Espionage

Spies sit between scouting and war. A scout counts what it can see from outside; a spy gets inside another lord's village (or a capital) and learns what the lord would rather keep quiet, steals from his scholars, spoils his work or sits by the road and counts every army that comes and goes. Every mission risks the spy: the target's own spies and his Watch House catch a share of them, and a caught spy is lost with its owner's name sent to both lords.

The basics

• Research Spycraft (Civic branch, rank 5) and build a Watch House in a village. Spies are trained there, one at a time.
• Open another lord's village on the world map, or a territory's capital, and use the Spies block to send a spy on one of four missions: Infiltrate, Steal research, Sabotage or Watch.
• A spy walks at half a scout's pace and is not shown on the map. Each mission costs gold when the spy sets out.
• On arrival the server rolls to see whether the spy is caught. If not, the mission happens at once (or, for Watch, starts), and the spy walks home to be sent again.
• Reports go to your scout reports and the Scouting tab of the Inbox. Caught spies and sabotage go to the Battles tab.
• The Spies button on the world map's bottom bar lists your spies abroad (with Recall), your spies per village (with Train), burnt buildings to repair and every spy report in full.
• A guild's (or higher body's) leader and Spymaster can share reports with the whole body, read members' recent reports and mark lords as enemies on the map. See The Spymaster's office.

Training spies

Rule	Value
Rank	5 (Yeoman)
Research	Spycraft
Building	Watch House (one per village)
Cost	200 gold and 1 peasant
Training time	15 minutes each, one after another

The cap counts spies at home, in training and abroad, per village:

Rank	0 to 4	5	6	7	8	9 to 11	12	13	14+
Spies per village	0	2	2	3	3	4	5	5	6

The Watch House is a 2 x 2 military building (120 wood, 40 stone, 150 gold, 15 minutes). Besides training spies it adds 15 points to the chance of catching spies sent against its village.

Travel

cellsPerHour = 9 x scoutSpeed x (1 + scout speed research) x scout speed cards
travelMs     = max(60 000, cells / cellsPerHour x 3 600 000) / worldSpeed

That is a sixth of a scout's pace, and the same research (Village Runners, Woodcraft, Outriders and the rest of the scout line) and cards speed spies up. Storms slow spies as they slow scouts. A village 9 cells away is an hour each way at world speed 1, where a scout takes 10 minutes.

A spy on its way out can be recalled: it turns round where it stands and does nothing. A spy on watch can be recalled too: it files what it has seen so far and walks home.

Missions

Mission	Cost	Base catch chance	Targets	Needs
Infiltrate	150 gold	10%	village or capital
Steal research	400 gold	20%	village	research of your own under way
Sabotage	300 gold	30%	village	a war on its lord, outside his peacetime
Watch	200 gold	5% on arrival, then a quarter of that each hour	village or capital

Infiltrate

The report holds everything a scout's does (the walls, towers and garrison an attack will face) and also:

• soldiers about the village and soldiers placed on the castle walls, by unit
• troops a liege keeps stationed in the village (see Vassalage)
• every good in store, whole units
• buildings under construction or waiting, with when each should finish
• soldiers in training, by order
• every research the lord has finished, and the one he has in hand
• every army the lord has on the road: where from, where bound, how many and when it arrives
• his liege and his vassals

At a capital the report holds the garrison as a scout counts it and every army marching on the capital.

Every report a spy files from a target (an infiltration, a theft, a watch) is a fresh report for Military, with the defences a scout would count: you can line up and send an attack on it within the same 6 hours a scout report allows.

Steal research

On arrival the spy looks at the research your scholars have in hand. If the target lord has finished that research, the spy copies his notes and your research jumps ahead:

gain = min(time left, 0.25 x full time of your research, 3 game hours)

Then that lord is on guard against you for 24 game hours: you cannot send another theft against him until it passes. Other lords are not affected.

Worked example: your Architecture takes 20 game hours. A quarter is 5 hours, so the cap of 3 hours applies and Architecture finishes 3 hours sooner. A 2 hour research gains 30 minutes. If the target has not finished Architecture, or you have no research running when the spy arrives, the spy copies nothing, the report says so, and no guard is set.

Sabotage

Sabotage needs a war on the target lord from you or a body you ride under (see Guilds and Houses) and not his peacetime. It is checked when you send and again when the spy arrives: if the war ended on the way, the spy comes home without striking. Choose one of three:

Choice	Effect
Delay the building queue	Every building under construction finishes later by min(0.25 x its time left, 30 game minutes). Waiting buildings follow.
Delay soldiers in training	The whole training queue moves later by min(0.25 x time left on the queue, 30 game minutes). Soldiers already trained stay trained.
Set a fire	One finished building, chosen at random, goes back under construction for 40% of its base build time. It makes and gives nothing until rebuilt, and it takes one of the village's builders.

The hall, the starting buildings and storage buildings never burn. The owner can repair a burnt building at once for half its base cost (rounded up), from the Spies panel. Pulling it down refunds nothing.

Worked examples: a building with 10 hours left is set back 30 minutes (a quarter would be 2.5 hours, over the cap). A training queue with 40 minutes left is set back 10 minutes. A Bakery (8 minutes to build, 60 wood and 30 stone) set alight is rebuilt in 3 minutes 12 seconds, or repaired at once for 30 wood and 15 stone.

The target's Battles tab says what was done, but not by whom. Only a caught spy names its owner.

Watch

Choose 1 to 12 game hours. The spy stays hidden at the village or capital for that long and sends word of every army that sets out from there and every army that arrives there, as it happens, each as its own Scouting entry. Armies already on the road out when the spy arrived are not reported. Raiders and levy hosts count as armies. When the watch ends the spy files one report listing everything it saw, in order, and walks home.

Detection

Each spy is checked once, when it arrives:

catch = clamp(base + 0.04 x min(spies at home, 10) + 0.15 if the village has a Watch House
              + 0.10 at a capital someone holds
              + the target's Informers research (0.05) - your Ciphers research (0.05),
              0.02, 0.90)

Spies at home are the target village's own spies that are not in training or abroad. Only the first 10 count. A spy on watch also rolls once for every full game hour it stays, at a quarter of its arrival chance.

Case	Sum	Chance
Infiltrate a village with no spies and no Watch House	0.10	10%
Infiltrate a village with 40 spies at home	0.10 + 0.40	50%
Steal from a village with 3 spies at home, a Watch House and Informers	0.20 + 0.12 + 0.15 + 0.05	52%
Sabotage a village with 5 spies at home and a Watch House, sent by a lord with Ciphers	0.30 + 0.20 + 0.15 - 0.05	60%
Sabotage a village with 10 spies, a Watch House and Informers	0.30 + 0.40 + 0.15 + 0.05 = 0.90	90% (the cap)
Watch an unguarded village, sent by a lord with Ciphers	0.05 - 0.05	2% (the floor)
Watch a held capital	0.05 + 0.10	15%

Worked example for a watch: an unguarded village, 4 hours. The arrival chance is 5% and each hour after it 1.25%. The spy comes through all of it with a chance of 0.95 x 0.9875^4, about 90%.

A caught spy is lost. Both lords get a Battles entry naming the spy's owner: yours says who caught it, theirs says who sent it and for what. At a capital, the leader of the body holding it is told. A watching spy caught part way through still files what it saw before it was taken.

The Spymaster's office

The Spymaster is one of the eight offices of a guild, order, house or kingdom (see Guilds and Houses). The leader holds every power too, and the powers flow down: a house's Spymaster may use them in every guild of the house. They are shown in the Intel tab of the Realm panel.

Power	What it does
shareIntel	Share one of your scout or spy reports (or a member's, with seeReports) with every lord in the body. Each gets a Scouting entry with a "Shared intel" button, and the report is listed in the body's shared intel (the newest 30). The sharer can remove one.
seeReports	Read the reports every member of the body has had in the last 24 game hours, up to 10 each, newest first.
enemies	Mark a lord by name as the body's enemy, or unmark him. Marked lords show red on the map for everyone in the body, as lords at war do. Up to 50 per body. Members of the body cannot be marked.

Everyone in the body sees the shared intel and the marked list; only the leader and the Spymaster see the buttons.

Interactions

• World map: spies are not drawn on the map, and travel at half a scout's pace with the same speed research.
• Military: an infiltration report gates an attack like a fresh scout report. Sabotage needs the same war an attack does.
• Research: Spycraft, Ciphers and Informers are in the Civic branch. Stolen time comes off the research you have in hand.
• Guilds and Houses: wars allow sabotage; the Spymaster's powers are described above.
• Inbox: reports and sightings go to Scouting; caught spies and sabotage to Battles; shared intel to Scouting with a link to the Realm panel.
• Weather: storms slow spies on the road.

For maintainers

• Numbers: spyContent in server/src/features/spies/content.ts, served as GameContent.spies. Pure rules (catchChance, hourlyCatch, stealMs, delayMs, repairCost, spyCap) are in logic.ts.
• State: meta key spies_v1 (spies at home and in training per village, missions abroad, theft guards, fires, shared intel and marks per body), in server/src/features/spies/index.ts.
• Spy reports are ScoutReports with spy set, filed through worldLive().grantReport, so the world feature keeps them and the wiring adds the defence layout and the inbox line.
• Watch missions read worldLive().movements() each tick and compare route ends with the watched cell (within 0.75 cells), so a departure or arrival is seen to within one tick.
• Marked enemies reach the map through intelApi.marked in registry.ts, which social/index.ts adds to SocialView.enemies.
• The Watch House borrows the hunter's hut painting (clients/web/src/features/spies/index.ts sets the atlas entry) until it has its own.
• Research: spycraft, ciphers and informers in server/src/features/research/tree.ts, with the army stats spyStealth and spyWatch.
• Tests: server/src/features/spies/spies.test.ts.