Super Spy Doesn't Work?

I created a custom race with the "Super Spy" ability. When another race sends a spy to my worlds, I:

- See a spy icon on a tile they've sent an agent to and the production of the tile is listed in (red).

- Receive a red spy notification icon, which when left-clicked says I'm immune because of my Super Spy ability.

- See a reduction in production from the planet according to the production stat line at the top of the planet's info window.

As far as I can tell, I'm still being infiltrated and losing bonuses from improvements, despite my Super Spy ability.

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Also, I forgot to mention that I can't nullify these invaders either. I'm essentially helpless against spies. I click the Nullify button and nothing happens.

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Nullify still works... at least it works for me.

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I haven't tried it myself, but I did notice something in one game. The Korath surrendered to the Krynn and the new planets still had spies on them. I really think they should be eliminated, or at least returned to their owner's spy pool.

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That makes sense to me, Evil Muppet.

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I just quit a game to post about this exact thing..
..the spy option was driving me crazy in every game, i had one game with the terrans, where half my planets were nearly shut down with almost 20 spies from all the other civs because i was the #1 civ. even with the top economy and enough money to spend the total %25 of my economy($1000+) on espionage i could not get rid of them.

fed up, i tried a game with the Krynn who are supposedly 'immune' with their super ability and ran across all the same problems as Kinjiru posted about. (and ive also seen what evil muppet mentioned.)

my two sense; **and before i get my head torn off, i realize that the spy feature has not been balanced and that this is only a beta**...its an interesting feature but needs a lot of work. i suggest a planetary improvement or a technology that helps to combat spies, like the secret police? in theory the super spy ability sounds perfect, but it doesnt work as advertised at all. i posted before about this topic with other suggestions which i dont remember now..cant wait for the finished game and a balanced spy network. when is that again?

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Yes I feel your pain. I was playing games on Challenging and Tough today and each time my planets would eventually be taken over by spies.

For nearly each spy I made I had 3 to deal with on my planets. I've kind of given up on the current beta build for now. Its REALLY annoying losing all your tiles to spies without any kind of realistic, fun or even reasonable way to get rid of them.

I have seen my own spies stay on planets that I've taken over. But it couldn't have been for more than 2-3 turns at most and then they either died or went back to the pool - I wasn't keeping track sorry.

@bastianex: yeah... i know exactly what you mean about the fanboyism here that attacks anyone who hates a feature/subsystem of the game. I'll leave it at that.

I like the idea of spies but I'd rather they cost a lot more... have a chance of failure and you should be able to get multiple options on how to use them. Each with varying degrees of % success.
* Sabatoge - what we have right now, they "turn off" the tile. Same system to remove them.
* Destroy - Blow up a tile.
* Delete research.
* Steal research.
* Steal ship?

There should also be a chance that upon failure the race that sent the spy can be revealed leading to war or at least worsening relations. Right now it just seems like the empires are paying off children to vandalize stores, factories and government offices and when the cops arrive they just run away never to return.

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

I suspect the spy-overflow thing is affected by your basic map settings. I'm in Mar 2229 of a gigantic-map game, am ranked 2nd overall, and have no enemy spies.

But I wonder if using your own spies might trigger things. I've finally just broken down and put a couple of spies on Terran worlds in my influence area. I really don't want that to be seen as aggression, but currently I can't see any explicit way to do the older simple intelligence gathering without placing an agent that is also attacking.

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I've been able to keep on top of espionage by sticking as much money as I can afford into recruiting agents, giving me a large pool. I can keep myself free of spies for quite a while, and it's only late game that I start to get overwhelmed, but then I'm usually far ahead anyway.

It seems to me that the problem is the time it takes to recuit spies, and that you can only recruit one agent at a time. If the other races gang up on you, sooner or later you're going to have most of your empire shut down, and there's very little you can do about it. You can't even tell who's doing it so you can take other measures.

It would be good, in my opinion, if players could construct Agencies on their worlds, which add to their agent producing power. If you find yourself getting attacked, build a few more agencies to help you crank out agents faster.

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I think the current system could work with enough balancing but check out this thread. I for one find this posters ideas superior to current system in every way. Less micromanagement atleast.

Espionage Thread

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I have to agree that the spy situation is not ideal atm. Only played one game so far but i suffered spy overload as well. I was leading by a fair margin (used the "hive" special which is really handy) but i was getting swamped by spies, it's obviously because as leader all the races gang up on you and while realistic there has too be something the player can do about it.

It seems like spy production doesn't scale with the rest of your production very well, that or the AI has spy offense on too high a priority.

I must say though that i agree with the other posters that espionage needs a little bit more still though. Maybe add a building or something that helps combat spies but make the tech fairly expensive.

Anyways, as it stands i think the spy situation is not balanced at the moment.

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I think it's not too well balanced on each end. I can send spies in and they get caught immediately often, and if not, often within a few turns. Even with a high espionage rating. Then the computer can dump a ton on you suddenly and if you haven't kept a lot of spies sitting around, you're in trouble. I think there should be a better way to neutralize spies and that spies should have a harder time infiltrating to begin with, but once there, they're hard to catch. The AI seems to use them poorly or very intelligently depending on your point of view. It seems like the AI holds onto spies as an ace up its sleeve, stockpiling them, then zergs you with them, either from one AI opponent or several. I don't necessarily think this is a bug, but it sure makes for a frustrating game sometimes.

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