Did we get an option to place spies on tiles they could not harm so we could do "passive intelligence gathering?"

Oh, Sir, I beg to differ. Your cadre of spies can be the single most powerful weapon in your arsenal. I'll give you an example from one of my games. Late in a large, common game, there were three civs left. The Terrans (me), the Iconians, and the Korath. The Iconians owned over 2/3 of the galaxy, and I owned the remainder, with the exception of the two Korath worlds. The Korath and Iconians were at war. I had been feeding the Korath bc and ships to keep them alive and keep them the focus of the Iconian's attention. I had started the game with max civs and minors, but now just the three of us remained. The Korath would be gone very soon, and then I was next. I just didn't have the resources that they had. What I did have, were my spies. The Iconians had been in a state of constant war for quite some time, thanks to me. That meant that they needed a constant supply of ships. Each world that they conquered they industrialized. They became very efficient at producing ships, but also had a huge budget. This is where the spies came in. I looked around, and found six economic capitals that they had taken from other civs. Off went my spies. They neutralized two, but as I had built up a stockpile, they were immediately replaced. Three turns later they were bankrupt. Everything ground to a halt. Now it was my game. My fleets chose their targets carefully, and started chewing up their military. It didn't matter if I lost a ship or two- I could replace mine and they couldn't. I completely cleared the galaxy of their military, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it. Then came the transports. I invaded planets that made money, and avoided those that were bleeding bc. This was getting ridiculous, so I made a spore fleet (tech stolen from the Korath by one of my SPIES), and put them out of their misery. In short, six spies, three turns, game over. THAT is what spies can do.

It's good to be human.

Yes.

Running through the campaign right now, the Dread Lords seem to be utterly incapable of dealing with spies. My tactic for the missions where I've had to deal with them so far has involved, finding their home planet and dropping spies on each of their industrial bases. Suddenly they are unable to produce units and cease being a worry.

I didn't like spies at first until I started learning how to use them. As others have said, the best things to target are economic resources especially if they are close to the line.

I enjoy the new spy system, but I think it could be expanded to be even better. For example, I'd love to be able to use a spy to destroy or temporarily disable an enemy ship, or to steal money from a trade route. Or use spies to cause political dissent, making my enemy lose control of his senate.

in the current game I'm playing, most of my money comes from tourism, I have also stockpiled a ton of money, that I just like to have sit around.....spies really wouldn't be much of a concern for me since 1) I can nullify them quickly 2) if I let them sit on tiles wouldn't affect me much since I don't really use huge economics systems as much as spreading out my off-setting costs by putting trade centers ( highest upgrade atm) on most if not every system, at least 1 or two tiles, how can you really hurt a person with spies with 50 K in the bank for emergencies, mostly tourism from influence(half my economy is tourism), and spread out infrastructure of tiles? Computer couldn't be programmed to really affect me with just a few spies....

Of course, I'm playing on a normal difficulty game, which is probably one of the reasons why I'm owning everything so easily......

reading this article makes me realize I probably wasn't using spies as well as I should, and should stockpile spies more......and actually look thru various systems more also to see which systems are more juicy.......

spies are really powerful especially on smaller galaxies with few planets. There's nothing like dropping 25 spies on the enemy on the same turn (took me some 15 years to accomplish this number at 1% investment). The most powerful thing i've discovered is that putting spies on farms cripple the population and add even more hurt. The thing is that you only need the spy on the farm for 1 turn make the population evaporate and lose 10s of billions of population. the next turn you can put the spies on a production tile while your opponent in financial shock from the loss of population and tax revenue. It makes it that much harder to recover from the spies

I think Spies should be left alone in Galciv2. Wait till some other game to try out a new system. However, Super Spy ability is useless right now, and needs some help.

I mostly agree with you. I would, however, like to see some kind of 'soft' espionage in the game; a way of gathering intelligence on other races without doing them harm.

I think that a 'super' ability should be something that no other race can achieve. The Krynn, the Korx, and to a slightly lesser extent, the Drath, have abilities that can be emulated by any other race.

So I don't quite understand how the slider to build spies works, is it based off how many you have already build, how many you have in your inventory, or how big your economy is?

The slider allows you to choose the percentage of your economy that you are willing to spend toward the next spy. You can designate up to 25%. Each spy you train will be more expensive than the last. This shouldn't be a problem, if you are growing your economy as well. I have had as many as 26, in preparation for a blitz, without a noticeable hit to my economy. The number of spies in your inventory is not a factor.