TThroughout history, spies have played an important role in international affairs. The Zimmerman telegram was intercepted and sent to the United States, one of the major reasons why the US eventually entered WWI. And the cracking of Enigma allowed the allies to gain valuable information.
Most of communication between allied nations comes through sending messages through diplomacy. But currently there is no way to "intercept" a message, which could contain valuable information (such as potential attacks, enemy strategy and army strength, enemy technology, etc.)
What I suggest is this:
1. Spies now have a 10% chance per day to "intercept" a message. The spy must be on an intelligence mission in the enemy's capital. Hiring more spies allows you to be able to intercept additional messages. Trades can also be intercepted as one "message", but of course you won't be able to accept it.
2. An intercepted message can be viewed at the espionage tab. Players can read it in its full glory.
[b]3. The intercepted message is gauranteed to be 2 days old at the most. [/b]
4. The intercepted message cannot be one already received or intercepted by the player operating the spies.
[b]5. The intercepted message/trade is merely a "view" of the message. The message will not be prevented from reaching the original recipient.[/b]
This could make in-game events much more useful, as well as making spies more applicable in roleplay servers. Imagine you uncovering a message sent from Italy to Spain, finalizing preperations for an invasion of France. If you were playing as France, you'd be able to divert forces away from other areas and brace for impact. Or if you were playing as an ally of France, you could forward the information over to your ally or prepare your bomber planes.
Of course, it's equally possible that you just get a boring old message that contains just some average conversation between two different nations with no useful intel inside.
Guide to reading your messages:
1. Once intercepted, look for any mentions of units or a certain type of power. If they say something about being able to "rain fire from the sky" or "cover the sea", you can safely assume they have a good stack of bombers and/or ships available.
2. Look at the original recipient. If you notice plenty of messages between Russia and Germany that don't look like threats, then that means they've probably got an alliance going on.
3. Their trades can be valuable. If one nation is trading some tanks for some ships, then it means that the nation probably doesn't have much of a navy, but has tanks to spare. The original trade recipient likewise needs armor and is willing to trade ships for it, which could reflect the size of their own navy. Or if a player is making consistent requests for food, it means that they're suffering a food shortage.
Hopefully this idea makes Spies a lot more interesting. In RP servers, you can even use this by "exposiong" perfidious or dangerous alliances/plans on the newspaper and publicly humiliate a person who was planning to invade you.
Spies already have the ability to intercept messages between players coming in and going out from the players if you have spies in their capital city.
the spies are already OP. No need to make them more OP then they already are.
You can virtually fight some body with only spies and punsish them until your enemy his country is so bashed that he will quit playing. Allot less resource income, allot longer production times, buildings being destroyed, morale drops..
No thank you, no improvements.
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