&D (66% success): You successfully assassinated enemy spies in SIMULATED NATION. Your spies killed 29 enemy spies. Your agents were caught and identified by SIMULATED NATION's counter-intelligence forces. The operation cost you $2,240,000.00 and 10 of your spies were captured and executed. Save this information somewhere safe; after you leave this page you will not be able to see this intelligence report again without executing another operation. The monetary costs (including spies lost) is $2.74m, while the costs by the enemy is only $1.4m. As per the mechanics of the game, increasing to normal precautions does not increase the amount of spies killed. Purely from an economic stand-point, even if the operation was (in a 2 out of 3 chance) successful, you still spent $2.2m to kill barely a fourth of the enemy force. By the way, 29 out of 100 spies is the maximum number of spies you can kill in one operation, regardless of how many more you can throw at them. ​Spy operations are already incredibly expensive. Decreasing the odds for success only serves to increase the costs by the attacker. The new overhaul now benefits the defender so much that doing any sort of offensive spy operation is just a massive waste of money. I challenge anyone here to run through the simulations, and tell me otherwise. Edit: P.S. Love the simulators. Those are awesome.

Had a nasty walk in with a spy bot a while back. Not fun. And I know it was a spy bot because I used my CIA project and logged off as soon as possible. The target had no suspicion of me (it was more or less a random attack).

I have absolutely no idea how this solves the spy problem, and that there was a spy problem in the first place.

Hiya! Welcome to Orbis. I'm a happy, good going guy. Perhaps we can be allies

Ships are one of the few good ways to ZI someone without missiles or nukes though, does that count? Admittedly, this does attack the very foundation of what ships are used for militarily. But let's just say this was implemented, purely from a financial cost view, the blockade not only is choking the guy being blockaded, but also siphoning resources and materials from other nations to maintain resistance. On top of the fact that the chance would be based on all combined spy forces of the nations against them.

Nation name: Rosecourt Nation link: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=9270 Pick colors you wish to have: Blue Link to an emblem if you wish to have one on: (Choice A-D, Package 1-2) Choice: Package: Package 1 Um, something with a blue rose theme. Show me whatcha got

Well, there are times where you can't help the cost-efficiency, if it means helping your ally, that's understandable. Hell, the reason why I know these numbers is because I did the exact same thing.

Well, if we are going to talk realistically here, if soldiers start dropping like flies due to poison in the food, soldiers would probably stop eating the food. Plus, the flavor text says bomb detonation in soldier barracks. You are entirely right though. Killing 3000 soldiers with spies costs around 5-600k, which is around 300 times more expensive than just recruiting soldiers and go for a ground attack. Likewise, that number is the same (roughly) for tanks and aircraft. That being said, there cost-efficiency ratio to killing conventional military can range from 40 to 3000 times less effective than a conventional military battle. The only spy missions that actually net a battle efficiency are ships (if the enemy has less than ~5 spies), missiles (if the enemy has less than ~5 spies), spies (but practically if you have enough spies for 99% Q&D), and nuclear weapons (if the enemy has less than ~40 spies). Spying tanks is roughly 40 times less efficient, but depending on market prices, it can fluctuate back down to around 5-6 times. Nobody in their right minds would use spies for anything other than ships, missiles, nuclear weapons and other spies. Spies, generally speaking, are an expensive force that, when utilized right, can save you millions in the long run. The number of spies necessary to destroy a nuclear weapon when an enemy has less than 5 spies is roughly 95. Rounding that up, the costs for destroying a nuclear weapon is $1m, while the costs for building the nuclear weapon is ~$6-7m, depending on market prices. That is a cost efficiency ratio of roughly 6 times. That is entirely excluding the possible damages taken from eating that nuke (which, JHH can vouch for, is well over $10m). My recommendation to you is start using spies against enemies with missiles, or (god help you) enemies with nukes. Using spies at a tier below 400NS is more or less pointless, though it can help in breaking blockades should that ever happen.

Ooooo, this sounds fun. The added spontaneity and randomness of the game also pairs well with the new approval system. This could allow nations who have suffered heavy losses and defeats to regain approval, not to mention fill the time during lulls of peace between major wars. I like this idea, and I think this should be developed more. Edit: Also, I know a player who just started a week ago, and now has 3 cities of 1500 infra (Probably not the best idea for infra-income efficiency) and makes a crap ton of money by raiding. I remember a post a while back about how lower tier nations raiding new players is bad for player retention. That is a true statement no matter how you put it. The implementation of this idea will likely encourage more new nations to grow faster and stay with playing, since theoretically, the NPC nations would be easier targets for reaping benefits. However, we should be careful though about the NPCs. I could possibly see that in the future, some alliances may have perm smaller nations just to farm the (Pardon my French) out of NPCs and build huge treasuries with it. The profits from NPCs should be carefully calculated.

Admittedly, there isn't a very good spy guide out there for the public. I think I wrote one briefly, but it was specific to my alliance. Perhaps a very generous individual would like to contribute to a guide for spies.

In regards to the Delian League, it should be noted that you have left the rather pessimistic view of the military alliance. First, any participant in the Delian League was indeed protected by the sort of "collective herd" mentality, but suffered a severe loss of autonomy. Case in point, the smaller nations of the Delian League often "deferred leadership" to Athens, which meant that in a lot of foreign affairs, smaller nations had less autonomy than without the League. In an extreme case, the Delian League reached a new height of Athenian dominance: the secession of the island of Naxos, which was brutally sacked and destroyed by an Athenian army. For those who vouch for this League, beware. The collapse of the Delian League was due to the increasing power of Athens in the League, which later could be characterized as an Athenian Empire. Small alliances will almost certainly be swept away in foreign affairs and will likely have little control over their own contributions to the treasury. Likewise, however, we should not discount the success of the Delian League. The Delian League did indeed centralize monetary funding against the Persian Empire, and despite lacking in almost every way militarily to the Persian Empire, the focus and concentration of the Greek funds, combined with other factors, ultimately led to a Hellenistic persistence and dominance. I think that HM Solomon I quite precisely points out the advantages to the League system.

The amount of spies to reach the full limit hasn't been really calculated. By my estimations, the number for destroying the full amount of tanks (250) was around 55-60 spies, assuming the enemy has zero. I'm sure there are others who have more direct combat experience, if anyone else would like to weigh in.

Yay! Another Cat lover! Cats will rule the world one day, if they ever went biped and developed the kitty death ray.

/o, congrats

Or, you can be a job killing socalist, talk peace, and leave the BoC out?

Greetings! Like many from my alliance, we tend to just materialize out of nowhere in forums and never bother to introduce ourselves. Hi! My name is Caecus, but you may call me CC. Caecus means blind in Latin, but I'm not blind, I just wear glasses and have trouble seeing. My alliance is the Brotherhood of the Clouds. I run a happy little nation called Rosecourt, and I really like cats. I briefly played (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) for a while, but gave up after like a week. In a lot of ways, PnW is my first real nation sim experience, and I love it so far!

Temporarily forgetting about the aesthetic "raptors" part of the project, let's briefly look at this in terms of how many people will actually purchase this project. This project costs roughly ~$6m, depending on the market prices. This project obviously takes up a project slot. This project is dependent upon spies. This project requires you to use money to execute operations... Already, this project is a financial drain. Unlike the gold standard Iron Dome, this project doesn't pay for itself. In fact, this project requires money. And spies. Purely from a financial standpoint here, this project is something people wouldn't get unless they are trolls, have too much money, incompetent, or all three. Secondly, from a strategic point of view, this project is only useful when dealing with someone you have already blockaded. After all, without the blockade, they can just buy food if they desperately need it. Even during wartime, food doesn't go too far over 120 ppu. It's like an expensive way to flip the wheelchair of a paraplegic terminal cancer patient. If you have that much spy dominance over another person to go walk over and eat their food, a more useful use of that operation would probably be to kill the guy's missiles or nukes. The only case where I see this operation being used is when you have practically won the war, but just to screw with this guy, raid his fridge. So, all in all, this is a project that takes up a slot, eats $6m, requires you to have more spies than your target for any decent success, requires money for those spies to have any decent success, and is only used when you are kicking someone's nuts around like it's the dominatrix world cup. Amount of people buying this project in the next 6 months: 3 1st guy is a troll, second guy is a 10-year-old inside who loves dinosaurs, and third guy is some guy in tS who has too much money. Edit: Perhaps instead of adding this as another project, perhaps you can put this op as something you can unlock if you have the CIA project, that way it buffs the CIA project and makes people want to buy the project a bit more. CIA project needs a bit of buffing. Only 3 people in the game (as far as I know) have it, and this might expand the usage of CIA to more nations.

In reference to how everyone is saying that this doesn't fit with the game, how about we change it from raptors to blight infection? All wars in the past have had some sort of sabotage which affects the lifeline of an army. Burning fuel, spreading disease, destroying crops. A blight infection is something that we have to deal with commonly in the real world, and has been considered as part of a biochemical warfare option by some countries. Think of it as poisoning the well, but the food instead. Still keep the numbers though, I suppose. Personally, I think we should modify the CIA project a bit.

*cough* *cough* I represent Asgard here, uh... Yay treaty!

Welcome, welcome!

Nation Link: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=9270 Amount: 4M Time Until Repayment: Before June 3rd

Triumph is determined by the amount of damage dealt, not soldiers killed. Seeing as how you destroyed an improvement, I would consider that an immense triumph.

Roses and Boxes and Flags "I am a pilot. I like to think I am a good pilot, because I can fly a Grand Eagle-class transport plane 36 hours straight. I'm not THAT good though, or else I would have been a fighter pilot. But I'm good at my job. I can fly from the homeland to the front lines and back twice before I need any sleep. People often ask me what I think about the war, but I honestly have no opinion. I just fly, fly between peace and war, between life and death. I drop young lads at the front, and fly back with roses and boxes and flags. I am a pilot. I like to think I'm a good pilot, because I am now on my 3rd round trip without sleep. After I drop these lads off, I don't think I would mind if this bird and her old captain retired on the way back."