Spying (was: Re: An Open Letter to the BM Community)

[Chenier]

Spying is terrible in places with sea travel. It makes surprise landings end up being a one sided massacre.

That's also a great point. With traditional intelligence, it's unthinkable to sail your army far away to land right next to the enemy capital unless you vastly overpower your enemy anyways. With spying, you know where to land without a loss and when to do so to prevent the enemy from being able to retaliate, offering the deadly possibility of landing safely and rushing to the enemy capital before they can react. You can often then even start a takeover of their capital...

[Penchant]

That's also a great point. With traditional intelligence, it's unthinkable to sail your army far away to land right next to the enemy capital unless you vastly overpower your enemy anyways. With spying, you know where to land without a loss and when to do so to prevent the enemy from being able to retaliate, offering the deadly possibility of landing safely and rushing to the enemy capital before they can react. You can often then even start a takeover of their capital...

I don't think that is what he talking about. Finding a region without militia to land in isn't that hard, but if your enemy shows up there with their army, you will be slaughtered on landing.

[Solari]

Remember when realms didn't care and talked about there plan openly and did it and still steamrolled ^_^ confidence in the people/char of the realm will prevail! Scouting reports win the day!

The fundamentals always win the day. Trust your nobles and empower them. It'll quickly become apparent who is and isn't part of the "team". No need for destructive witch hunts that way.

[Vellos]

That's also a great point. With traditional intelligence, it's unthinkable to sail your army far away to land right next to the enemy capital unless you vastly overpower your enemy anyways. With spying, you know where to land without a loss and when to do so to prevent the enemy from being able to retaliate, offering the deadly possibility of landing safely and rushing to the enemy capital before they can react. You can often then even start a takeover of their capital...

I'd grant that spying is more lucrative in the current naval game. The enormous variety of potential destinations and the huge power asymmetry that manifests upon landing versus an amphibious assault lend themselves towards empowering espionage. Naval landings seem only likely to succeed against essentially undefended shorelines, which means they have to be surprise attacks.

So countries with disproportionately maritime borders (D'Hara) may be uniquely susceptible to espionage, and may also stand to benefit more from it.

[Lacedaemon]

There was that Fluke when a D'haran army landed in Moon Bay and promptly got massacred.

No spies were involved. Amyclas was just paranoid enough to garrison regions at a loss, and marched his army like a madman when he got the landing messages.

[Lacedaemon]

I play EVE online, so I'm kind of desensitized to spying. Everyone spies on everyone, and there are master-spies who end up shooting themselves and collecting payment from all sides.

But the level of spying that goes on in there raises the bar for anyone who wants to run a player organization. having a in-house computer forensics man becomes a requirement. There are spies caught through IP traces on skype and clan servers. Major battles are sometimes won entirely by superior spying. And surprise executions of spies in the middle of battles are a routine thing.

Some of the larger groups also fund and encourage new spies to have their army of accounts to do their thing.

Groups cope with it by compartmentalizing their information. Give it out on a need to know only. Which leads to bureaucratic fun.

A game like Battlemaster with an average realm size of 20 people cannot deal with high-level gaming spying. Well most casual games cannot deal with high-level spying.

[De-Legro]

Having run several spy networks over my time I have a few issues with them, the major one being that no matter the intention of the spy master, you invariably end up with players using multi accounts in relation to spying.

[Vellos]

Having run several spy networks over my time I have a few issues with them, the major one being that no matter the intention of the spy master, you invariably end up with players using multi accounts in relation to spying.

Indeed, this does begin to be a problem, especially with planted spies. Making someone go turncoat, in my experience, poses way lower risks of knock-on multi-cheating, but I've also noticed that planted spies seem to morph into multi-cheaters pretty quick.

[Jens Namtrah]

An interesting twist on the Spy Game today in Sandalak     

(Interesting twist on the Misogyny Game, as well. Good Guys - 2, Bad Guys - 0 )