There has been a fascination for strategy games that let you mastermind a conspiracy. Who doesn't want to be an evil puppet master behind the scenes?
However fascinating the ideas are, there are very few dedicated games for it, and those dedicated ones... arguably aren't very good.
Elements of Conspiracy Strategy Games
A conspiracy strategy game usually has the following I have noticed:
Behind The Scenes - In a conspiracy strategy game, you are often not one of the "major players" in the world stage. You are not a king, or a country, or a military commander. You are an advisor, a grandmaster, a priest, a prophet, a cult leader behind the thrones. Your goal is often to affect the major players to bow down to your will.
Indirect Influence - To convince the "major players", you will need to convince them. One way to do this is automatically. In Civilization, a neighboring city may come over to your side because of your strong cultural influence in a number of turns. Another is to do it manually, you order agents to convince the major player, through seduction, bribes, blackmail.
Voting - Because conspiracy games are about influence, a lot of them have voting somewhere, where it shows if your influence actually works.
Multiple Map Overlays - Because there is something as behind the scenes, there is often at least one other map overlay. For example, in Civilization, a religious map and cultural map will show the different kinds of influences.
Agents - Agents do things. They are spies. They are assassins. They are diplomats. They are cultists. They are information brokers. They are prophets and preachers to convert the flock. They can often do a lot of things and are not specialized.
Information Warfare - Because conspiracy strategy games are all about subterfuge, information warfare is king. At its basic level, this would be the fog of war that conceals enemy units.
Examples
What are some examples of conspiracy strategy games or strategy games with subterfuge elements?
Game of Thrones: Genesis was a failed product. It was very convoluted.You gain prestige, and the methods to get that prestige were very arcane, at best. There was a war aspect, but the subterfuge aspect confused everyone. There are so many moving parts. It seems automation would help this.
Shadow Council The Puppeteers is an okay indie strategy game. It's very click to do something, and boom, you increased influence. Yeah, very much an oversimplified spreadsheet game.
Shadows Behind The Throne suffers from your actions not having very clear effects at all. You make nobles vote to ignore the Lovecraftian army you are creating. While that sounds sort of exciting, it's not. Lots of micromanagement.
Republic: The Revolution was a really cool political RTS. You canvassed neighborhoods and got votes in order to enact a revolution in an alternate history East European country.
Left Behind: Eternal Forces was very similar to Republic: The Revolution. You prayed and converted people to your side. It was just very tedious to do that. It seems automatic preaching and conversion would have helped from the beginning. But it was a story-based game, so that could be forgiven.
Conspiracrat: A Game of Secret Machinations is a game of my own making. There should have been better objectives, like causing an actual war and nuclear warfare, rather than just accumulating much money and power. Ordering agents was tedious.
Offworld Trading Company was probably the best non-violent RTS I have played. The interplay between trading felt visceral. There was clear objectives and progress. Subterfuge also had clear results. An EMP bomb would disable my opponent's buildings very clearly.
Secret Government is a recent grand strategy game in the same vein. Early Access reviews show it is mostly positive. Time will tell if it actually will last the test of time.
Crusader Kings and similar Paradox games seem to be long lasting, but they are very convoluted for the average player.
The more warlike RUSE offers a solution, while combat would be a thing, give commanders more explicit information destroying abilities such as "fake armies". Many RTS games have some form of information disruption, but RUSE makes it front and center.
There was a simple Flash game, I'm not sure what it was called, but I think it was called "Third Party" or "Third Side" where you played both sides in a war and you had to balance the war so one side would not win and so you could get an endless war. Units fought automatically. You were given a random unit and you can place the unit on the left or right side, so if you place it on the left side, it will fight for the left side, and vice versa. If you balanced it long enough, a nuclear war starts and you win.
Among Us isn't strictly a strategy game, but it is a strategy game. It is a traitor game like Mafia. It's ideas on how to play an Impostor, Sabotages, and the voting system can be translated into a gameplay with multiple units.
Proposed Solutions
Less Micromanagement, More Macromanagement: In many conspiracy strategy games, you have many agents working for you. Clicking and ordering your agents is tedious and gets overwhelming the more agents you get. We will get to more specific details how on the next points.
More Automation: Agents are agents for a reason. They need to be independent. Have them bribe automatically. Have them infiltrate automatically. Have them assassinate automatically. And so on.
A lot of other things in conspiracy strategy games can be automated as well. We look at automating voting last.
Agent Specialization: Another way to lessen micromanagement is to make agents specialized rather than all-around hero units with many abilities. So spies always spy, assassins always assassinate, etc. rather than have agents that can do all these.
For converter units, it is very tedious to keep clicking to convert other units, when in the end, those units are just walking resources. See converter units as harvesters rather than hero units in their own right.
More Strategy, Less Tactics With Planners: This ties to both micro and macro as well, and even automation, but it is beyond those. Strategy means you can set an overarching goal with actual planning. Strategy games do not have planners. They really need to.
A planner would where you can choose objectives or goals or layouts or loadouts (whatever you need to prepare) before the game that every unit would know beforehand. Most planners in strategy games just consist of loadouts, such as for XCOM.
Maybe the goal is nuclear war. You choose "nuclear war" in your planner as an objective. Then all your agents would work with that plan in mind. Diplomats would automatically tell rulers to consider nuclear war. Sabotages would target nuclear silos immediately.
There should be a planner in-game as well so that changes to the master plan that would immediately affect everyone. If I want to switch from "nuclear war" to "make a one world government", I should just be able to do it with a button.
Real-time strategy games have always leaned towards tactics, command this building to produce this single unit, command this unit to go here, etc. A focus on strategy would make this less of a hassle. For example, switching to a "mobilized vehicle strategy" from an "infantry strategy" can be done with a button, changing all your unit production into vehicles rather than going to each factory to make vehicles and going to each barracks to stop infantry production.
Information Warfare Progression:
There should be no or little information warfare in the beginning. Only when it is near the end should complete "plot twists" be accessible and reveal themselves. Conspiracy strategy games like to throw you to a complete subterfuge mode where everyone is a double agent.
This would be a good progression:
Start - Everyone on the map has clear allegiances. When you send agents to convert someone, they fully convert to your side with no question.
Mid-game - Making more fog of war, some people have unclear allegiances because multiple sides are vying for them.
End-game - Most people are close to their end game objective (nuclear war), secret agreements and double agents can now be a thing, where some people seemed to be working for you, when they were sleeper agents. And they will be revealed as double agents and sleeper agents when they act (or close to it), rather than it being hidden the whole time so that enemies can react and don't feel too bamboozled.
A system like DEFCON where you are allowed to use some things depending on DEFCON level would probably work in some capacity, but you can design it naturally as well.
Make Soft Power More Impactful and Deterministic, Not Probabilistic:
It is hard to show "soft power" and "indirect influence" and making them impact hard. Religious and cultural victories in Civilization are often maligned because influence mechanics are just not hard hitting. This is probabilistic and not deterministic.
Rather than, say, influence giving you a vote, have it that those you have influenced always vote like you. Or even better, they always vote according to your planned strategy.
There also needs to be a lot of UI that indicates this. For example, mind control lines like in Red Alert Yuri's Revenge clearly shows who is in control of a unit. A place getting cultural influence in Civ should have the number of turns shown when it will convert.
Reduce Voting In General (Or Turn It Into A Resource Rather Than A Game Stopper):
Showing influence's impact to just culminate in a single vote is anticlimatic. Often, the game pauses just for a vote so you could choose. And often, that vote doesn't do much of anything impactful, maybe just +1 Economy. Whoppee.
Instead of influencing "major powers" just to vote on some proposal, influence them to do more concrete things like pressing a nuclear button for war immediately. Or if you still want votes system of gameplay, make them vote automatically for your benefit (and planner strategy) without you having to click to choose (thus more automation). Turn votes into a resource and a number than something you have to pause the game for (which Shadows Behind The Throne is particularly bad at).
So if your strategy is nuclear war, agents and the influenced will always vote for it. If it's a vote for something like +1 economy for you and -1 economy for everyone, then they will always vote for +1 economy for you. Of course, there may be a subtlety here, that they would vote for themselves if it affects them if the against vote makes them get -1 economy, but for things that do not affect them, they would vote for you.
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