Espionage Changes

[Shakyr]

22 hours ago, Adrienne said:

You had me up until the second part. There's already a discussion about changing the spy kill ratio in place and I don't think there should be any changes to Spy Satellite taken until we see how those pan out. Double nerfing spy sat straight off the bat would be a terrible idea.

Pinging @Shakyr as well, in case you weren't aware of this thread.

Thanks, I was made aware after I posted that there was discussion on changing it at some point in the future. I wasn't aware of the suggested amounts though. Why it isn't changed asap though, I have no clue.

When they actually get around to implementing those changes, I'll be quite a bit happier.

21 hours ago, BelgiumFury said:

Obviously the ROI is something to take into account.
Imagine if all your other attacks only did a maximum of 700K in damage, we would all go retire and play a diffrent game.

I just had a spy attack take out 3,060 tanks. That is like $8 million in Steel in a single spy attack and potentially $24 million across 3 daily spy attacks. Why the hell this ever made it past the test server, I have no idea. And don't talk to me about missing spy attacks, because the way things currently stand, you can take out a nation's spies within a day or two and then they have no chance of ever defending.

[BelgiumFury]

49 minutes ago, Shakyr said:

d a spy attack take out 3,060 tanks. That is like $8 million in Steel in a single spy attack and potentially $24 million across 3 daily spy attacks. Why the hell this ever made it past the test server, I have no idea. And don't talk to me about missing spy attacks, because the way things currently stand, you can take out a nation's spies within a day or two and then they have no chance of ever defending.

Wonder how much damage a beige, ground attack or an air strike does 😛, in addition to the fact that steel only costs 5000 PPU because of war.
Or a suicide soldiers only ground attack

Next to that, this means you get extremely unlucky, assuming you had you maximum tanks the maximum damage would be around that. 
The average would be 2025 tanks, only if you have maximum tanks, and 36 cities however. 

I can talk to you about missing spy ops because I am zeroed since day three of this war. All I can do are information gathering spy ops and endure my ships and tanks getting killed. And so is life.

 

56 minutes ago, Hime-sama said:

The problem is that smaller/poorer alliances cannot reasonably sacrifice growth like that. There is obviously a disproportionate effect that this 'sacrifice of growth' has between a poor/small alliances and a rich/big alliance, which is why it's not a realistic avenue to take a loan or budget for it. A loan accumulates interest, for an investment that has (basically) no monetary return, it's essentially a depreciating investment. Budgeting for it would take up too much of the resources, again, for a project that provides no real monetary benefit. It's a great project for other reasons, but remains out of reach for most alliances/players.

If you want to introduce more expensive projects (which does seem something alex and pre want to do) and make projects more valluable and more customizable this will be a risk in any way. Alliances or nations will have to do creative accounting.
Unless you only want to have economic projects, which would admitidly kind of boring.

Edited November 10, 2020 by BelgiumFury

[Prefontaine]

I've not read everything in this thread but I would like to go over a few things. Spies, like military units come with the base problem of how to allow for units to be rebuilt over time in a manner that allows for meaningful future defense of that rebuilding nation versus losing the victors advantage from spy ops too quickly.

The reason spy kill rates vs spies are being nerfed, simply put, is because they are too high. Even with this large nerf it is possible, more often than not, in a coordinated day reset spy blitz to lose all of your spies. If spy kills get too low you greatly reduce the impact of spies on warfare which can be an important part especially when dealing with up-declares. The idea behind the reduction is that you kill spies a little slower, that six hit blitz might take all 6 hits to 0 your spies, but your spies effectively acted as a 24 hour buffer to your units. Units are much more easily (though not cheaply) replaced than spies, so leaving their kill rates up (though maybe slightly reduced in some areas) makes them a useful weapon in warfare. With the current design of spies, we don't want to see that go away. 

There is talk of a reserve mechanic for spies where a nation can rebuild their spy counts without their spies being at risk of being killed. This way once you lose the spy war you are actually able to rebuild your units over time and come back into the spy war with spies again. There are flaws to this, but less flaws than the current rebuild system. I'm currently waiting on Alex to decide if he wants to scrap the spy system and go for a complete overhaul to the mechanic or add the new mechanic in conjunction with spies. When that decision gets made, a thread will be made to discuss such options.

Edited November 10, 2020 by Prefontaine

[BelgiumFury]

48 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

I've not read everything in this thread but I would like to go over a few things. Spies, like military units come with the base problem of how to allow for units to be rebuilt over time in a manner that allows for meaningful future defense of that rebuilding nation versus losing the victors advantage from spy ops too quickly.

The reason spy kill rates vs spies are being nerfed, simply put, is because they are too high. Even with this large nerf it is possible, more often than not, in a coordinated day reset spy blitz to lose all of your spies. If spy kills get too low you greatly reduce the impact of spies on warfare which can be an important part especially when dealing with up-declares. The idea behind the reduction is that you kill spies a little slower, that six hit blitz might take all 6 hits to 0 your spies, but your spies effectively acted as a 24 hour buffer to your units. Units are much more easily (though not cheaply) replaced than spies, so leaving their kill rates up (though maybe slightly reduced in some areas) makes them a useful weapon in warfare. With the current design of spies, we don't want to see that go away. 

There is talk of a reserve mechanic for spies where a nation can rebuild their spy counts without their spies being at risk of being killed. This way once you lose the spy war you are actually able to rebuild your units over time and come back into the spy war with spies again. There are flaws to this, but less flaws than the current rebuild system. I'm currently waiting on Alex to decide if he wants to scrap the spy system and go for a complete overhaul to the mechanic or add the new mechanic in conjunction with spies. When that decision gets made, a thread will be made to discuss such options.

A completly new balanced spy system does seem interesting (but hard, it would probably go best hand in hand with a revamp of the whole war system?)
Just fixing the spy system can be unbalanced again when the other war system change significantly, (or so I think).
This however does still implicate the spy sat issue, but I have faith that these can be solved too.
 

[Adrienne]

5 hours ago, Hime-sama said:

The problem is that smaller/poorer alliances cannot reasonably sacrifice growth like that. There is obviously a disproportionate effect that this 'sacrifice of growth' has between a poor/small alliances and a rich/big alliance, which is why it's not a realistic avenue to take a loan or budget for it. A loan accumulates interest, for an investment that has (basically) no monetary return, it's essentially a depreciating investment. Budgeting for it would take up too much of the resources, again, for a project that provides no real monetary benefit. It's a great project for other reasons, but remains out of reach for most alliances/players.

Ideally, it would be nerfed and lowered in price to compensate, without refunds.

It has no monetary return for the larger alliances either. It would be a decision made for the military benefit of it. There's nothing depreciating about it, it's a consistent benefit, just not an economic one. I'm not sure I agree with your assessment that it's harder for smaller alliances to the degree you're stating because while I recognize that, yes, the alliance is smaller and has less money, the pool of nations you'd realistically be looking to give it to is smaller as well. Looking at your alliance's city counts only, I'd probably only give it to one individual there. Maybe 5 if you're trying to build up a decent amount of folks with it but, as you mentioned, growth is important as well and you need to weigh the value of an expensive project like this against the cost of said members' next city and make an assessment on the worth of such an action with that member's activity and contribution to the community. As for affordability though, there are generally a variety of options available to smaller alliances. Your alliance, for example, has a protector. Protectors generally come with economic perks. Additionally, your small alliance owns a bank. There are always options, you just need to explore what yours are more.

Also, to my knowledge, projects have never been nerfed after the fact. Saying it should be nerfed and not refunded if people don't want to keep it after it's nerfed or the price is lowered is a little bit ridiculous since it wouldn't be the project people bought and it's not realistic to say "you should have expected it". They shouldn't have. It would be unprecedented and punishing to the individuals who decided it was worthwhile to go for it and made the time and investment to do so.

I still feel like overall though, it's a poor idea as well to nerf Spy Satellite before changes are made to the spy system. You tinker with one thing at a time, wait and see how it impacts things, and make decisions based off that.

[Arawra]

10 hours ago, Adrienne said:

Also, to my knowledge, projects have never been nerfed after the fact. Saying it should be nerfed and not refunded if people don't want to keep it after it's nerfed or the price is lowered is a little bit ridiculous since it wouldn't be the project people bought and it's not realistic to say "you should have expected it". They shouldn't have. It would be unprecedented and punishing to the individuals who decided it was worthwhile to go for it and made the time and investment to do so.

I still feel like overall though, it's a poor idea as well to nerf Spy Satellite before changes are made to the spy system. You tinker with one thing at a time, wait and see how it impacts things, and make decisions based off that.

I think we may have to agree to disagree on the parts I snipped from the quote, but I'm also not very good at econ so it's plausible that I'm wrong there.

Regarding precedent however, I think there are two options: one where Alex sets a precedent of refunding nerfed projects or one where Alex begins nerfing projects and they become part of the risk assessment. I personally disagree with the former precedent, as there has already been (significant) return on currently-in-play Spy Sat projects. Thus, I think it would be unfair to allow the alliances that were able to have their fun with the project, not to suffer any losses while alliances that I don't believe could reasonably afford them, never had a chance to participate and benefit from it.

However, I agree with your last point. I'm fine to reconsider potential changes to Spy Sat if/when the changes to spies are made as changing too many things at a time can result in overtuning.

Edited November 11, 2020 by Hime-sama

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

On 11/10/2020 at 3:52 AM, Hime-sama said:

Ideally, it would be nerfed and lowered in price to compensate, without refunds.

or you can just change what it does a little bit, so instead of killing 50% more units, it could increase spy defense by 33% or something equally valuable.

[Azaghul]

29 minutes ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

or you can just change what it does a little bit, so instead of killing 50% more units, it could increase spy defense by 33% or something equally valuable.

I agree with this.  Rebalancing it to help with spy defense or some other benefit is a good idea IMO.

One suggestion: Nations with spy satellite get extra gather intel ops and/or automatically can see extra info on the nations they are at war with.  Resources on hand, military buy reset time, military bought that day, and the like.

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

54 minutes ago, Azaghul said:

One suggestion:  Resources on hand, military buy reset time, military bought that day, and the like.

Holy crap, I would much rather have this than 50% more damage.

[BelgiumFury]

8 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

Holy crap, I would much rather have this than 50% more damage.

Yeah if we are nerfing spy sat to this I am a happy camper 😛

[Micchan]

The solution is a defensive spy operation that last 24 hours, reduces the number of spies killed by something like 75%

You can chose to use one of your two spy operations to defend your spies and use the other to attack or do two attacks, you can still lose spies but instead of losing at least half of your spies in the first minute of the war you lose like 10 of them and the next day you have a chance to counter attack

You still have to do it every day, even before the start of the war, so it has a considerable cost

They spy battle doesn't end the first day of the war and is in favor not only of the side with more nations but also in favor on who can coordinate better and use a better strategy

It solves also the problem of the units killed because winning the spy war requires more effort and more money so the prize is high

[chameleon]

"An unknown nation has executed an espionage operation against your country. They successfully assassinated spies in your nation. 14 of your spies were killed."

Already down in spies, so this is over 4.5 days of rebuying spies gone poof, welp!  Would be 7 days worth of rebuying spies w/out the Intel Agency project too.  Arcane doesn't seem to be helping much either.

[Micchan]

34 minutes ago, chameleon said:

"An unknown nation has executed an espionage operation against your country. They successfully assassinated spies in your nation. 14 of your spies were killed."

Already down in spies, so this is over 4.5 days of rebuying spies gone poof, welp!  Would be 7 days worth of rebuying spies w/out the Intel Agency project too.  Arcane doesn't seem to be helping much either.

This is my first day of the war

An unknown nation has executed an espionage operation against your country. They successfully assassinated spies in your nation. 26 of your spies were killed.

An unknown nation has executed an espionage operation against your country. They successfully assassinated spies in your nation. 21 of your spies were killed.