Infiltration and Disguise
Slip into rival cities under cover, pass dice-roll checks, and use disguise to trade, recruit, and operate inside enemy walls.
Loading...
Loading...
Infiltration is one of the indirect approaches available to a clan or wandering warrior in Huaxia: Warring States. A successful infiltration uses a disguise to enter a hostile prefecture's city and conduct business that would normally be impossible there: trading, recruiting troops, gathering information, or undermining the local power. Failed infiltration draws guards, alerts the city defense, and can quickly turn into combat or escape.
Infiltration is resolved through a dice-roll check rather than a pure skill threshold. The check has its own difficulty target, modified by the city defense level of the prefecture, the disguise quality, the team you bring, and the war state of the surrounding region. Both an unmodified low roll and an unmodified high roll matter; the system rewards investing in the disguise as well as accepting that some attempts will fail.
Recent balance changes have lowered the dice-roll target needed for a successful infiltration in the early game and reduced the initial city defense of each prefecture. The intent is to make infiltration accessible to new players while keeping it difficult later. Numbers shift between Early Access patches; treat the wiki guidance as structural rather than as exact thresholds.
Every prefecture has a city defense value that pushes back against infiltration. City defense begins at a relatively manageable level for new players, but climbs as the war intensifies. As clan armies clash and surrounding prefectures fall under contest, watchful guards and reinforcement levies make even a well-prepared infiltration team more likely to fail.
In practical terms this means three things. Easier targets in the first months of a campaign let players learn the system. Late-game infiltration becomes a real investment, often worth several supporting actions before the attempt. And a city held under siege or border pressure becomes harder to slip into than the same city in peacetime.
Once a disguise check succeeds and the disguise holds, the infiltrator can act in the target city as if locally trusted. The current build allows several specific actions in disguise:
Action | Effect |
|---|---|
Trade | Buy and sell with city merchants on local prices, including materials that would normally be flagged as enemy contraband. |
Receive services | Use city facilities such as inns, blacksmiths, and temples without being challenged. |
Recruit troops | Hire local levies and skilled retainers from inside the rival prefecture. |
Gather information | Listen in on city events, faction news, and rumour without setting off alarms. |
Sabotage | Set up further covert actions, including stirring discontent and undermining the rival's grip on the prefecture. |
These options are part of the broader toolkit alongside formal diplomacy and outright conquest. Some clans prefer to weaken a target through repeated infiltration before declaring war.
Infiltration is a team action. The party brought into the city affects the disguise check and the success of follow-up actions. Stamina cost for team actions, including infiltration, gathering, sparring, persuasion, and commanding from a distance, is shared across the team rather than placed on a single character. A balanced team trades off action stamina against the chance that any one member is recognized.
Useful retainer roles for an infiltration party include a face character with high social skill, a scout with high stealth and observation, and a martial follower for the moment if the disguise breaks. Pure-combat parties are loud, even in disguise.
If a disguise check fails badly, the city's defenders react. Guards converge on the team, gates close, and the infiltrator either fights through or flees. Persistent failures in the same prefecture raise the local alert level, making the next infiltration harder. A single bad check is rarely catastrophic; a string of bad checks invites the local faction to escalate the situation toward open hostility.
Infiltration is the bridge between the wandering and clan paths. A wandering warrior can use it to enter cities ordinarily closed to them. A clan-builder can use it to soften a rival before declaring open war. The conquest page covers the open-war path; the diplomacy page covers the alliance and trade path. Infiltration lives in between, expanding what a small team can do without raising armies.
Diplomacy: formal alliance, trade, and persuasion mechanics.
Conquest: open war and territorial control.
Wandering Warrior Path: the lone-actor lifestyle that pairs naturally with infiltration.
Retainers: companions whose social and stealth skills shape the team check.
Infiltration interacts directly with the player's criminal record. In the current build, constables in a city scene do not attack the player on sight, even when the player carries crime status. This means an infiltrator with an outstanding record in the target prefecture can still move through the city, interact with merchants, and approach the actions the disguise enables, rather than being forced into combat the moment they enter. A constable can still confront and arrest the player; the shift is that crime status no longer locks the player out of the city scene entirely.
This makes infiltration a viable late-campaign tool even for a player who has accumulated a record in the target prefecture. The disguise hides the player's identity, including the crime record, until the disguise breaks. When the disguise fails, both the local hostility from the failed check and any unresolved crime record contribute to how heavily the city reacts. For the full picture, see crime system.