Espionage

Intelligence ratings, sending agents, being spied on, double agents and sealed intercepts.

Espionage runs in both directions. You plant agents in other countries and read their private diplomacy; other countries plant agents in you and read yours. It is the most mechanically explicit system in the game — the rolls are real numbers, and they are deterministic.

Find it in the Chat panel, Spy tab. (A scenario can switch espionage off with its Espionage feature; then the Spy tab is hidden and no service acts.)

The Spy tab before anything is deployed — your service rating, and the three slots you have to spend.

Intelligence rating

Every country has an intelligence rating from 0 to 100. It is the single number that decides how good its service is at everything below: planting agents, catching yours, turning the ones it catches, noticing when its own have been turned, and reading intercepted traffic.

The default is 40 — deliberately "ordinary", not "none". A country with no rating yet gets one assessed the first time it matters: when you open its stats, send an agent there, read an intercept from it, or have an agent caught by it.

Your own rating is on the Stats tab of the advisor drawer. Raising it is a matter of governing that way — order intelligence expansion, fund the service, make it a priority — and it moves like any other national statistic.

Limits

Three is not many. Choosing where those three go is most of the strategy.

Sending an agent

From the Spy tab, deploy to a target country. You can also just write it as an order — "deploy a spy in Germany" — and the next time skip places a real agent through exactly the same rules and caps, quietly on the turn it happens. Either way the agent's operation opens on your Projects board the same turn, and recalling or losing it closes it.

An active agent reports: it feeds you the target's private diplomatic traffic, subject to how much of it you can actually read.

The target picker. Countries you already have an agent in are not offered again — one agent per country, and never yourself.

You can give an agent a cover story, recall it at any time, and see everything it has sent.

Every state at once: an agent running in Germany, one flagged possibly compromised, a line recording one Belarus expelled, and a German agent caught inside Poland waiting on your decision — expel it, or turn it and write what it reports home.

Getting caught

Every jump, each of your agents is rolled against the target's service.

The chance of detection is driven mostly by the gap between the two services:

detection = 0.04 + (target/100 − yours/100) × 0.25 + (target/100) × 0.10
            clamped to between 2% and 60%

Read that as: a service much better than yours will find your agent quickly; a service much worse will mostly not. But there is a floor of 2% — a brilliant agent in an incompetent country is never perfectly safe — and a ceiling of 60%, so even a hopeless agent is not guaranteed to be caught on day one.

Some worked numbers, per jump:

Caught, then what

A caught agent becomes discovered and stops reporting. The target then either turns it or expels it:

turn chance = (target intelligence / 100) × 0.6
              clamped to between 5% and 60%

Turning takes skill. An ordinary service mostly just throws your agent out; a very good one keeps it.

The turned agent

This is the part worth understanding properly.

You are never told that your agent has been turned. From your side it looks like it is still reporting. What it is actually sending is material the target wrote for you.

Each jump, your own service gets a chance to notice:

suspicion = 0.05 + (yours/100 − target/100) × 0.3
            clamped to between 2% and 50%

So a service better than the one that turned your agent will usually spot it eventually. A service much worse may never.

The game itself always knows — reports produced while an agent was turned are permanently marked as planted — but that mark is not shown to you. It exists so that the consequences are consistent later.

The practical lesson: intelligence you cannot corroborate is not intelligence. If a single agent is telling you something convenient, and your service is weaker than theirs, consider that you may be reading fiction written for you.

Being spied on

Other countries plant agents in you, on their own initiative, every jump:

deploy chance = (their intelligence / 100) × 0.12 + hostility × 0.2
                capped at 40%

A capable service does it as a matter of course. A hostile one goes looking. At most three foreign agents can be inside you at once.

When you catch one, it appears in the Spy tab and waits for your decision:

• Expel it. Clean, final, and it tells the other country you found them.
• Turn it. It becomes a double agent, and from then on you write what it reports home. The country that sent it is not told.

Turning is the more interesting option and the more useful one, but it requires you to keep feeding it plausible material.

Typing a story before you turn the agent changes the button to Turn & plant story, so the first report home is yours from the start. A turned agent's Save is greyed out while the field matches what it already reports and reads "Saved" for a moment after you save; Enter in the field saves too.

Reading intercepts

You rarely get a clean transcript. How much of an intercepted message you can read depends on both services:

clarity = 0.12 + (yours/100) × 0.88 − (theirs/100) × 0.35
          clamped to between 6% and 100%

An intercept read at 39% clarity. The formula above gives exactly that for a service of 55 reading one of 61: 0.12 + 0.55×0.88 − 0.61×0.35. Punctuation survives; the words do not.

Unreadable words are blanked out, but punctuation and sentence rhythm survive, so you can often tell the shape of what was said even when you cannot read it. Raising your intelligence rating only ever reveals more of a message you have already seen — it never re-hides anything.

Intercepts are stored separately from the rest of your save and encrypted at rest with a key unique to your campaign. They are decrypted only to show you and to inform the simulation. An undone turn, or an Intervene, takes the turn's reports back with it.

Stolen documents

Some things governments know are not on the public record at all — a secret protocol, a private letter between heads of state, the full articles of a treaty. When such a document is held by a government where you have an active agent, your agent brings you a copy: it is filed in the Spy tab with the agent's intercepts, sealed like them, and readable only as far as your service can read theirs. A turned agent brings nothing real. The country you stole it from is never told.

On beta, agents can uncover covert puppets. An active agent inside either party to a covert puppet arrangement reveals it at the end of the turn, and keeps what you know of it current for as long as it stays in place.

Agents report in real time

Agents report after time skips — with Save AI requests on, collecting their reports is one of the after-skip checks, and each agent files at least every third skip. They also report between skips: while the game is open and on screen, each deployed agent is rolled roughly once a minute, working out to about one report every twenty minutes per agent. Those in-between reports are background AI, so they only happen while Background AI is on, and stop at its daily cap.

This is deliberate and it is why there is no "gather intelligence" button: an agent is a trickle of information you receive over time, not a resource to farm on demand. Leaving the game open during a tense period genuinely gets you more.

Playing it well

• Raise the rating before you rely on the service. At 40 you can barely read what you steal and you are caught reasonably often. Intelligence capability is worth ordering as a programme.
• Three agents means three priorities. Put them where a surprise would actually hurt you.
• Recall an agent that has done its job. Every jump it stays is another detection roll.
• Turn the agents you catch rather than expelling them, if you can afford the attention.
• Distrust a lone source, especially against a stronger service.

Next

• Diplomacy — the conversations your agents are reading.
• National statistics — where the intelligence rating lives.
• Projects and operations — running covert work as a long programme.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-09-24 · main e62a1c55 · beta 2f48a6c2. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.