The might of your armada, the intellectual prowess of your scientists and the cunning of your diplomats are not the only ways to conquer the stars in Master of Orion. Beginning with the next phase of Early Access, you will have an additional avenue to wreak havoc on the galaxy: Espionage. This overview article is intended to provide a glimpse into this new feature and the functionality that comes with it.

Getting Started

Espionage is not available right away; you’ll need to unlock a specific technology within the tech tree—Xeno Relations—to get started down your path of subterfuge. Unlocking this technology will grant access to the Spy Center, the building required to train spies. The Spy Center is Empire Unique, meaning only one can be built across your entire empire.
Completing the Spy Center will immediately grant you one spy (“Alpha”) and begin training additional spies. New spies will become available roughly every 15 turns until you’ve reached a maximum of 10 spies. Traits and technologies can reduce the time it takes to train spies, as well as increase the maximum number of spies you can have at any one time. If a spy is lost on a mission, their space will be freed up and another spy will be trained to replace them. If the Spy Center is destroyed, your existing spies remain available but no additional spies are trained until the Spy Center is reconstructed.

Spy Management

Managing your spies is done via the new Espionage window, which can be accessed by clicking on the Espionage icon in the top-right menu, third from the left between Research and Ship Design.
From this window you can see what your spies are up to at-a-glance, and clicking on a spy gives access to controls for that spy.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It

The core gameplay behind Espionage is to send spies to carry out missions on enemy colonies. This takes place across a branching mission structure that starts out simple and can result in some fairly dramatic, gameplay-changing events. Here is an overview of the mission options available to you:

• Acquire Data: The most basic espionage mission, this allows you to unlock additional information about a colony including Population, Credits, Defense, Morale and Pollution.

Once you’ve acquired data on the colony you unlock four new missions to choose from:

• Infiltrate Cybercrime: Reveals Research generation, Research structures and the technology currently being researched. It also unlocks the following missions:
  • Hacking: Prevents the target colony from generating Research points for a specific number of turns.
  • Steal: Steals a random technology from the target race.
• Infiltrate Agronomy: Reveals Food generation and Food structures. It also unlocks the following missions:
  • Famine: Cancels any food surplus on the colony for a specific number of turns.
  • Contaminate: Causes food poisoning, reducing the colony population by a minimum of 1.
• Infiltrate Trade Unions: Reveals Production generation and Production structures, as well as the current item in the Production queue. It also unlocks the following missions
  • Strike: Prevents Production generation by population for a specific number of turns.
  • Sabotage: Destroys a random structure. The chance of a structure being selected for destruction is proportional to its cost.
• Infiltrate Diplomacy: Once complete it unlocks the following missions:
  • Destabilize: Lowers disposition for the target race with other AI races.
  • Revolt: Causes a colony to revolt, rendering it useless until the target race invades with Marines to restore order.

As long as missions are successful the Acquire Data mission does not have to be repeated. Once you’ve unlocked the end-tier missions, you also don’t have to infiltrate again unless your spy is discovered. Keep in mind that the greater the reward, the higher difficulty it will be to complete a mission.

Spy vs. Spy

Defending against spies will be an important part of gameplay even if you’re not using the Espionage system offensively. To that end, a new attribute has been introduced for colonies: Security. Each turn there is a chance that a spy will be discovered and their mission deemed a failure, and this is based on the Security rating of the colony. If a spy is discovered, there are two possible outcomes:

• They can be deported, which simply resets all mission progress at the colony and sends them back to the colony with the Spy Center
• They can be eliminated, which removes them from your spy pool and requires training a new spy to replace them

Security can be boosted in multiple ways:

• Structures like the Global DNA Scanner (+6 Security)
• Assigning a spy to a colony on the Counter Espionage mission
• Achievements unlocked in the tech tree like Neural Scanner (+8 Security for all colonies)

In general it is recommended to use a mix of spies for Counter Espionage and offensive missions. Your most important colonies will be big targets for Espionage, so deploying spies to increase their security will be critical to retaining full control. We hope you enjoyed this preview of Espionage, and look forward to hearing your feedback on the system once you’ve had a chance to try it out in the next phase of Early Access.

Disclaimer: This is from a development version of Master of Orion. Information is subject to change.