When playing with 8 civs, it feels like I spend all my time fighting off those """"" red spies that pop up faster than my tax income allows me to fend them off. For me , this new feature is nothing but a pain in the backside. It takes the focus off the real meat and potatoes of the game, and gives me the feeling that I am playing a game made for 5 year old kids. Who ever heard of a single spy stopping a factory from working after all! Spies steal information, so lets get with it.
Or at least give a person the option of turning the darn option off so that spies only spy, like it was in the first game. To add some reality to the game, the civ should have a way of increasing the difficulty or security level on a planet so that the level of espionage spending for each planet would be different. Or, maybe the tech tree, could have a graduating scale like port guards, security police, counter terrorist unit, central intelligence agency... to increase the security of all planets in the federation. Spies could then be discovered by the police and the stolen information recovered. Most important to me would be the discovery of which civ sent the spy!
I hope you will consider my comments.
