Espionage in games - what is the best?

[Wolfe1759]

I'm currently re-reading Col. John Hughes-Wilson's The Puppet Masters and is has got me wondering what 4X / Grand Strategy / Strategy games have the best / most fun intelligence/espionage/spying systems.

Any thoughts?

[Anguille]

Imho, the original Master of Orion has still the best system. You can target specific planets.

[bobarossa]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Seven Kingdoms (2?).  Create spies and send them into enemy territory and they blend into the populace.  If they get promoted into soldiers/generals, they can cause an entire army to change sides.  Been quite a while since I've played it so can't remember all the other details.

[airboy]

Covert Action (cheap from www.gog.com) was a fun spy game.  Grogheads had a fairly recent review of this 20 year old game.

[JasonPratt]

I was going to say that the answer to this question, as always, is No One Lives Forever 1 and 2; but then I remembered it wasn't a strategy game.

So let me pull a vote from an oldie and nominate: Sparta / Gates of Troy (same game but GoT had different missions and some engine updates. Unsure if what I'm going to talk about was in Legion, or Chariots of War and its semi-update Egypt: Engineering an Empire, which used similar versions of the same game engine, but none of which I ever personally played.)

The diplomats in that game were basically the espionage branch, and were also for all intents and purposes wizards. They had a suite of very useful cost-effective powers which verged on game-breaking but not quite; and the computer would use them against you, too, which in a campaign with fifty other nations could be a serious problem since it wasn't easy to keep track of all of them aside from sending all diplos back carrying their heads in a box as standard operating procedure (which naturally tanked international relations).

[jomni]

Romance of the Three Kingdoms X  ^-^
Because your character can go to the other factions yourself and look around, talk to their generals and befriend them.
This is in addition to managing your kingdom and order your other generals to do some espionage themselves.

[republic]

As corny as it sounds, Star Wars Rebellion and later Star Wars Empire at War had an interesting take on Espionage.  Different characters had different abilities, and you were hesitant to risk them.

[Nefaro]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Seven Kingdoms (2?).  Create spies and send them into enemy territory and they blend into the populace.  If they get promoted into soldiers/generals, they can cause an entire army to change sides.  Been quite a while since I've played it so can't remember all the other details.

Seven Kingdoms 2 HD, the hi-res re-release, is out now.  I picked it up for something like $5 not long ago (sale?).

[Nefaro]

As corny as it sounds, Star Wars Rebellion and later Star Wars Empire at War had an interesting take on Espionage.  Different characters had different abilities, and you were hesitant to risk them.

Not corny at all.

There was definitely a risk of them being discovered if you sent them on covert missions to enemy held planets.  Tough choice between sending some of your best covert specialists for a higher chance of succes and getting them captured.

[Jarhead0331]

Master of Orion 3 should be mentioned too. You recruit spies based on specialty...ie. Military, economic, science, political, etc. you can then send them abroad on missions, or keep them local to conduct counter espionage.

[bbmike]

Alpha Centauri had spys. Man,how I hated them!

[BanzaiCat]

Two boardgames come to mind: The Resistance and Battlestar Galactica.

Both are immensely fun. In both cases, one or two individuals are secretly determined to be subversive elements. Everyone knows there are subversive elements, but nobody knows who they are. In both games you try to undermine the efforts of the 'good guys' without sticking out like a sore thumb...pretty much exactly how I'd imagine being a real-life spy.

I've played both, but was only one of the subversives in BG (my son was the other one). I had chosen the Chief as my character before we figured who the Cylons were. So I had the responsibility of repairing Vipers but at the same time, being a Cylon and all, I had to do what i could to ensure the humans didn't win. Not repairing Vipers would have earned a one-way ticket out of the airlock so I had to do stuff in support of their efforts and try to take them down elsewhere. We actually ended up winning.

Added bonus of in-game banter between players, in each game, by accusing everyone of being the bad guy. "blah blah blah because you're a Cylon/the spy" and about fifty variations on that. Very sneaky, underhanded, sabotage-y, and overall excellent fun.

[solops]

No spies. Not interested...an irritating distraction and usually overpowered.

[JasonPratt]

Two boardgames come to mind: The Resistance and Battlestar Galactica.

Since we're mentioning The Resistance, there's a Camelot variant, too, Avalon iirc?

However, the ultimate version of that kind of game (which goes back to a Russian psychological experiment called Mafia), would no doubt be Ultimate Werewolf, since both villagers and werewolves almost all have some kind of special power, usually deployed in an espionage way.

(The "Resistance" games, or at least the Camelot variant, are mainly different from Werewolf/Mafia by players not being regularly put out of the game every turn: everyone survives to the end.)

[Nefaro]

Two boardgames come to mind: The Resistance and Battlestar Galactica.

*ahem*

Agents Of Smersh

For some Co-op/Solitaire wacky James Bond-ish tabletop gaming.

The reprint is reportedly on a ship pretty soon.  ;)  The earlier ones sold out.