One important part of La Resistance DLC in HOI4 is inteligence agency. This agency allows you use spies which could protects you or could helps you to defeat significantly larger states. You can cause problems in another country, gain access to information/technology, or set the stage for your next steps.
Key facts about intelligence agency
There are some facts about intelligence agency. In article bellow I’ll explain them in more detail.
- Regardless of whether you have it or not there can be missions against you.
- IA allows you to recruit spies and then send them on various missions.
- Your spies could defend you or build network in another country.
- When your spies have network in another country then they could do missions.
- If you have problem with resistance your spies could solve it.
If you have La Resistance DLC then intelligence agency opens new dimension of strategy which you could play. If you are playing with this DLC I recommend to learn how to control IA properly.
Building intelligence agency
And overall development of intelligence agency will cost you civil factories. So I’ve recommend you to have minimum around 10 factories. If you don’t have enough civil factories then you will have problems and at the same time focus on espionage.
However, if you have enough factories you can set up your own spy agency with your logo and your name. You can’t get any further without this agency. Just be careful – even if you don’t have an agency built by you, others can attack you with spies.
Intelligence agency departments
If you build a basic building, so you will open the possibility of hiring a spy and subsequent building of the department. In the game there are 5 basic departments that you have to gradually build:
- Intelligence branch >> provides you more information about other nations
- Defense branch >> will help with protection against other spies
- Operations branch >> affects the success rate of missions
- Operative training branch >> affects the success rate of missions
- Cryptology department branch >> helps you with cryptography
If your plan is to play a defensive game (you know you’re going to defend) so it’s good to improve defense branch and cryptology department branch if you want to play aggressive, I recommend upgrading operations branch and operative training branch.
Missions intelligence agency
There are three types of missions and one bigger agenda. Defense missions are easy and cryptography too. But if you want perform “aggressive/diplomatic missions” then you must build first intel network in opposite country.
Building networks takes some time. And when your network is strong then you could perform some types of aggressive missions which I describe you bellow.
Defensive missions
If your operatives doesn’t doing missions in another countries. Then they could to defend your country from attacks by other spies. It’s always good to have at least one spy at home or at least somehow improve your defenses to keep other powers from taking information about your country and your plans.
Diplomatic missions
Diplomatic missions are good if you need gain more support for your ideology…
- Boost ideology – helps boosting ideology from your country to another
- Propaganda – lover stability and war support of another country
- Control trade – helps you improves opinion on trade – the country should trade more with you
- Diplomatic pressure – increases the chances that undecided states will cooperate more with you
… but for me I don’t use this often. I have experimented in the past to see if control trade might help with getting more exports from your country to that country, but it doesn’t seem to help much.
Agresive missions
If you have enough strong your intel network then you could start these operatives…
- Infiltrate Civilian Administration
- Capture Cipher
- Infiltrate Army
- Infiltrate Navy
- Infiltrate Airforce
- Orchestrate Coup
- Prepare Collaboration Government
- Coordinated Strike
- Steal Industrial Blueprints
… this should helps you to prepare invasion to another country.
Cryptography
The last thing which you could do with your intelligence agency is cryptography. This department could help you with cracking enemy cipher. Which could you get some boost to planning plans for wars. Decrypting takes some time but offers you a lot of benefits.
Occupation and resistance tips
The hidden gem of La RĂ©sistance for me is occupation and resistance mechanics. If you manage to occupy another country, so you have to work more with that country to keep it under your domination and not have problems. The guerrillas in those countries will go against you if you have a dysfunctional police force.
The way is practically simple and that you have to choose correctly what units to send to the country. But in case you have free spies so you can send them on a mission to you occupied country and spies will help you accelerate the occupation to run smoothly.
More information about occupation, resistance and collaboration in HOI4.
Spies in HOI4 worth it?
I think spies pay off in HOI4, you just have to know how to play them effectively. I believe I showed you above and gave you some tips. It goes without saying that if I’m playing for a small country where I don’t have enough factories at the beginning I work with spies only in the later stages.
Which DLC added spies to HOI4?
Spies are in DLC La Résistance which we get in 25.02.2020.
More information about La RĂ©sistance DLC | If you have cheats then you could look on agency codes.
