What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.
Grand strategy games (GSG) can be described as a deep/wide exploration of three main aspects of statehood: military, diplomacy, and economy.
Espiocracy, as a GSG-like, puts these through the lens of the Cold War and espionage, arriving at fairly limited military aspect (due to the coldness of the Cold War, replaced obviously by espionage, and also by guerrilla warfare and nuclear brinkmanship) and deeper take on diplomacy (DD#51, and ubiquitous manipulation of actors from behind the curtain). What about economy?
It's very basic. Since the player as an intelligence agency cannot really interact with economy directly (aside from small industrial espionage gameplay and microeconomic angles such as funneling laundered money), since the topic is so complex that it can be identified as a contributor to failures of other attempts at creating a good indie GSG, and since we have to pick our battles where our strengths lie (knowledge about economics is definitely not one of them) - it is kept reasonably simple.
The backbone of material comparisons between countries in the game is State Power Index, described in DD#16. It takes into account all the mentioned statehood sectors and a few others (such as nuclear capabilities or cultural influence). Economy is the most significant (25% weight) part of this index, and as such (and as fundamental part of statehood and GSGs), it receives its own layer of depth, which we will explore below.
GNP
Espiocracy takes Gross National Product (GDP + international factors) as the main parameter to define the state of economy of a country. Its calculation resembles real world GNP calculation but it is adjusted for gameplay purposes. In-game GNP is a sum of:
- goods, services, food industry - multiplied by population (private consumption)
- factories, heavy industry, bank groups (investment)
- income from colonies and foreign state-controlled enterprises, access to global economy, access to oil (international factors)
- government spending
Absolute values are derived from actions, national resources (formerly known as national assets, DD#33) and entities in the world (eg. Anglo-Persian Oil Company, contributing to GNP of the UK). For instance, "services" is a percentage value from 0 to 100+, while "factories" is a number of active factories within the country. This, naturally, defines how GNPs increase in the game: through growing population, industrialization, investment, international expansion, and so on.
This GNP-like value, in turn, defines budget available to the government: 20% for capitalist systems, 30% for mixed systems, 40% for planned economy. Such budget is spent, as was shown in numerous diaries in the past, on domestic projects, foreign activities, and player's intelligence community.
Capitalist, Mixed, Planned Economy
Countries in the game implement one of the three economic systems. The choice is defined by local constitution (DD#28) and emergencies. The latter factor is important in early game: after the world war, many countries maintained rationing and state planning programs for some time. For instance, the USA begins the game in March 1946 as mixed economy due to emergency laws - eg. the Office of Price Administration which was active until 1947 - until it rescinds them and switches back to capitalist economy.
While countries generally converge towards mixed system over time (aside from a few notable exceptions, especially two superpowers) which hits optimal middle ground, the two other contrasting systems offer their own significant advantages.
Capitalist countries in the game can achieve highest year-to-year GNP growth (following historical comparison of West and East Germany), significant non-state contributions to national resources and critical sectors (such as mentioned services - but also, for instance, locally mastering new scientific and technological paradigms without involvement of the state), higher number and influence of business actors, and substantial international expansion.
Planned economy, on the other hand, favors larger military, ICBM/space/nuclear programs, rebuilding after the war, and naturally all the state-funded projects (anything from state-built housing to public healthcare). From the perspective of the player, it offers also tighter counterintelligence environment (for instance, inability to establish front companies by other intelligence agencies). However, following the history, planned economies in the game are bound to fail sooner or later, ending in a crisis that forces the government to, at least, switch to mixed economy (and at most, contributing to the collapse of the country - for instance, dissolution of the USSR).
Beyond these systems, there's also fourth "economic system" in the game: informal economy - which relies on barter, illicit activities, unofficial transactions, and general lack of state authorities. It dominates countries ravaged by wars (for instance, occupied Germany at the start of the game), including nuclear wars, and/or failed states. This situation very practically changes espionage on the ground, making money irrelevant as a motivation (eg. no "fund X" operations), and elevating importance of other methods (such as "supply" operations).
Oil
In addition to simplistic GNP-based economies, we explore one - important for the Cold War - resource: crude oil (petroleum). Governments were overthrown, wars were launched, and whole alliances were forged just to secure access to this critical material. Espiocracy reflects this by introducing simple demand-supply situation: a sufficiently developed country has to import (or use domestically extracted) quantities of crude oil proportional to its GNP. If this demand is not met, its GNP will suffer.
On the supply side, oil reserves have defined positions on the map (which can be scrambled by pre-game randomization), some of which are hidden until discovery through lengthy exploration process. At the beginning of the game, extraction is fairly timid, as the world produces roughly 8 million barrels per day. With further discoveries (including discoveries of "elephants" - giant oil fields) and build up of oil wells and offshore rigs, in an average campaign the extraction exceeds historical level of 40 million barrels per day in 1970s. This huge increase prompts petroleum exporters in the game to establish OPEC and leads to increase of global price of crude oil which, in turn, lends significant international influence to relevant countries (mainly in the Middle East), and gives them powerful international tool in the form of an oil embargo (historically activated in response to 1973 Yom Kippur war).
International Economy
Crude oil is a significant part of wider international economy in the game, which includes also:
- Widely understood access to global economy (established through standard economic development, limited by isolating actions such as embargoes, with high isolation severely limiting economy, see Cuba or North Korea)
- Trade between countries with established relations (therefore, limited by lower recognition and severed relations)
- Strategic trade deals (for instance, Cuban-Soviet deals, aimed at countering American-led economic blockade of Cuba)
- Economic cooperation programs (eg. Marshall plan - but also EU's European Economic Area)
- Exploitation (client/satellite/dependent states, also war spoils and war reparations) and neocolonialism (non-state-level influence in former dependencies)
- Economic migration (to neighbors with significantly higher GNP per capita)
- Currency strength (while the game does not explicitly model individual currencies, it stores their relative strengths - with dollar as the strongest currency - and their evolution, which then influences practical value of bribes, funds, and other expenses during espionage activities)
Final Remarks
The next dev diary will be posted on the first Friday of the next month: June 6th.
If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/
There is also a small community around Espiocracy:
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Main image attribution: Rama, CC-BY-SA-3.0, render of project Cybersyn (the project does have a single flavor event in the game)
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"Our banks and financial services may collapse, our economy may be going through the floor, our road and rail system may be a catastrophe, our Millennium Dome a laughingstock, the cost of fuel, energy, and water rising by the week, but our spies are immune to all of it" - John le Carré