Espionage
A country-level budget contest, no individual agents
There's no agent roster or mission timers here — espionage is a budget you split between defending your own country and targeting specific others, and every country you spy on builds its own separate score over time as you invest in it.
Design goal
Access, not a passive bonus
Every country you target builds its own penetration score against it — funding an operation is a real investment in access to that specific country, not a general bonus. Spending on your own counterintelligence makes everyone else's operations against you harder to pull off, and you can never allocate more than your total budget allows across everything at once.
How it works
Progress happens once a month
At the start of every month, every operation you're funding gets one real outcome — a setback, no change, progress, a breakthrough, or a catastrophic exposure that burns the operation and puts the target on alert. How strong a country's internal security is directly determines how hard it is to make headway against them — political police make infiltration harder, secret police harder still, a full surveillance state hardest of all.
How it works
What penetration actually unlocks
The deeper your access to a country, the more serious the things you can do to it — starting with basic intelligence gathering and building toward political interference, sabotage, stealing technology, military intelligence, and eventually backing coups or stealing war plans. A sudden breakthrough can put a major option within reach immediately, which is what makes a long, patient investment feel like it's actually paying off.
How it works
How the AI plays it
AI countries keep roughly a third of their budget on defense and put the rest toward whoever looks like their most valuable target — usually a hostile country with real military weight. Once they've built up enough access, they take whatever action is currently their best option, within whatever cooldowns apply.
In the interface
Your view and theirs
The main Espionage view gives you the full picture — your budget and counterintelligence, every operation you're running or defending against, what actions are available or still cooling down, and a log of recent outcomes. Each country's own view also carries an Espionage tab scoped just to that relationship — or, for your own country, your domestic security budget.