(Any posts that are not specifically related to this subject will be deleted, if you want to make a suggestion or comment that is not related to this topic, then please PM me and I will create a topic if I feel it is something to discuss.)

This is a discussion for AFTER the new UI is complete. I just want to start conversation.

The Cause Dissension ability of spies is super-over powered. There are many ways to combat this. Feel free to post your own suggestions:

1. Lessen the troops lost per op
2. Limit the number of CD's before diminished returns from it
3. Increase spies lost for failed ops.
4. Have spies lost regardless of success or not.
5. Troops lost to Cause Dissension will join an allies country instead. (This could open a fun new mechanic in the game and incorporate more strategy into the game)

(EDIT) HOW SPAL is calculated is another topic of discussion because a small restart can cause massive damage to a country that is significantly larger then it is.

The end game is to favor specialist strategies like in the past. You have your breakers, your attackers and your spies. Each with its own perks and disadvantages.

I might be in the minority, but I think the problem is not with CD at all. Rather, it's a larger problem with spies. I think spy effectiveness should be re-assessed. SPAL as it currently stands means that growing in war is discouraged. The more acres one has, the more spies one has to keep, and 200 spal at higher acreage is far more expensive than at low acreage. So either one has to have low spal, or high expenses. Meanwhile, a 4th restart with barely any spies, relatively, will often be more effective than originals with lots of spies.

Furthermore, as the last war has shown, tech stealing from bots is incredibly overpowered. For reference, I used it on FFA about a year ago -- running all explore rainbows, just stealing tech from bots, I had about 350 million average -- nothing to slouch at.

In my opinion, two things must change:
1. Spy DR should hit far earlier on all ops. In order to balance that, ops should have individual DR, half of the current DR or lower (10 ops would get my vote).
Example: Someone can do 7 Demos, and 10 CD against a country with no fails. But if the person tries 17 CD, the last 7 will have a high chance of failing.

2. SPAL should be re-worked to only take into consideration the DEFENDING country's land. It makes no sense that a country with 5000 acres and 200 spal would be able to invade a country with 50000 acres and 100 spal. That 200 spal would be 20 spal on the larger country.

I have always had issue with the spal as well sin. Thank you for hitting it better then I could have worded it.

Added SPAL to the discussion for this topic. My top post has been edited.

I think both are right. Spies are too overpowered, CDs is part of that but also the way spal works unencumbered against bigger countries discourage building a bigger country.

I say success rate on ops should be calculated instead of from a SPAL:SPAL ratio basis it should be as such:

Min(SPAL_offender/SPAL_defender,Spies_offender:Spies_defender)

Secondly damage from everything spy related and attack related should be limited much more harshly by the attackers total resources in the area that he is attacking.

Constants*Variables*Min(Offender_resource,Defender_resource) or possibly
Constants*Variables*Min(Offender_resource,Defender_resource*1.25)

All changes made to spy ops greatly reduces a Dictator's effectiveness. If you're going to make changes to the "overpowered" spy ops at least add strength to the underpowered ones.

all of these are garbage:
attack intelligence centers
raid oil reserve

and add a DR info spy op.

Raid oil works differently on different servers, it's a damn fine op...

What about spy readiness, separate from war readiness obviously. Take away limited numbers of ops per day and just use your own readiness equal to how war readiness works.

Agree on the DR info.

I like attack intelligence centres, I'm doing that op every now and again on solo server 1vs1 wars.

raid oil, bomb banks, attack food stores are weak in war but strong still for suiciding. they should be replaced rather than strengthened, any mechanic which's only viable use is griefing is bad for the game.

Intel gathering can be strengthened with more info ops, the market op can give more info such as timing of goods and orders.

I think bioterror should be changed to deal far less damage on its own and add more to counter walling. For instance stop it from killing population but cancel pop growth completely, and remove the effect of medical tech on clearing it faster.

In general I like stuff like demoralize, attack intelligence centres, bioterror(my version of it) that doesn't by itself deal much damage but in combination with attacks does. CDs are too strong because they drop the break nearly as much as demos, but they also deal permanent damage by themselves and they are not maxed out at 7 ops.

Stuff like:
Sabotage turrets - Defenders turrets are 80% as powerful next defensive BR battle. Only works on the next attack, but can be applied multiple times with stacking effect.
Sabotage troops - Defenders turrets are 80% as powerful next defensive/offensive GS battle.
Sabotage tanks - Defenders tanks are 80% as powerful next defensive/offensive AB battle.
These will be super fun for wallers and to help your friends when they are walling, since they can be used to force fails.

Sabotage SDI - Defenders SDI has a 50% chance of malfunctioning on the next missile sent to him.
Sabotage targeting systems - Targets next missile will fizzle.

So strengthen intel gathering, make more ops that work in well combined with attacks/missiles, but weaken the ones that are good on their own/multipurpose/overpowered or have no viable use other than for griefing.

Edit: Druncks idea of Spy readiness is an interesting proposition. It can slow the game down as well.

Edit: Celphi suggests Dict will be too weak in war and he has a point, can give dict either 25% higher offencive SPAL OR 25% higher spy op damage in addition to the +25% spal it already has. I think as we are talking about the direction of the game in general tho the discussion of rebalancing govts is childs play in comparison. It's obvious what needs to be done once we have settled on a new path.

I honestly do not see what is broken about it.
It is a good game mechanic that serves a purpose in war when breaking down larger opponents.

It even gives the defender time to wall as it takes more hits to kill someone with gs than br.

Having more land should be riskier when compared to a smaller countries. Yes it requires more spies to = a smaller county's spal, but the economy of the larger country is so much better.

This seems like a way to help netters not get sideswiped and would also make them more op compared to a country built for gathering intel and causing havoc.

There was a reason most clans had a spy department and war department.

I explained this very well in AT recently. Hold on lemme grab it.

The points that relates to spy ops is here(earlier in the post I explain that country A is has twice as much of every resource as country B and Im comparing to a situation in which they are rougly equal in everything):


The entire post is here: https://www.earthempires.com/...ke-about-war-47401#906367

I dont think the problem is CDs themselves. Maybe instead of 17 successful max beneficial CDs to half # of troops increase the # needed to half it

But that is what makes this game unique. Take a risk to get big and the payoff might be worth it or follow the norm and play it safe under the radar with a substantial lower net worth compared to the country that took a risk.

So the larger you are the more of a target you are and the more defenceless you are. I consider that a bug and the biggest problem with this game by far.

You have three spectrums.

Pure spy / in between / pure netting

Pure net will always place higher than a pure spy and in between. It's a risk they take running barely any ic and/or lack of def. They want to maximize their potential by decreasing expenses.

It seems like we are trying to cater to netters while making them stronger vs countries that solely war prep. I dont understand the logic in breaking this balance to make this game safer for the small amount that like netting.

It's not a balance. It's suggesting to a large group of people that they have to be fish in a barrel to compete, then giving everyone else the chance to just decide who of those gets to win. Its not competetive, its not balanced, there is no counterplay and its simple. I want competition, I want balance, I want counterplay and I want complexion.

Let there be ways to destroy a netting country. There are plenty of option. But make it at least feasible to defend oneself, that way more would actually feel its worth doing. And also why does it have to be possible to destroy 10 netting sets solo with one halfass country?

I don't think it caters only to netters, I think warring people have also grown tired of the endless string of GS that wars become lategame (close wars or wars that start late between wartags are always that). And as has been said before its almost impossible to outgrow an opponent contributing to wars taking too long and restarts being too strong.

I'll just let you all know, that circular discussions wont come to unanimous decisions.

And at the end of the day it is up to the Administration of the game to decide if they wish to side with one side or the other.

You all make good points, and we are not blind observers of the game. So from there lets make sure we aren't attacking one class of people just to make a point.

Personally, I think the CD mechanic is fine. Sure,. it's powerful., but once your target hits DR, they're basically immune to it.

There's like a total of 40 ops you can do to a single country per 24hrs. In war, the pattern is usually demo 7x then CD to breaker range then GS. If you weaken the mechanism,. a country who is exclusively a netter could be nearly impossible to break.

If the developers decide to nerf it,. then at least strengthen the ops which never get used.

I never understood why you would attack intelligence agencies if your SPAL is better. The returns of each op just isnt worth the amount you lose when you fail.

I use spy ops almost exclusively in war. I agree with The_Hawk viewpoint on the 3 different classes (spectrums). And I agree with Gerdler's point of restarts being too strong.

The thing is... Nerfing SPAL in either the way I describe or Gerdler described has no immediate benefit to netters. Even using Gerdlers formula, a war prepped country will still hit their ops on a netting country. The difference will be that a good war prepped country won't be victim of a bad war prepped country/a terrible restart. It will also make builds like Derrick's MB Spy country more viable in my opinion.

Yeah, I agree it will place more of a premium on prepping a war country properly than anything. you would still need a few million more spies than a netter usually likes to get in order to have a shot at making an op fail before Spy DR has become really high.

And what Celphi is saying about netting countries being unbreakable is not true at all, it's just a few more CDs needed. In general everyone can break everyone in any close war, the CDs are used to make kills faster and cheaper. Otherwise it would require hitting at higher readiness cost and/or spending a little more stock on units. What CDs does do tho is that the standard war country will set up with something like 10:1:5 Troops:jets:turrets because BRs are not an option in general, as GSing will still be much cheaper and you dont want to carry around the NW and expenses of a few million jets that dont help on defense. It makes most wars very one-dimensional.

If you CD a country 40x successfully with max returns., a 10mil troop country goes down to 1,953,651 troops exactly.

Which is basically not possible to buy and replace in a single day.

If you're suggesting on nerfing those returns to 1/2, then your target country would still have ~5,976,825 troops remaining. That's significantly harder to break,. not to mention easy to replace those lost troops in a single day.

Your numbers are incredibly wrong. 40 CDs on a 10m troop country will leave him with just under 1954k troops.

7 CDs drop troop break by about 25%, 7 demos drop break by 30%... don't you think thats a bit close considering that CDs deal permanent damage regardless of if you attack as well and because unlike demos they keep reducing break indefinatly?

A reasonably normal number of ops in a lategame war is 17 CDs and 7 demos which drops the break to just slightly under 35% of what it was before, now if that is a netting country you are targeting with a warring country, generally none of those ops fail. And if it is a netting country you can just keep going. I've taken breaks on 50 spal countries to 15% of original this set, and netters usually have far below that.

See repost., I had typo in my function.

If you nerf the CD from 4% to 2%, which is probably a bit more than I would suggest initially, depending on other changes, you end up with 4.457m troops left after 40 ops, not ~5,976,825 troops.

If SPAL is unchanged I would think that is reasonable. if something like what I, sinistril or jabroni suggests for making spying harder in some situation is implemented I would suggest something like 2.5-3% troops removed per op.

10000k*0.975^40=~3632k
10000k*0.97^40=~2957k

I do like the idea of nerfing CD's somewhat. maybe a floating scale between 2% and 4%..

But also increasing damage from others, some are not used at all and maybe its time to change them for something new, rather than something the same as always has been.

What if there was a "Counter-Intelligence" Technology that acted as a defense against spies, in the same way SDI defends against missiles?

Then, instead of the attacking country's SPAL squaring off directly against the defending country's SPAL, the likelihood of success when performing a spy op is calculated using the Attacking Country's Spy Effectiveness and the defending country's Counter-Intelligence.

I know this would be asking A LOT of the dev team, but is is the way I'm seeing it. Hear me out:

1. Spies are no longer produced by Industrial Production. But new ones can be trained. Perhaps a function in the game to Train Spies, which would yield a low number of spies (less than 10). The amount would vary based on your investement in Spy Tech.

2. Countries start the reset with 50 spies. (Number can vary by game type). Counter-Intel spy defense starts off at 20%, caps at 75% or 80%. You would need to invest or buy tech to boost it like any other tech.

3. When attacking a country with a spy op, you send 1 spy. The success us determined by your Spy Effectiveness vs. their Counter-Intel.

4. If the spy is not caught, they stay in the defending country and continue to repeat their assigned op every turn until they ARE caught, or you call them back. Each turn your spy spends in the opposing country carries the gradually-increasing risk of your spy getting caught and killed.

5. If your spy is in the enemy country while the enemy is online, the enemy will see the effects of the spy ops when they spend turns. Each turn THEY spend also carries the chance of your spy getting caught or the op succeeding again.

6. Most spy ops would need to be redone in the way they are executed and the results they yield. Cause Dissention, for example:

-You send a spy to CD the enemy country.
-Success! Defending country loses X amount of troops on the first turn.
-You spend your next turn cashing. When you see the summary of that spent turn, you also see, "Your spy in Country (#) caused slightly-less-than-X troops to flee from their military."
-You spend another turn cashing, but...uh oh! You see, "Your spy in Country (#) has been caught and killed!"

You succeeded in 2 CDs in this example. Now, you would have to send another spy to the target country if you wanted to continue doing it.
=============
-No more messy SPAL
-A great deal more realistic (I mean, come on, you send 500,000 spies into a country, SOMEONE is gonna freaking notice that!)
-People have to be just as judicious about whether they want to keep the spy op going, or to stop it.
-You can do other things while your spy does their job.
-Restarts can still effectively use spies to make a comeback, pending they invested well in spy tech before dying.

This is just my draft of the overall idea. Feedback? Yay? Nay?

Brigg's idea is a big change from normal, but could be a welcome change all the same.

Which ever solution is pro netter that's what will happen

Thanks. I know it's a bit of a stretch, and asking a lot of the dev team. But this is what I was able to come up with after reading through the thread; in some cases re-reading some of the posts. If there is enough positive response to even consider incorporating this idea, I can start drafting ideas on how to adjust the Spy Ops to accommodate it. I think the mathematical formulas will remain roughly the same, but I had ideas for renaming, adjusting, and nerfing a few of them.

But let's see how the community and developers feel about the idea first. :D

If we're going to lower the effectiveness. Make it 3% so instead of 17cd (4%) it's 25.5cd. If u do 2% it would take 34cd not including demo makes a big difference if u have fails since it's spied out around 40 ops if I'm not mistaken

What makes you think that?

Just trying to stop people with 10m troops losing all their troops to CD's before an attack even happens..

Plus none of the suggestions so far will affect netters positively or negatively. That's what's so beautiful about them, they all manage to limit their scope just to wardogs.

I do love the idea of a floating scale between 2-4% btw.

Bug:. I asked gerd to make a list in another thread. But I'll ask u. Do a pro netter on 1 side and pro war on the other and see which side has had more changes go into effect to help the other. That's why I if it helps netters it's more likely to happen


Now to ur latest post. I agree why people are wanting this tinkered with. However I feel it shouldn't on basis what if said person with the theoretical 10 mil troops is in a alliance that picked on another tag. And the tag that was picked on is significantly smaller. They are going to need every advantage they can try to exploit

Briggs post is chock full of merit

+1

Thanks, man.

I drafted up my ideas for the revisions to the spy ops. But let's get past getting such a lofty and dramatic change approved first.

Unless anyone wants to see them anyway, I can link the Google Doc to the draft.

It's all ultimately up to the Devs, of course.

It's making earth spies a lot like utopia wizards. I have no idea how that would work with the rest of the game but perhaps it would be easier to balance than what we currently have. :)

"-No more messy SPAL"
It's not that messy. It's the fact that the success rate is random and affected by spy DR(which we have been given no clues when they begin or with what formulae they affect success rates) that makes it hard to understand. For whatever reason the devs wanted it that way all along as they have not posted more than hints to how it works.

I'm not exactly sure I agree with that decision but it has some possible reasons for being that way:
1. It becomes less obvious in which situation your ops will succeed, which can be a 'feature' they want in the game.
2. It becomes less obvious how to set up your country to do damage or to be safe from spy ops, which can be a 'feature' they want.
3. It's another opportunity for a person or a group who are gritty to test and to increase their understanding and perhaps eventually reverse engineer the formulas that govern spying in order to create an advantage in game knowledge over their competition.

"Messy" was the word my mind came up with after reading the thread.

With the new model I drafted up, a somewhat-random success rate and Spy DR would still exist, just in a slightly different form. The way I'm seeing it:

-Let's say you invested in Spy Tech, and your Spy Effectiveness is 120%
-Your target invested in Counter-Intel; their CI % is at 50%
-Your Spy Effectiveness is reduced by your opponent's Counter-Intel % (120 x .5 = 60% chance of success for the first op).
-After the first success, the numbers skew a little, gradually decreasing that chance of success, and slowly diminishing the returns of the ops as the spy needs to be "more careful" doing their deeds so as not to get caught. I'm no coder, nor a mathematician, so it would be up to the devs to create those formulas.

With this model, Spy DR is carried by the individual spies, and not so much influenced by the number of times a country has been spied on in the past 24 hours. Perhaps, though, a country's Counter-Intel could get temporary, invisible boosts if they are being spied on too much, and/or if they have more than 1 spy in their country at a time.

Additionally, it would be prudent to make sure that when a spy enters an enemy country, the Spy Effectiveness % for that individual spy is locked in and cannot change. This would seal up a loophole that would allow you to put a Spy in an enemy country, then spend turns Teching/Buying Spy Effectiveness to offset the Spy DR and the invisibly-boosting Counter-Intel. Such a loophole would be bananas.

That sounds a bit scary to me tho, if spy DR is effectively removed for new ops there would be no limit to ops damage really. Now even if you got 20 times the spal of the target you are effectively limited by spy DR from for instance SRing a target more than like 100 times.

I guess it can be solved through shifting the formulas a bit, tho.

I definitely see what you're saying. That's why I was thinking of the target country getting "invisible boosts" to Counter-Intel the more they get hit by ops in a given period; which is essentially my proposed version of Spy DR and getting "Spied Out". It's like the country getting smart to it. But I'm confident the dev team could definitely set up the formulas to prevent said 100, uncontested Stir Rebellions.

Im too lazy to read half of whats been written, so much work for so few players just change the spy formulas back to what they were in Earth2025 days instead of this crazy EE version and yer all fine and fluffy im sure someone has the old formulas saved somewhere :)

When missiles are sabotaged, they should detonate in the home country; causing some destruction (.5 to .25 the normal effect)

Well...that just made it into my revision draft. Great idea!

Sabotage Missiles - Each turn spent (Yours or Target’s) that the spy remains in the target country, the spy diffuses 1 missile. The spy no longer destroys 1 of each kind per successful op; just 1 missile per turn. Each success also carries a probability equal to your Warfare tech % of the diffused missile detonating in the target country, causing damage based on the type of missile used. This also, however, kills the spy.

Gerd is right as acreage increases it becomes exponentially harder to maintain SPAL.

SPAL is currently spies/acres. To address that you could use a different calc for relative "spy power" such as spies / sqrt(acres)

e.g 100k acre country would need 500k spies to match a 15k acre country with 200k spies in effective "power"

Well it is a greater risk by having more acres which can result in a greater reward by finishing higher.

There has to be a viable counterplay in order for a mechanic like tech stealing or CDs to be balanced. There isn't right now. You are basically saying "If you don't want to be suicided you shouldn't go for a high rank".

That's not even what I am saying.

I am saying players who wish to take a risk by out growing their spal do so for a gain at the end of the reset.

Suiciders will always find a way to grief with or without spies.

That seems like a very clean and easy to understand formula that pretty much does the trick. :thumbs-up:


Yes, suiciders decide the winners whenever they want to, and to stop that, which we must, we need to do more than just change the way spies work.
This discussion is mainly about war tho, and how skillfully building your country in preparation for war is too much effort for too little benefit due to the squared growth in cost of producing and maintaining an equal spal at higher acreages.

If people REALLY think that Cause Dissention is so problematic, and everyone is going back and forth on suggesting adjustments, leaving it alone, or what have you...

What if...
If...
Big "if"...
HUGE "IF"...

...They got rid of Cause Dissention altogether and either:

A. Increase the effectiveness of Demoralize; tweak how Readiness factors into defense?

and/or

B. Create a new Spy Op that shifts troops to standby for a limited time; as though they were part of a Planned Strike — "Order to Standby" or "Muddle Troop Orders" or something like that?

and/or

C. Split Military Effectiveness Tech into 2 techs; one for attacking, and one for defense?

This way, all of the people who don't want to lose literally-millions of Troops to a handful of Spy Ops can rest easy, while countries and clans who want to go to war can still break through said literally-millions of Troops without shifting their entire country's strategies to gather the resources to do so.

Just drafting ideas on the fly again, by the way.

Ugolinoll nailed how spies should work, though i dont think it is dramatic enough. It should be about half as effective as that on low acres or less.

I can personally speak for the fact that maintaining 8m spies on 50k acres is more economically difficult than 800k spies on 5k acres with a third MBs. If you wanted to accentuate the ability for people to run spy heavy strats you would in theory want them to grow and make huge spy countries and not dramatically implode their countries into 5k acre war machines like i often do in a stocks war and live off stock.

The goal of the game should be to grow your lands into these things. That's why oil destock feels so weird too. Building it all just to absolutely wreck it to help you win? Seems strange.....

No country with 200 spal has a good economy, large or small. The bigger country doesn't produce enough to offset the heavy expenses of spies. If you wanted to raise the economy of a large country who actually built up with their large spal, you could in theory reduce the expenses of spies to make them more worth building on a large country.

The floating CD scares me because i like concrete math. If you're going to kill someone you kinda want to not have to recalc. As sin suggested, CDs should plainly just hit heavy drs after 10, or be reduced to a concrete 2%. Ty <3 a warleader.

Whether or not they scale spies effictiveness better, if you're going to be a 200 spal person, I think it should be EASIER to maintain on higher acreage, not more difficult.

The only ways to achieve this are by either lowering the effectiveness of spies on low acres, or lowering the expenses of carrying spies. While they both achieve the same ends, lowering the effectiveness on low acres benefits those who are built well, such as the better netters and builders at war, whereas lowering the expense seems to only benefit those who build indies heavily.

I like this formula.

tho i have no real input to add, i just wanted to say im enjoying reading the different opinions and ideas without all the usual abuse. :)

good job everyone :)