Last week espionage went live and I told you it exists. This one is the manual: how a spy mission actually plays out, what you get back, and how to play the information war well rather than just poking at it.
Read the top half for the shape of it. Read the rest if you want to run operations properly.
The loop in one line
You train spies, send them to read someone else's base, and bring back a dossier you can raid off. Everyone else is doing the same to you - so you also catch their spies and feed them lies. That back and forth is the whole game underneath the game.
Getting set up
Espionage runs out of The Watch, and it's an early-game structure - it opens up once your HQ reaches level 3, so you're scouting well before the late game rather than grinding hours to unlock it. The Watch is your whole espionage investment - it does offence and defence from one building, so there's no painful choice between scouting better and resisting scouts. Level it and everything improves at once.
A few numbers worth knowing (all interim - I'll keep tuning them):
Your spy cap is one to start, plus one more for every five levels of The Watch, so the building gates how many operatives you can field.
Spies are the fastest thing in the game - faster than any raiding army, so they get there and back before most attacks would land.
Counter-spy handler slots unlock at The Watch level 10, then one more every ten levels - more on those below.
Recruit operatives into the roster, give them time to train, and they're yours to send.
Running a scout
This is the part I'm most pleased with, and the part that rewards playing it well. A spy mission isn't a job you queue and forget.
Before you send anyone you set the loadout: how long the spy dwells (the push-your-luck dial), the priority order of what to read first, and how big a squad to send - more operatives mean more dice and a better chance of getting people home. You can also arm an auto-extract so they pull out on their own when things get hot.
Then they travel in, embed, and you run the operation tick by tick - gather more intel, sabotage something, or extract - while a Detection Meter climbs the whole time. That meter is the tension. Each tick is another roll by the defending base to notice you: unnoticed, then suspected, spotted, compromised. Stay longer and you read deeper, but you're feeding the meter. Sit tight without acting and the heat cools a little. Pull out early and your operative walks home safe with a thinner picture.
So the real skill is the dwell decision: how greedy you get before you bank what you have and leave. There's no correct answer - it depends on how much you need to know and how much you can afford to lose the operative.
What you bring back
Intel comes back as a dossier, built piece by piece rather than handed over whole. Each building, unit and defence is read on its own, so a dossier is a patchy picture you assemble, not a single verdict. Every aspect has its own fidelity that climbs the more you read it: none, then partial, solid, deep. A quick in-and-out gives you a handful of aspects at partial; a long, clean run reads the lot in depth.
This is why the priority order matters - it decides which aspects fill first, so the things you actually care about get read before the heat forces you out. Steer it well and even a short run brings back the two or three facts that decide whether you raid.
The dice are seeded and reproducible, the same backbone the combat engine uses - it's not a slot machine I can rig against you.
All of it lives in the Intel hub at /intel - plan the operation, read your dossiers, and manage the roster from one place.
Getting out - or not
When a mission goes wrong you have options, and they cost different things. You can call a manual extraction and cut your losses, sacrifice the squad to save the haul, or roll the escape and hope. Outcomes band by severity: most compromised spies escape, some come back burned and need to go quiet for a while, and a few are killed for good.
That permanence is deliberate. A spy you've invested in is worth protecting, which is exactly why the dwell decision has teeth.
The other side - catching spies and lying to them
Because everyone can scout, everyone is scouting you. Defence is the half of espionage people forget until it costs them a raid.
Counter-spy handlers. Assign operatives to watch your base and they intercept incoming spies. Keep one or two on station and you stop bleeding information for free.
Forgery and decoys. Higher up the tree you can feed an attacker a false read - make your base look poorer than it is so they skip you, or scarier than it is so they bring a wasteful army. The Smoke & Mirrors capstone is the full version: be genuinely hard to read.
The lie only works if it's believable, so forged numbers are nudged within a plausible range, not flipped to nonsense. A base showing zero loot just teaches attackers to spot fakes.
Counter-scouting an incoming raid
The reactive play is the sharp one. When a raid is inbound, you can send a spy at the attacker to read what they're bringing before it arrives - then re-garrison and build counters to suit. The catch is timing: your spy has to get there and back inside the raid's ETA. Because travel is geographic now, a nearby attacker gives you almost no warning and a distant one gives you room to react. Spies being the fastest unit is what makes this possible at all.
Spies that grow
Operatives earn XP from every run and climb a Tradecraft tree, so a veteran is quieter, sharper and better kitted than a fresh recruit. Every node tells you what it does before you spend on it, so you can build the operative you want - a recon specialist, a saboteur, a counter-spy, or a mix. Levelling literally lowers your chance of losing a spy, which closes the loop: invest, survive, invest again.
Sabotage - spies that act, not just watch
Recon is reading. Sabotage is doing. A saboteur infiltrates the same way - embed, dwell, risk the meter - then spends a clean infiltration on a non-destructive hit that sets up your own raid: weakening protection, suppressing a defence, that sort of thing. It's not destruction - that's what armies are for - it's an edge you carve before you commit force. And it stacks with forgery in a pleasing way: a well-faked dossier can bait an attacker into wasting a sabotage on a target that was never worth it.
How to play it well
If you take five things from this:
The honest caveat
This is a large system and it's alpha. Detection rates, intel tiers, perk costs, escape odds - all knobs I'll keep turning as I watch people play. If a mission feels impossible to pull off, or trivially easy, that's the feedback I want. Tell me where it breaks.
Go read someone's base. Then go make yours unreadable.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com · The world, if you want it: breachlands.com/lore