Spy ring mega event and Influence trading

I've had the spy ring event (the one where an agent appears on almost all of your planets) happen in 3/4 of my games, which seems a bit frequent. Also, in Huge maps and larger this can lead to a very very long list of spies. I have had as many as 62 spies that needed to be gotten rid of. When the maximum number of spies you can produce is 1 per turn, if you can afford that kind of cash, it takes forever to get rid of them all.

Also, I noticed that some of the AIs are willing to trade away a bit too much of their influence. I don't know how much this had to do with me being chummy with the Terrans, but as the Altarians I was able to trade for 3/4 of their influence buy selling them world colonization techs in one turn. Some of our worlds were intermixed and this lead to the defection of Earth and, eventually, about 80% of their planets to my side

I also wonder if these advanced colonization techs can be weighted based on the number of planets in the map that use them?

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If you had 62 spies than I assume you're playing on abundant-all, and the entire point of these 'percentage' mega-events is to discourage planet-whoring and make you pay for it. Jagged Knife, Fundies, and a few other events all take away a percentage chunk of worlds. In a fairly balanced game, everyone will lose the same amount of worlds, but if someone is seriously dominating, they can lose nearly twice as many as someone else.

Advanced colonization techs have always seemed overly-valuable to me. I've only once seen a game (okay, maybe a bit more than that) where the advanced colonization was really, very necessary, and it was because I was playing with a few planets and had 3 class 12+ planets, all with toxic atmosphere a few systems away.

Yes, colonizing these worlds can give you a good bonus, but the AI almost NEVER invests in them, and is more than willing to throw ludicrous amounts of money at you for them, whether or not there's even any planets to use them on.

As for the worth of IPs, honestly I've never seen the AIs make any rational deal for them. I can throw a few thousand IP at them and they'll offer a couple hundred credits, but I have to pay tens of thousands of credits for a few hundred of their IPs.

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I had an old post where I reported getting around 250 spies from the spy ring event. What seems to precede it is building up a large reserve of spies and not using them.

Scincerely,

Scintor@aol.com

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Uranium, that's interesting. I was reading somewhere else here about how AIs investing in colonization techs is what lets human players get ahead in suicidal/tiny games...

I can't remember who posted it, and I have no idea if it's still true.

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