As prompted by my last blog post, I decided to write a blog post getting into some detail about how the gameplay will work in Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. Then I got 600 words in and realized I was only beginning to discuss actual details, so I decided to try to write this in the meantime, a quicker attempt to satisfy your curiosity without getting too deep into details (details which are highly likely to change by the time the game is ready for release).

A Role-Playing Strategy Game

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars doesn't truly belong to any genre of game - or maybe more accurately, it's two genres at the same time. The quick X-meets-Y elevator pitch for Silent Weapons might be "Jagged Alliance 2 is going on inside of an X-Files mod for Crusader Kings 3". Both of those games belong to the same quasi-genre that I refer to as Role-Playing Strategy Games, though they come at it from opposite sides: Jagged Alliance is what happens when you insert strategy game elements into an RPG, Crusader Kings is what happens when you insert RPG elements into a Grand Strategy game. 

What this means is that Silent Weapons exists as a balance between two play modes: the Global, and the Personal.

The Global Scale

On the global scale, your overarching goal is to spread your conspiracy's influence across the world, and the meat of this process will be controlling governments. Controlling a country's government will allow you to funnel its resources towards your conspiracy's projects, thus furthering your goals. What those goals are will depend on what victory type you're pursuing, which will be affected by your choice of conspiracy. For a New World Order victory, you'll want to control countries with a lot of diplomatic influence. For victories involving science projects, you'll want to control countries with a lot of research output. 

Something that you might have already noticed is that the bulk of both of those examples are, in the real world, controlled by a small handful of countries, mostly in Europe and North America. And that is also true in the game, which is where country management comes into play. The way I want things balanced, if you straight-up control the USA, that should be most of the research or diplomatic influence you need; and only one conspiracy can control it outright. (Note: while regional control will still matter for economic resources and cultural influence, Diplomatic Influence will be a specific gameplay mechanic, and it will only exist at the "national" level.)

While you'll still want to conduct operations to bring other countries under your influence, the idea is very much that you will, in strategy game influence, "go tall"; that is, building up the holdings you already have, or at least maximizing their output of the things you need the most. Doing this will work a little differently in Silent Weapons than in a typical strategy game, however.

"Building up" the countries you control will usually be less a matter of literal construction projects (though that will certainly be present in the game, but since the game only takes place over 10 years, only so much construction can realistically happen). It will be much more about securing trade deals with other countries which serve as a cheap source of goods and/or labour for your primary holdings in the developed world. 

Developing infrastructure will be directed by controlling people in government offices, but the dirty work of getting other countries receptive to these exploitative trade deals brings us to the second play mode:

The Personal Scale

The work of bringing organizations and people and ultimately whole countries under the influence of your conspiracy will be carried out by Agents: named characters in your employ. These agents will carry out Plots to advance your conspiracy's goals, which will sometimes culminate in Missions.

At the start of the game you will only directly control a small number of Handlers. Recruiting the field agents who will carry out the plots you assign to them will be a part of their job, with most agents functioning as freelancers unless you explicitly choose to keep them on retainer. These handlers are high-ranking agents, and probably the only people in the outfit who actually know who's behind the operation. If you want some examples from fiction:

• Saito (Ken Watanabe's character) from Inception has the "facilitator" role of a handler, though Cobb (Leo Dicaprio's character) does the actual recruitment and coordination work of a handler. This split-duty setup might or might not occur in the game itself, I mean, I'd like it to, that would be cool, but no promises.
• Deirdre (Natascha McElhone's character) from Ronin is a perfect example of a handler: she organizes the team to do the job, and is the only person who knows who their employer is.
• While we never see him organizing a crew to do a job (at least in any episodes I ever saw), the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files would have a roughly handler-level role in his organization.

As illustrated by that last example, handlers are also the agents who directly manage office-holding characters who are under the conspiracy's influence, but are not fully initiated members. 

 (The reason for keeping most agent characters as unaligned freelancers is that I want to reduce the chance of a weird scenario where a conspiracy makes it impossible for any other conspiracies to do missions by hiring on every active agent; while they can be procedurally generated, I want there to be less than a hundred hand-crafted agent characters who are explicitly the best of the best - this is the Jagged Alliance influence shining through, I guess. I have not yet decided on the mechanics by which this will be enforced, though it might very well be that at "launch", the game at the beginning of early access, you just won't be able to keep agents around at all other than as handlers, which would largely take them out of the action of going on missions.)

Plots

Plots function like a combination of Crusader Kings Schemes and the "away missions" you send your guys on in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and the Big Boss MGS games (Peace Walker and Phantom Pain). 

A Plot has a concrete goal, something like influencing a particular character to be under the influence of your conspiracy - or maybe something more dramatic, like just killing them. That's a good example because later it will let us discuss Missions, but for now I'm going to stick to gameplay as it applies to all plots.

You start the process by creating a Plot, then assigning a Handler to it. The Handler will then begin recruiting a Crew; though you'll have the final say on the crew composition, their recruiting ability (as well as any agents you have employed outright) determines what you've got to work with. There might be specific roles in the Crew to assign agents to, depending on the kind of plot you're running (in an assassination plot, at least one agent needs to be the actual designated assassin).

A plot will then play out in the background, letting you multitask, though you'll be prompted with story moments where you need to intervene and direct the actions of your agents (if you've played Crusader Kings 2 or especially 3, what I'm trying to describe is events happening during schemes, exactly like that). This is where the specifics of the RPG mechanics come into play, and I'm going to save that for the long version of this blog post, because, and I don't want to hype things up too much, but it's actually kind of a big deal. 

Plots slowly accumulate Exposure, which functions as a ticking clock to get you to make riskier decisions, and to make success not guaranteed. You need to have a crew which makes progress faster than exposure accumulates, because if exposure maxes out, you need to call off the plot to avoid compromising the Masquerade (definitely not going to be the actual term I use in-game, but that's what's going on here.)

Plots which don't culminate in a mission will achieve their goal at a progress percentage of 100. Plots which do culminate in a mission, where your agents will travel to a location and potentially engage in combat, those are more complicated. You can launch the mission at any time, but you can use progress as a kind of currency to buy advantages in the mission - but the more exposure accumulates, the more dangerous the mission will be as well, since the defenders will be on higher alert. 

Missions

The design for Missions is, in ways, defined more by what I don't want it to be than what I do want it to be. Specifically, I don't want to get into an X-Com or Jagged Alliance level of detail, because I don't want the player to agonize over minor details of positioning, for two reasons:

One: this isn't supposed to be a tactics games. I love tactics games. I fully intend to make at least one over the course of my career. This game is not supposed to be one.

Two (and this is the big one): I don't want missions to take longer than 10-15 minutes to play out, because I don't want the player to lose their train of thought. This is inspired by Sid Meier's retrospective analysis of a game of his that's actually pretty similar to Silent Weapons: Covert Action. (If you want to learn more, look up the Civilization 1 Post-Mortem GDC talk on YouTube)

I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds here, especially since I haven't implemented any of this and so it's hugely subject to change, but the idea is to have something which is still a tactical mission, but at a much lower detail level than the norm for that genre. This lower level of detail will also make it possible to include kinds of action scenes that would be nearly impossible to implement in a fully-featured tactics game, specifically, car chases. 

The Rest of the Game

My intention is for the game to have, if not at early access launch then certainly by full release, many other features: research and science projects, base building, wars and other political crises, fleshed out internal politics; but all of those will exist in service of making the features I've already described here more interesting. 

What I have laid out here is the basic gist of what the game will be. To be perfectly honest, I think it's gonna be really really cool.

Here is a link to the Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/DncyAduE