Traitors

[流れ星]

One of my councilors developed a suspicious tendency to fail 90+% success chance missions. With rather insulting mission reports like "Success probability 96.94%, roll 97%". My diagnosis: He's the second dumbest double agent in the history of sneaky business.

Of course the appropriate treatment for such a person would be 10 years in the uranium mines followed by 10 years in the smiles room, but that particular councilor has 22 persuasion. Training a new one to the same level would take five years game time. So, what can I do about the situation?
1. Can I turn him back into an obedient slave dog again? If yes, how?
2. How do I even find out who the mole is working for? There is no torture button. Why is there no torture button? Are we the goodies now? I've infiltrated North Korea so I could nuke Kazakhstan. I should have torture buttons.
3. Is there any way to use the situation for my own benefit? Feed the mole false intel or poisoned project data or something like that? I didn't get the impression that the game is sufficiently complex for advanced cloak&dagger shenanigans to be implemented, but maybe I've missed something there.

[SpiderKhan]

1. Spam inspire on the double agent. With some luck it will un-turn him.
2. I think you can investigate them to figure out that they're turned (maybe to find out to who?), however I've actually never had an enemy AI turn a councilor of mine in any of my games. Whether that's due to luck or a tendency to use inspire a lot is anyone's guess. The AI investigates its own and fires them immediately 90% of the time after doing so on a DA, so *shrug.*
3. Not really directly? Theoretically having a double agent means that your dudes are gonna be targeted more by the faction that has it, and you could then try to use that fact to more easily discover agents from that other faction using surveil, or to catch them out by using stuff like protect councilor while hoping for crit fails, but that's a hell of a stretch. So it's kind of like a form of honeypotting. It's definitely not worth the fact that the other faction just has permanent level 2 Intel on everyone in any case, as should be clear if you've ever turned a councilor and gotten up to severe shenanigans.

[Damedius]

Investigate your agents and find out their real loyalty. Inspire them to get them at least above 20.

[流れ星]

Thanks, I'll try that. As Fortuna wills, that mole is my only agent with both the inspire ability and a high enough persuasion skill to effectively use it. Guess it's org micromanagement time again.

~~~~~

Edit:
That was surprisingly effective. I inspired the traitor councilor a couple times, also did the same with a second suspect and, just to be on the safe side, gave one or two inspire treatments to each of my other agents too.

Big surprise, suddenly all my agents could do several missions in a row without being detected. Before the treatment they were always detected by two or three factions right after they left their hiding spot and went on a mission. Looks like there was more than one mole in my council. At least two, likely more. For years. And I didn't notice a thing, just had the occasional vague suspicion when they did something improbable like failing a 93% mission with a 94% roll once in a blue moon. Could be perfectly coincidental, right? No reason to get paranoid over a baseless hunch, right?

The moral of the story: Always make sure your persuasion agents can use the inspire ability and do use it routinely. This means no criminal background and no suspicious (or was it lone wolf?) personality allowed on persuasion agents.

If the developers read here, please get rid of the decimal digits in the double agents' mission reports. Even I could figure out that these numbers are fake.

[Morti]

i guess i had one too : servant had knowledge of my councilors ( even after holydays in honolulu ) 2 inspire missions on my 2 "crap but usefull agent ( they can set up policies, advise, defend interests or take over when good councilors have more skilled tasks ) who where known by the enemies 80% of the time, it worked ( then kill all the skilled agent from the servants )

[Pyro Hawk]

Yeah, Inspire is the ability to want to use to flip back a Turned Councillor. It's also good for raising their Loyalty before they get turned which makes them harder to be turned in the first place.

Well, unless you are tossing a >20 Persuasion Councillor at them with up to 64/128 Influence. I do find it very amusing when my Turned Councillors in the Servants or Protectorate are their highest loyalty at 14-17 Loyalty.

Even more amusing is that after the early game period where you are challenged to get any Councillor over 10 in a stat, let alone multiple stats over 15 across all of your Councillors put together, I always make sure that the Councillor which possesses the Inspire ability is the one that I Turn. If there's multiple with Inspire, I assassinate the one/s with lower Espionage because that way the Turned Councillor is better protected against being uncovered as a traitor.

It has the wonderful benefit that even once the enemy faction has learned which Councillor is the one I turned, they have to dismiss them losing any benefit from XP or traits the Turned Councillor had. It's only if they're missing a Councillor with Inspire (that has at least not pathetic Espionage because otherwise someone's going to assassinate them soon) that I Turn whichever of their Councillors they are currently using as their Investigator.

Usually followed by assassinating those Councillors with lower Espionage if there's multiple, just like with Inspire. After all, Councillors can't investigate themselves, so if the one person looking at all the others is the one you Turned, then you are perfectly fine. At least until someone Inspires them, which is why those are the priority targets because the AI will infrequently randomly do that.