Counterintelligence

It was bothersome to have espionage in the game without counter-espionage. Then it came to me that if enemy aristocrats were to do something against you, their effects would have to be generic so that players couldn't figure out the culprit out of experience. This eliminates the risk of  becoming boggled in writing more time consuming content, so from now on acquainted aristocrats might also spy on you too.

Presently, there is about a 20% chance that any aristocrats you meet might betray you at one point or another in the future. When you first meet them, they'll show a neutral 50% chance of being a threat in the future. Through Investigating/Stalking these aristocrats, not only you'll be given the chance to carry an action, but you'll also collect Intel modifying this value to better adjust to the actual threat posed by the target. You'll want to use units with high Intelligence for this, as low intelligence ones might be fed misinformation or simply misinterpret their findings.

Successive operations will be giving you a better idea of the target's true intentions, as this value won't move more than a 10% in the right direction per action. Therefore, if you do notice something weird you'll have to find the balance between terminating interested friendships blindly or gathering too much information while exposing yourself to further harm in the process.

This harm so far comes in 2 different ways. On the one hand, being spied on obviously makes spying harder for yourself, so you'll fail more easily in these endeavours. Not only it'll increase Local Tension now, but it might also make the target being spied on more wary and thus in turn prompt them to start spying on you.

The most obvious cause of harm however will be in occasionally doubling the loss of Merits and the increases of Local Tension. Depending on how many double agents you have among your aristocrat buddies and their level of treachery, you'll be more or less likely to get these events, in which case you'll be notified that the effects were disproportionate and espionage is suspected to have been involved.

I believe it's more interesting to cause harm depending on the player's actions than creating random events because this leaves us the choice of either smoking out the traitors or carefully behaving properly at least until we get a chance to deal with them.

I've been considering adding other negative effects as well, but we'll leave it at that for now.