See first. Strike second.

Recon — the safe four

• General spy — reveals the target's resources, buildings, and technology effects.
• Military spy — reveals the target's force composition, missile inventory, and military tech. Spy counts are redacted (that's part of the fog of war).
• Market spy — shows the target's active public listings and standing orders.
• Alliance spy — reveals the target alliance's roster, role assignments, and metadata.

Recon ops never reveal you ran them. The target sees nothing. Use them constantly — running a Military spy on every potential attack target before you commit is one of the highest-EV moves in the game.

Harmful — the twelve

Harmful operations actually change the target's state. Each one fails silently to the defender if it succeeds — they never know you did it. But if you fail, a news event fires revealing you tried.

• Steal resources (cash, food, oil) from the target.
• Sabotage buildings — destroy construction sites or completed buildings.
• Sabotage military — destroy unit stockpiles.
• Espionage technology — steal points from a specific research track.
• Cause dissensions — temporarily reduce the target's tax rate, hurting their income.
• Bioterrorism — apply a plague debuff that slows production until cured.
• And several more variants that target specific resources and unit types.

SPAL — Spies Per Acre of Land

Your spy operation's effective strength scales with your spy count relative to your land — Spies Per Acre of Land, SPAL. Higher SPAL means better odds of success. The defender also has SPAL, and theirs improves their odds of detecting and repelling your op.

Spy technology, government modifiers, and your alliance's intelligence pact partners all multiply your effective SPAL. Intelligence pacts contribute a fraction of your allies' spies to your SPAL count when you're running ops or defending.

Same-op diminishing returns

Repeatedly running the same spy op on the same target gets less effective in a rolling window — same model as repeated attacks. Spread your spy operations across multiple targets, not into one defender's face.

Daily cap

You can run a fixed number of spy operations per day. The cap resets every 24 hours. Run out and you're done for the day — plan around this if you're using spies as your primary harassment tool.

Getting caught

Failed harmful ops fire a news event revealing you as the attacker. Once your hand is shown, the target can retaliate — directly, by attacking you back; through alliance war; or by warning their alliance to avoid you. Caught harmful ops cost reputation.

Spy Center

The Spy Center screen (under Actions) is where you launch operations and read history. The History tab shows your past operations and the ones run against you, with redacted attacker info on the ones you caught. Expand any entry to see the full payload — for successful recon, that's the intelligence you bought; for harmful, it's what got damaged.