Spies

Hi all,

Spies are still a little mysterious to me. I understand they are there for three purposes:

- to wreak mayhem on the selected planet improvements of an opponent
- to counter foreign spies from doing the same to me
- to gather general information on a civilization

It's the last that has me stumped so far. In previous versions, I simply allocated funds for espionage...and waited.

Leaving my spies hanging around doing nothing doesn't seem to help. Do I actually have to place spies (over, and over, and over ......., and over again - in a long, expensive battle of attrition) to gain intelligence?

Best
EJMH

strategies

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Hi!

I understand they are there for three purposes:

With current game settings is the main purpose of spies to kill your economy while you're using them. Producing the 20th spy costs as much as a serious war. In my small games it's usually cheaper to conquer a civ than to get rid of spies on my planets.

BR, Iztok

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Leaving my spies hanging around doing nothing doesn't seem to help.

Nope. But they don't cost anything to maintain.

Do I actually have to place spies (over, and over, and over ......., and over again - in a long, expensive battle of attrition) to gain intelligence?

Yep.

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The fourth major thing that spies do is steal technology. I've had spies bring me as many as 30+ techs over the course of a long game (admittedly, that was a spike in performance, but 15+ is still nice.)

Part of the secret is that you seem to need to get High or Advanced Intelligence level on a civ before stealing gets to a useful probability. So what I do is hit each civ I encounter with a series of spies til I get Low Intell, then switch any spies beyond 1/per civ to the next civ. When the one that is left behind at this stage attrits, I just let it go for that civ for awhile.

After I have Low on every civ I can reach, I focus spying on one civ at a time until I get Advanced, or at least High, on each one in turn. Just keep plugging them in there. Surprisingly often (but less than half the time), a target civ will seem to sort of accept the situation after awhile and stop policing so aggressively, so you will get up to 3-4 spies on a civ. Once I reach Advanced, or High if I have 2+ spies on that civ, I move the focus of my spying to the next civ, while attempting to maintain at least 1 spy on the civs that I have good knowledge of.

If you are trying to limit the activities of a civ, I suggest nailing any money or population improvements. The AIs always play "calculatingly" close to their resource limits, so sudden shortages in those two areas can have at least minor cascade effects. If you are trying to NOT hurt an ally, while building your knowledge base on them, I suggest spying on (ta-da) research facilities; it actually hurts them the least, and seems to annoy them the least. After all, allies can trade with you for their techs.

Oh, and as far as I can tell, the AI is not any more able to determine who is dumping all those spies on them than you are. I've never been able to notice any increase in an AI characters "ticked off" factor when I've been doing extensive spying on them, not even the time I had 1.5 planets worth of spies on the !! Korath's !! 2 planets. (Stole him blind, though!)

I know that there are not a lot of spying fans on these forums, but I like to play ideally bloodless, conniving strategies, going for alliance or influence or fully-teched-out tech wins, so I hope that helps.

Spying could use a couple of good governor options, however, to target them and maintain the spy pressure on a civ without having to click-place-replace each spy (Frogboy - hint, hint).

drrider

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(Repost fron DA forum)

While I am not a big fan of the current DA spy system, I have figured out a few tips and tricks to make it usefull. Under the Dread Lords spy system you just set your sliders on the first notch as early as possible and forgot about them.

The Dark Avatar system is obviously very different. On the other hand it is not as obvious how to use it in a efficient manner. Others have discussed what to target to use spies offensively, but I am going to concentrait on how to use them to gather info.

The first thing to note is that the magic number of spies is 3. If you have three spies or more in a given civ, you will gain information quickly. If you have 1-2 you gain info very slowly. I reccomend NOT sending any spies to any civ unless you can send 3 or more at a time.

The second thing I noted is to only keep you spies in any one civ until you have the moderate level of info on them. At this level you can get the full report of what techs they have and you can check their ships to see where they are going. In the early stages of the game this is 99% of the info that you want anyway. Getting this leve is easy and should only take you 5 turns to gain with 3 or more spies. After you have moderate info on everyone, then you can go back and shoot for higher levels where you find it necessary.

The last thing I have noted is to never hord spies for defence. I was one who was appauled at usuing my spies to cripple civs who had done nothing to me, so I just built up my spy levels to what I thought was an impenatrable defence (around 20.) This seemed to work out well as although I was being constantly attacked, no one could get through the sheer numbers I had. Then I got the 'every planet in the galaxy gets their own spy' event. I was playing in a gigantic galaxy and had over 250 worlds in my empire! Needless to say I never got rid of all of them and they were a constant thorn in my side. Because of the interactive way that mega-events work, the more spies you have, the more likely you are to get this event.

I have given up on using spies to actually steal techs. I have never found a consistant way to do this, so I have relagated it to the catagory of the occasional random bonus and not something you can work toward.

Scincerely,
Scintor

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I have learned to load a planet up with my spies before invading it. Create a lot of them, then put all on the planet you intend to invade. It seems to shrink the enemy's defense troop numbers. Also, it does up the chance of gaining techs, as it seems to raise the intelligence i get on the targeted civilization. You will lose more of them if you have less intelligence on the target race. But as time goes by, a spy is just a spy...

But as I said, I use them to distract the planet's defenders before going in. Then I liberate them.

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