Spy Ops
Eleven covert operations, from a harmless recon sweep to sabotage that only makes sense mid-war — what each one needs, what it risks, and why the physical-harm ops are gated so much harder than the rest.
The three tiers
Every one of the 11 ops falls into one of three gates, from least to most restricted:
- Intel ops (Recon Sweep, Count Spies, Intercept Comms) are pure information — peacetime legal, no cell required, nothing destroyed.
- Steal Charts loots cash from the target's treasury. It's destructive (it costs the target real money) but not classed as physical harm, so it stays peacetime-legal and needs no deployed cell — deliberately ungated, because the payout is small enough that gating it further wasn't the point.
- The seven physical-harm ops (Plant Misinformation, Foul Freshwater, Torch Kelp Stores, Spike the Foundry, Cut Mooring Lines, Smuggle Defectors, Crash the Beacon) do real damage — casualties, sickness, a wrecked facility, Marines bled off. Every one of them requires an active war against the target and a live, deployed infiltrator cell already sitting inside their decks. No war, no cell, no op.
The catalog
| Op | Tier | Min spies | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recon Sweep | Intel | 1 | Maps the target's platforms and defenses. |
| Count Spies | Intel | 2 | Estimates their counter-intelligence strength. |
| Intercept Comms | Intel | 3 | Reveals their economy and defenses. |
| Steal Charts | Destructive, ungated | 4 | Loots a capped slice of their treasury on success. |
| Plant Misinformation | Physical harm | 4 | Disables one of their improvements at random. |
| Foul Freshwater | Physical harm | 6 | Sickens the population and degrades a water facility. |
| Torch Kelp Stores | Physical harm | 6 | Burns food reserves and degrades a food facility. |
| Spike the Foundry | Physical harm | 8 | Damages infrastructure directly. |
| Cut Mooring Lines | Physical harm | 8 | Sets platforms adrift — damages platform directly. |
| Smuggle Defectors | Physical harm | 7 | Bleeds off some of their Marines. |
| Crash the Beacon | Physical harm | 10 | Degrades one of their command & defense facilities. |
Cost scales with the target's own strength on top of a base price, and every op grows more expensive the harder it hits — Recon Sweep is the cheapest op in the book, Crash the Beacon the most expensive.
Success odds & exposure
An op's success chance is driven by your spies and technology against the target's, not by spies alone — a smaller service backed by a strong tech base can still out-run a bigger, backward one. Your spy posture (an offense/defense stance you set, the same idea as a military posture) shifts the odds further in either direction. However the math falls out, the chance is always held between a floor and a ceiling — there is no such thing as a guaranteed spy op, and none is ever a pure coin-flip either.
Every op risks exposure independent of whether it succeeds — more likely on a failure than a success, and more likely still for a destructive op. A botched or exposed op costs you a handful of spies, never more than you actually have deployed.
Infiltrator cells
A physical-harm op's damage isn't a fixed number — it scales with the size of the infiltrator cell actually carrying it out. A full-strength cell reaches an op's configured damage cap; a cell that's taken losses reaches proportionally less. Getting a cell into place, and getting it home again, both cost lives: some spies are lost crossing in on deployment, and some more are lost covering the retreat when the war that authorized the cell finally ends and it exfiltrates. A cell that's already thin when the fighting starts is a cell that can't do much once it's there.
Spying on a real commander
Intel ops against another live commander don't read their sheet directly off your own device — an on-device sweep would only ever see the ZEROED public military every commander's dossier publishes by default, and would confidently report a lie. Instead, a live target resolves through a server-side gateway action that can actually see their private forces, so the report you get back is real. Against an AI rival, the same ops resolve locally, the same as always.