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Assuming you have the La Resistance DLC, you’re able to get access to spies or operatives.
Building an intelligence agency will activate this feature, and doing this will just give you one operative.
To increase the number of spies & operatives in your control, you can do any the following:
Upgrade the Intelligence Agency
Hire a special advisor
Complete a National Focus
Be the faction spymaster (this is arguably the best method)
It’s important to note that the maximum number of operatives a country can have is 10 total.
Upgrading The Intelligence Agency
One way to add one more operative into your arsenal is to purchase five agency upgrades.
Each upgrade costs a certain number of civilian factories, which is shown in the Agency Branch Upgrades Tab, for thirty days.
Hire A Special Advisor
Another way to get x1 more operative is to hire an Illusive Gentleman as a political advisor for 150 political power.
But you get even more with this strategy.
Along with adding an operative, hiring an Illusive Gentleman will also make your agency upgrades faster by 15% (from 30 days to 25.5 days).
Complete National Focus
If you have the No Step Back DLC, you can have at most 5 (yes, five) additional operatives beyond what the Soviet Union/Russia has.
In the army branch of the focus, you can two additional operatives if you finish the SMERSH and Organization of the Partisans national focuses.
However, these focuses can only be done if you’re at war with a major power – because you need to finish the Desperate Measures focus which requires it so.
If you’re interested in building atomic bombs in your campaign, the Soviet Atomic Bomb Project focus is a must.
Aside from a hefty bonus in atomic bomb research time, it also gives you one additional spy operative.
If you decided to be communist in your Russia campaign, you could also have one more operative if you finished the NKVD Primacy focus.
If you chose Joseph Stalin to be your leader in the USSR communist path, you can also have one more operative when you finish the Behead the Snake focus.
Be A Faction Spymaster
The best way to increase your total number of operatives is to be a spymaster for your faction for 50 political power.
For this to be possible, you must have at least three intelligence agency upgrades, be independent (or at least a dominion), and be in a faction.
But the calculation for the number of operatives that you get is a bit complex.
It requires counting the total factories of each faction member and adding weights to them.
The weights are as described:
If a faction member has a total of 0 to 9 factories, it contributes no operatives.
If a faction member has a total of 10 to 49 factories, it contributes 0.25 of an operative.
If a faction member has a total of more than 50 factories, it contributes 0.5 of an operative.
If you add all faction member weights and round it down, you can find out the total number of operatives that you’ll get with this method.
