Espionage

Espionage is a fancy word for all the diplomacy and backstabbing you will be doing to advance your bank's standing.

Diplomacy
The basic point of espionage is maintaining friendly relations with countries that you operate in. As relations tend to naturally decay over time, your goal is to keep them happy as much as possible. To do so, you spend Influence, generated automatically by your Espionage department. You can perform five actions:
 * Meeting
 * Gathering
 * Negotiation
 * Conference
 * Summit

You can also set up auto-negotiation, which will automatically perform the first three actions (depending on your selection) at the beginning of the turn, to improve relations.

The different relation levels are


 * Hostility (very bad, freezes assets)
 * Distrust (negative and reminder to do something about them)
 * Neutral (starting point)
 * Respect (enables starting wars)
 * Friendship (enables devaluing enemy bank assets and freezing them)
 * Worship

In general, you want the relations to be at least at Respect to give you more wiggle room and the ability to start wars at your leisure. However, be wary of spending your influence needlessly...

Revolutions
...as you will need a lot of it to ferment revolutions. Once you upgrade the espionage department, you gain the ability to start revolutions. This allows you to spend money to dispatch spies, who will identify potential revolutionaries in one of the six main regions of Eurasia and North Africa. Once identified, you can spend a lot of money and influence to support one of the factions and set up a breakaway state.

Note that revolutions happen not along national borders, but rather cultural and class ones. The newly created state will comprise regions of matching cultures, religions, or social regions and you have fine control over what the end shape will look like. However, it is a very useful tool for expansion, as you are automatically granted a banking license in the newly created state and all enemy banks lose access to assets they have there.

Revolutions are expensive, but they're very good at breaking up large countries into much more manageable chunks that you can play off against one another.