INTELLIGENCE needs to change

📚 In this comprehensive Hearts of Iron IV guide, we'll break down the mechanics introduced in the La Resistance expansion, examining the impact of espionage on your strategic decisions. Feedback Gaming provides expert analysis and practical tips on how to navigate the intricate web of intelligence, sabotage, and reconnaissance.

🌐 Whether you're a seasoned HOI4 veteran or a newcomer eager to master the intricacies of the game, this video is a must-watch! Discover the historical context behind espionage during World War II and learn how to effectively employ spies to gain the upper hand in your campaigns.

🔍 Topics covered include:

The role of spies in Hearts of Iron IV
Espionage mechanics in the La Resistance DLC
Real-world historical insights on intelligence operations during WW2
Common pitfalls and mistakes to avoid when utilizing spies
Strategic tips for maximizing the effectiveness of your espionage efforts
🎮 Arm yourself with knowledge and become a master of intelligence operations in Hearts of Iron IV. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell icon to stay updated on the latest Feedback Gaming guides and HOI4 content!
Overall why spies are terrible to use in HOI4

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[hertogvandamme]

The worst part about building a spy network causing your spies to get captured, is that as a minor with only one spy, your spy will get captured, and you can't get another for over a year

[RobsRedHotSpot]

I think they should shift away from seeing each spy as an actual spy and move towards thinking of them as some kind of regional director. So each spy represents many operatives in a region. So when a spy "dies", you get a temporary debuff rather than a chore to rescue them. The event could be "our spies in x are being discovered" and it would give percentage debuffs to the various advantages of having a spy network. You would then choose to either invest some civs to restore the network or let it slide.

[Vaelosh]

I think the biggest design problem with spies is that all of their bonuses are passive, even completing missions gives you passive bonuses or imposes passive penalties. It would feel a lot more impactful if, for example, a mission could cut off frontline supply to a state for 30 days, so you could have your divisions ready to push that state ahead of time and once the enemies ran out of supply and were taking penalties you could start your attack. Another suggestion would be a resistance mission that has partisan divisions pop up on top of enemy troops or on top of supply lines and airports behind the front line. Again, this could be combined with a regular attack by your army.

Fundamentally the fun part of this game is coming up with strategies to beat the enemy's army and then carrying them out. Spies being so disconnected from anything to do with the actual units on the map makes them feel like a separate minigame, which just compounds with how tedious their minigame is. We can come up with ways to make the minigame more fun but it will never really feel worth it unless its effects are tangible.

As an aside, one useful thing to do with broken encryption is to look at the design of enemy planes, it's a good way to see if you can tweak your plane design to have more agility than their fighters or beat out the air defense of their bombers.

[aleksandrmikhail]

Yes there is a good part as attacker for spies, dont forget collab government, you did it twice, once they capitulated you get 60-90% compliance which means you got all of the benefit of both harsh quota and forced labour without setting any occupation law into one or the other since resource and factory availability is already tied to compliance, there is a reason why PDX nerf collab government but it still worthed even to do it once for the sake of saving manpower for occupation

[TexanNative]

You can place spies in pre-set capitals of releasable nations, that’s why there’s so many locations across Siberia and Yugoslavia for example.

The state in the USSR you pointed out was the capital for Taymyria, while for example, the two other states with very few people that spies could be placed in were the capitals for Yamalia and Nenetsia.

Like in Spain it’s Madrid (Spain’s capital), Galicia (its own capital), Catalonia (its own capital), and the capital of the Basque.

[kariminal]

To be fair to pdx on the spies getting captured all you have to do is build your network up (to 100 or lower if you want) and then just put it to sleep. The network maintains full strength, requires only 1 spy and you can do operations. So many people seem to miss this!

[quentintin]

a big issue for me with spies is just how limited they are
outside of becoming spymaster for an alliance, you can have 3 tops (1 from creating the agency, 1 with 5+ agency upgrades, 1 with illusive gent.), which is very limiting because you basically can't do anything, if one gets captured through the black box detection chance, you lose another for the rescue operation, every other operation requires 2 spies to execute on top of the operation cost which seem random (sometimes it's just 1 civ for 15 days, other times it's weapons/support eq + civ), so any operation will effectively cut 2/3 of your intelligence capability for any nation, which is why i never even touched stealing operations even once
add the placement difficulty, or the fact spies go back to your capital with no warning when you capture the city they operate in, the general non responsiveness of that whole system and lack of interactions with the rest of the game, it just feels like a tacked on mechanic

[cmhoax]

Something actually useful you can do with spies, I have only found this in early war Soviet games, so mileage may vary, but rooting out resistance can save you massively on garrison equipment.

[MrBulldog]

Wish there was a bigger bonus for using spy planes. Spy planes and armored cars are really somthing that either need a boost or change in game mechanics to make them more viable. I dont think ive built a single spy plane since the air update last year, and i havent built an armored car since the last time i LARPD the USA. Both coincidentally released with the La Resistance DLC

[HungarianPatriotGaming]

I remember how much better spying was in the game Imperium Galactica II, from 1999. There, you had to build spy centers to get extra slots, up to 20. In HOI4, that could be an agency upgrade. In that game, spies did not have traits, but had stat cards, and stat points they gained by leveling up through missions could be freely distributed. There was also a training mission with 5 levels that could increase their level with 0 risk but it did cost a lot of money and time. They had stats such as infiltration, but also fighting skill, which allowed them to assassinate enemy spies back in their home countries or even enemy leaders, sparking mass unrest in the targeted empire. They also had a loyalty stat which influenced the likelihood of them defecting or even turning into double agents upon capture. There was a steal blueprint mission, and it could be targeted at a specific blueprint, but first, you had to know it existed, either through gathering intel with spies, or by witnessing the existence of the tech in one way or another. Spies could also blow up enemy spaceships or stage terror attacks in their colonies, destroying buildings. And the AI used spies very aggressively, something that can't be said about HOI4. But then again, that game from 1999 has incomparably more fleshed out gameplay mechanics than HOI4 ever had or will have.

[Knoten]

there is also a bug where if you steal a blueprint and it instantly unlocks the tech you were researching just now you get it twice (not useful for tech like guns but VERY good for passive bonuses like industry)

[RobsRedHotSpot]

As for the regions, I think the idea is that espionage works best in population centres. Spies can't do much good in the open desert or small towns. You need spy planes for remote regions. But yeah Siberia makes no sense.

[billybish]

The only benefit of coordinated strike i have found is, it allows you to declare war on a nation of which you have a non-aggression pact with

[stue]

Think that more active spies would be better. Limiting to 3 spies in most cases you can really do much except maintain the spy network that, as you said give the most bonuses.
Would like to see focuses for the UK for spies like a focus for Bletchley Park which would give the UK insane decryption bonuses but if used too much the decryption bonuses drop, like when Churchill had the dilemma of warning Coventry or letting Coventry get bombed and letting the Germans know we had cracked their codes.
I like the idea of a danger meter, may be there could be a slider that you set where you automatically go dark when the danger gets too high to stop the capturing of your spies and only go active again when the danger drops.
May be some operations that will plant false information so they move troops to defend, against the computer it would work and may be against players you could double bluff.

[Wustenfuchs]

In general, when you design a feature that is 90% role play and 10% useful, you need to think about complete redesign of the said feature. If you look at any HoI4 youtuber and how they use spies it is basically for two things - get collaboration government (priority) and gather some intel on the enemy troop count/supplies. Other things, while possible, are useless. And codebreaking.

HoI4 is a GRAND strategy game and the whole feature should be conceptualized along those lines. Instead of individual spies, have those characters be placed as heads of various departments of your Intelligence agency/agencies. Invest certain amount of civilian factories to buff certain aspects of your intel agency (increase/decrease funding - by reserving a certain number or percentage of your civs to espionage) and make all the decisions that could be taken have the same weight, or at least that they are useful to a similar amount.

For example, you are building colab government as your main investment... meaning you just got a bunch of important people to basically prepare for occupation. How are those same people not contributing to your ability to stage a rebellion/coup in the same country if you have, for example, 80-100% Colab government?

I like the visual representation of a spy building a network from a certain point on the map, but I feel the game needs more above ground approach. Have the current spies as heads of department, and if a mission goes exceptionally well, there is a chance you get a "spy ace" type of character that can now be attached to one of the departments and boost its performance.

And think of a different system for making spy networks and doing missions. For example, we already have air and naval zones. Why not Spy zones? And you allocate a certain number of spies to them... and the number (and replacement rate) of those depends on your investment in your training program for spies. Then, your missions available for a certain zone depend on the number of spies that you have and how well the enemy prepared for them (his counter-intelligence branch of agency upgrades). And create a cap, so that Major powers do not absolutely obliterate the small ones.

That way, you can have a veterancy level of your spy rings in different regions, you can give them names (Red Orchestra, for example) and they can start generating "spy aces" that will boost them or the department in question. And when you go to Spy overlay and click on a specific spy network, it opens a window somewhere between air missions (with all the targets and missions) and the current one for spies, and there you give orders, prepare missions that can have a real impact in the war.


All in all, I think that the Espionage is the worst feature currently in the game, compared to how detailed it is.

[kentonlucas]

The two best uses Ive found for spies is to get as much naval intelligence on the UK to gain enough naval supremacy for a naval invasion and collaboration governments on the Soviet Union to capitulate them easier

[quarties]

This is the feedback we gave to pdx team during the lan party too

[ang-ot]

I think we need more spies for it to be meaningful - it’s nightmare when they just get captured

[darthteej]

I do really like stacking decryption bonuses and operations to break enemy ciphers over and over. And making sure to time big offensives with revealing ciphers.

[cirokistermann]

The only thing I do with the spies apart from the defense bonus is steal plans, the problem for nations without approaches that give you more is that you require yes or yes the illusory man, it's fine anyway, it's rng, but in Industry is always worth it, since you can dedicate yourself to doing everything except excavation and oil, the AIs do it, so it saves you a lot of time, especially oil, I thank God every time they get you the refineries synthetics, since they require a lot of time.
But the best thing is that if you have everything they have developed, it gives you a speed bonus, sometimes it is 300% for anything (I have seen it a couple of times), so stealing plans from nations like Nepal or Bhutan is used to obtain research bonuses.

With other industries, it has too many technologies to make it worth the time to steal plans from Germany, for example, I will always steal from poor people.

Oh, and you have 2 technologies in the agency upgrades that make it always easy to get the blueprints, the blueprint theft, which is obvious, but the invisible ink too, which is also good because it reduces the risk of infiltration.