Stellaris Nemesis - Espionage Mechanics (Let's Get Dangerous)

this video has been made possible by expressvpn find out how you can get three months of expressvpn for free by visiting expressvpn.com aspect or clicking the link in the description box below as of the 3.0 update as well as nemesis the spycraft system has been introduced into stellaris and this means we have now intel we got operations as well as a slew of other things that we can dive into from mechanics point of view because there is quite a lot of stuff to discuss here this is a key part of the diplomacy and information game when it comes to the game and it's brand new and it is something you should understand let's dive into the mechanics behind intelligence and see what the system is made of as with any system with installars everything starts on the empire creation window and that's exactly where we are right now and we have a couple of things that we actually need to take a look at in order to understand what is going on and what is important so i've created this little empire called the intergalactic information agency with a couple of traits that will make this empire a lot more useful for the spy game first of all we are a representative democracy doesn't really matter for this stuff there is no authority that actually adds any additional bonuses to the spycraft system same thing applies to the ethics there are no real ethics that change the way things uh really progress when it comes to the spycraft system except for the xenophile ethics because they will get additional envoys and envoys is really what it's all about when it comes to spies the more envoys you have the more operations you can do with multiple empires so having a large amount of end voice is very useful plus envoys can also be used within the galactic community and maybe later on with the empire as well but that is of course part of nemesis still though where the real flavor lies here is with the civic specifically cut road politics which will increase code breaking by one and we will go into what code breaking actually means shortly and shadow council which increases the maximum infiltration level of your empire by 10. basically what this means is that you can do more stuff but we will dive into that once again very shortly let's dive into the game and see what is actually going on with this uh particular setup and what we can do here with these mechanics so the spy game actually starts right at first contact with another empire as you can see we are about five years into the game and we have made first contact with another species now at the start we will get an incoming transmission upon first contact and basically we'll have a couple options because yes they now actually matter and these are actually kind of important because they will allow another empire to have a bigger effect on you than you would expect we could say that they we are delighted to meet them which increases their their opinion of you we could uh go down the middle ground and basically uh have a 33 spy network growth malice from them which means it's more difficult for them to spy on us or we do the same thing with the spy network but also it reduces the uh opinion of them by -30 and this is generally a role play but overall if you want to go down the good route it's usually a good idea to go down either we are delighted to meet you or make sure that they cannot spy on us and considering the ai can be a little bit iffy i do recommend uh to make sure you do not have them spy on you so there's a couple options we can do here right away after first contact we got all of these things up here and we got all of our envoys it looks like this is a federation as well which is rather curious but it doesn't really matter what does matter however is that there are multiple empires here that we can send our spymasters to so we click on the diplomacy window here and we start building a spy network with one of our many envoys that we have available in this particular case we have three so we're gonna go ahead and send an envoy over there to build a spy network we're gonna do the same thing over here and we're gonna do the same thing over here as well so now these guys will start building a spy network and as you can immediately see a spy network has now been established this is the first big step in our illustrious spy career because it's going to be really important for us to maintain this and also when it comes for information warfare so let's uh continue on a little bit more and then we can take a look at what the spy screen looks like so now that we have deployed our spymasters to these systems over here we will start to learn more about what they're up to for instance if we go to these fine people over here we go to the espionage screen we will see that we currently have an infiltration level of 13 over 70. that means that we can get a total of 70 infiltration level uh in total and that translates to all these wonderful little operations that we can uh do within this empire also you will see that their relative encryption is pedestrian this has to do with the fact that we've gotten ourselves a bonus to our decoration modifier the higher our decryption modifier the easier it will be for us to counter alien empires um and decryption level basically they're the electronic counter measures if you will they basically translate that we get additional infiltration levels etc and we also will grow things a lot quicker now there's this handy-dandy little drop down on the top right here that will illustrate to us what the current level of infiltration is in some of these places as you can see here we have 20 here we have 20 here and we have 30 over here let's swiftly move on towards the number 30 and then take a look at the rest of the ui here as you can see we have this little screen on the top right that is a generalized information overview of what we know of this empire what is their government like what kind of authority do they have what kind of ethics where is their capital located what level is their ruler then we got their diplomacy and that diplomacy is actually really really important because it allows us to see what causes belly they have i.e who they can attack for which reason etc which rivalries they have because at the start of the game we don't know this and most importantly federations so we don't know at this point in time who their friends are who their enemies are and what it will do if we would attack one of these empires so at this point in time if they have for instance a defensive pact or a federation which we already know they do because of the way their empires are laid out um it would be a bad idea but right now we don't have that information yet so we're gonna leave that as it is then is there military intelligence basically how strong their fleets are how far their science is and how good their economy is as well and that is a generalized overview we want to make sure that we get as much information as possible and we can do that by doing a operation called gather information now gathering information will bring up this little menu here which basically shows us a little operation which will cost us 400 energy which we have there is a plentitude of energy available to us and basically what we can do here is launch a operation but the problem right now is that relative power is overwhelming that's most likely because they have a larger fleet and everything else is the same however this is a going to be a routine operation it's not going to be difficult so we can commence when ready and basically what it does is as soon as we launch it will automatically commence we're actually going to unclick this for now so we can walk through the entire process so let's launch this operation it will cost us 4 energy a month and a 400 energy setup right now so let's dive forward into the future to see how that progresses so these empires how could they defend themselves from being infiltrated well they could have been a hive mind so that they get an inherent bonus to encryption or they could have made sure that their communications to the galaxy at large was better protected by using expressvpn that's right every single signal that these aliens send out is being picked up by the intergalactic information agency and oh no it looks like that but claw cross from the sinha jenemy was writing emails from their local space box they're sending out messages that are really really important and should really be send over a secured line so the agency can use their spy network to read them but now it is too late of course this is just a fictional scenario and in real life you could be sitting in that cafe and sending sensitive information over an unsecured line which is where expressvpn comes in expressvpn encrypts all your network data and masks your ip address so you can navigate the internet safely and securely find out how you can get three months of expressvpn for free by visiting expressvpn.com aspect or clicking the link in the description box below so as soon as we get this pop-up called gather information basically and what it says is is that we've completed their information gathering operation we send a dossier detailing their findings basically we will now understand what is going on in the yen lot combine and basically see what is going on this will reduce our infiltration level but because we are an empire spoke towards infiltration it will allow us to see more things as you can see right now we will have a good idea of what is going on here on with their economy so basically what we can see now is their relative economical power uh an idea of what their colonies look like what their system looked like and the location of their civilian ships and that allows us to gain initial information which is really really useful so if you for instance go into their solar systems right now we take a look here we now have an idea of what their planets potentially look like size 14 it's not all that impressive but still we know where their capital is and we know what is currently going on size 18 and it does look like that these guys may or may not be necros so that could be potentially an issue and it basically builds up the story that we have behind this here empire what they could potentially be up to and we get another report coming in again gathering information on another empire we will now get information on the sin incorporated but as you can see we still don't have the information that we need just yet which means the other operation was a lot more successful and no doubt we will get another operation successful very shortly and there it is and we will get even more information here so we can take a look at this empire and once again we will see that we have an intelligence rating of 40 but we still don't have any idea of what is going on here at this stage we will need to wait because we need to increase our infiltration level so that we can do something more nefarious such as preparing sleeper cells which will allow us to do more updates in terms of intelligence and we will just go down the list slowly over time and illustrate what everything does now every so often you will come into a situation where your spy master will randomly create themselves a asset will find themselves an asset in an alien empire in this particular case the gen lot combine has found itself with somebody who is not too happy over there and that basically means that they are going to be joining our cause so they are in the gen lot empire over here which is in this here criminal mega corp which is incredibly annoying because they've decided to put some criminal uh buildings on our planets however as you can see we will now have a asset on the right side of the screen and this is a hugely important thing because we can use those assets to boost our abilities on our operations in this particular case uh we can add additional um to things on manipulation as well as a government and those will all be uh specified in the side here so for instance sparking a diplomatic incident is something that we can do use here stealing technology not necessarily but we can use them on other things the thing is is that we can boost our chances with our operatives in order to you know get everything rolling and that's exactly what we're going to be doing very soon right now we are preparing sleeper cells on every single one of these planets because it will allow us to improve the infiltration level on those worlds and in addition it will allow our spy master to be reassigned at another location so basically the spy network will uh stay at its current level and we will continue to know what is going on on these worlds we still don't know anything about their military but we're slowly but steadily learning about what is going on right now we have maxed out our intel so we want to know what is going on in general so let's take a look at what we can do with our asset once we've got enough spy level or at least enough infiltration level to do something more interesting now solaris wouldn't be solaris if we didn't get random events popping up all the time such as this particular one because we are trying to put in sleeper cells basically what's going on here is that our operatives may be at risk and this is obviously a problem this gives us a couple of options whether or not the operatives are being panicked or something is going well now these options by themselves do not really have a lot of impact in terms of diplomatic in a diplomatic sense so basically we can just go ahead and if we get set back it's not the end of the world yeah well we got the positive one which means that the difficulty has been decreased and therefore we can do things more easily over time we got really lucky here with uh having three whole empires to try things out on now of course there are going to be scenarios where the ai is trying to do things on you thankfully if you have high encryption they'll have a more difficult time to do so but regardless though it looks like that these guys are trying to undermine our influence with another empire we do get a bunch of unity for that though but we've been implicated into a plot and in one day we'll find out what will actually happen still though with all of this stuff going on here uh having even a minus uh modifier with one of these inside of a federation it's not the end of the world because in the end we just need to hedge him on to like us so these fine gentlemen next door have decided that they want to vassalize us which means that in the near future they may or may not attack but thankfully due to the endless efforts of the intergalactic information agency we can do some naughty things to them as well because we have over 70 infiltration which is the maximum amount that we can currently have on them which means that we have full uh visibility on what their government is like as well as a whole bunch of stuff on the rest of their empire for instance we know where their fleet powers are as well as where their fleets are in general so we have a good idea of what is going on due to the infiltration power of our species now the bad thing is we do not have a fleet however we do have very strong infiltration which means that instead of using hard power we can use soft power now what would be a good way of doing this well we could do a whole slew of interesting things we can spark a diplomatic incident for instance where all of a sudden uh you know something embarrassing will happen in this empire but sadly because they're in a hegemon it will not matter to anybody nearby uh preparing supercells we have already done this acquiring an asset would be very good for us to prepare for future stuff such as sabotaging a starbase or arm a privateer so getting an asset is probably a very good idea we're going to do the same thing in all of the other empires as well thankfully in one of them i believe it is this one yes we already have an asset available which means that we can do other things like extern extort favors now favors is something that is part of the galactic community so it's not all that relevant to us yet so instead we are going to arm some privateers but oh no it is uh it's a very expensive operation it costs 3 600 bucks so instead we're just gonna go ahead and reflects our economical strength and sell off some of our resources to see whether or not we can actually do this operation and yes we can let's get some privateers rolling in this empire and see what will happen our operative uh should be attached to this actually um we should have attached an operative but we can uh in the future we can do that so no worries about that but basically what we're doing now is we are getting uh privateers up and running in this empire the real question is is this go if this is going to work considering they're a two planet system uh they don't really have a lot of space for these privateers to spawn so this could potentially be a problem in the meantime though whilst all of that stuff is happening uh our empire is growing very very rapidly and we're basically spiraling out of control compared to the enemy which is perfect for us because it means that they're locked inside they've got a massive fleet that they have to upkeep where we're uh as we are just running around with our operatives and taking things out right now we're just waiting on our operatives to be done uh basically we've got a breakthrough rating going on here so it's only a question of time until we have something that will go well here now as we're running this operation stuff can happen such as one of our operatives going rogue and joining the enemy we can do all sorts of things like for instance say okay we want to make sure that this succeeds and we can disavow if we disavow it ends it's over here we can also go ahead and spend 20 influence and if there is a um if the enemy has the ability to do a spy network against us they would potentially find out however we're going to go and spend that influence and see whether or not anything will happen here this could go very bad but also very very very well we just want to get those privateers up and running so we can mess with their economy that is our main goal here now whilst our operatives are toiling away down on this planet i have just unlocked another thing that will boost our spy game in our edicts you will find the bureau of espionage it is a early game technology that you can find and basically what it will do is we'll give you additional invoice because you could always use more envoys and will also reduce operation difficulty and increase base spy intel so we're going to go ahead and activate that and then take a look at our operation uh which has currently failed apparently which means we'll need to relaunch that that is not much of a problem so let's just do that and basically we will continue doing operations in this year empire same thing with this place we are slowly but steadily doing interesting stuff such as for instance we are just going to go ahead and steal some of their technology because uh we've managed to get a couple of things here in for instance here as well we are just going to go ahead and well let's um let's acquire an asset shall we once we have the money that is we can just quickly get that on the way and basically we'll have a whole bunch of operations running pretty much all the time because right now we all have a lot easier time to actually go and go ahead and do this uh thankfully due to our encryption you'll have a very easy time doing this so sooner or later we may actually be able to do some privateering on operative resurfaces yes let's get an extraction team ready sooner or later we'll have the ability to actually finish our operation and it looks like we got ourselves some science so we got the climate control network science by stealing technology from this here empire and that is excellent because it will give us a um a one-up against them they are still economically and technologically similar to us and their fleet is definitely more powerful than us as we can see we still got eyeballs on them at all time and they can feel significantly larger fleets than we can especially with that federation fleet hanging out there so slowly but steadily we can do stuff to them that is rather naughty and the examples that we have here today are not necessarily the end of it there are more examples that will become available over time one of which i find really really fun and that is of the crisis beacon so let's take a quick look at what the crisis beacon actually is now here's a little safe game of a multiplayer match that i did over the weekend and as you can see well the unbidden have spawned right in the middle of my empire this would be considered a bad time however not all is lost we have the opportunity to do something against them right here what is that you may ask well we have an infiltration level over here at our allies there are tributary of us we don't really care about that we are more interested in deflecting the unbidden away from us so what we can do here is we can go to our espionage because of course we're spying under on our tribute and we activate a crisis beacon it is extraordinarily expensive it costs 6 400 energy and that is of course a problem still though we can easily do this as we have a high level of um stuff going on here as we got a 90 level of intel so we're just going to go ahead and launch that operation and immediately you will see that their relative encryption is a is weak and b we know everything about them so our operatives are now going to go ahead and move in to try um to put a beacon down for the unbidden to swarm to the unbidden themselves are already all the way on the move and is of course a problem so let's quickly wait to see how this develops and see if our operatives can actually do something with this whilst the unbidden have managed to eat one of my planets thankfully my team is now on standby to lure the unbidden into my tributaries uh territory which is exactly what we are going to let them do they will start putting down a beacon as soon as we can and let's hope that we're gonna be in time in order to pull this off they're looking uh they're looking pretty good so far so let's check back in with them once they are up and running and there you have it the unbidden have been paid off so to speak a beacon has been set up and their ships are now on route to the shariat system uh one of the uh fleets will immediately move on its way so uh we'll see whether or not they'll actually actually go there it is the stolter system they'll be going so one of their fleets will now beeline over towards this area to be deflected and that's exactly what we wanted we wanted the unbidden off of our doorstep and that's exactly what is going to be happening right now so it's a wise investment sometimes to do this and in order to do all this stuff it also means that you can be rather a nefarious on the galactic map and that right there is pretty much a generalized overview of how the whole system works there's a bunch of other stuff for instance there is the enhanced surveillance technology that you can get where you can get additional envoys and more encryption on your empire but that is something that uh you can research for yourself over time in the meantime though we're gonna go and wrap things up here i wanna thank uh my good friends over at i want to thank expressvpn for making this video possible because if it wasn't for them well vp is still on the bad side of the encryption cycle thank you so much for watching and until next time take good care of yourselves and remember stay vigilant they're listening

Channel: ASpec

Views: 80,688

Keywords: ASpec, A_Spec, Stellaris, Nemesis, 3.0, Espionage, Intel, Spymaster, Paradox Interactive, Research, Civics, Edicts, Intelligence, Patch, Patch Review, 3.0., Philip K. Dick, Stellaris 3.0, Review, Expansion, Factory Districts, Districs, Spying, SpyMaster, How to, Overview, Paradox Development Studio, DLC, Facecam, Amazing, Update, 3.0 Update, pops, carrying capacity, Economy, Buildings, alloys, consumer goods, Star Eater, Engine

Id: ouWSP-ec0jU

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021