Espionage exploit?

yea i felt the same way here is my post on it


https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=421&aid=136862#1062566

Excelent find OP, Iam sure it gets tweaked in the next beta. For the moment I wont be using agents on AI farms

This can be prevented by building a specific structure, which is unlocked by researching counter espionage. I'm not sure as to what its name is, but it prevents spies being placed on the planet this structure built on. I haven't seen the AI take advantage of it yet, but I haven't seen the AI spam spies either. Since the AI isn't so focused on spies, its possible they have yet to consider defending against it a significant concern.

P.S. This is a yellow tech, unlocked by one of the diplomacy techs. I believe its the one after the one that unlocks trade.

Have not yet had time to get down and dirty with the new tech tree, just about to start my first DAbeta 2 game.

But I feel that disabling a farm building with spy should not immidiately kill all the extra population enabled by farm building. Instead it should give negative pop growth instead. What the negative growth rate should be when these buildings are disabled is up to developers I guess.

I think is is called Counter Espionage Center

But I feel that disabling a farm building with spy should not immidiately kill all the extra population enabled by farm building. Instead it should give negative pop growth instead

for some reason the quote is not working on my machine, but I agree with the above, when you delete a farm on a planet you capture because there are too many, or for what ever reason, you don't kill off the population right away. People just leave until it gets down to the level the planet can support.

If the population is dying from food shortage, I would suggest 2 things:

- Morale lowering. A lot.
- Maybe "food route", where you could send a planet's surplus in food to another one?

Sir Nasty, thanks for pointing out your post on the same topic. You spelled "farm" correctly in your first post there, so I don't know why my search didn't pick it up.

I think this would be much more balanced if an agent placed on a farm simply stagnated population growth until removed or, as posted above, even made population growth slightly negative. This is much too powerful as it is, expecially as a precursor to invasion.

Another solution might be to make spies not immediatly available once removed. Once removed a spy would be unavailable for a given number of weeks before you can plant it somewhere else.

It would prevent sending spies from planet to planet and cutting down opponent's pop too fast.

sending spies from planet to planet and cutting down opponent's pop too fast

Yes, that was why I pointed out the effect of moving spies. The way this works now, it would be possible to create a wavefront of mass genocide with your planet-hopping spies that preceded your invasion fleet.

I doubt that the effects of agents on a single type of improvement will be something that we can mod out, but hopefully the devs can either remove it or tone it down as suggested above.

But I feel that disabling a farm building with spy should not immidiately kill all the extra population enabled by farm building. Instead it should give negative pop growth instead

That sounds spot on to me. It's definitely something that needs looking at.

Hey everyone, thanks for all the input, it's always appreciated.

re: the original topic -
Your "Basic Farming" improvement grows enough food to feed 4 Billion more people, providing 3 mt/wk of food.  When you place an Agent on that farm, it no longer produces this food, and therefore your planet no longer has enough food to feed that 4 billion people.  You'll notice that your population max will go down by 4 million.  If your population was above this new max population, that amount of people will obviously die.  The reason for this is simple, when each turn is a week, and a portion of your population goes without food for that long, they cannot survive.  If your population was not maxed out when the max got lowered, and you are still below the new max, you do not lose any population.

re: the "Counter Espionage Center" improvement -
If you play as the Krynn, who have the super ability super spy, you start out with the technology to build this improvement on your planets.  If you don't play as the Krynn, you can still research the tech tree to get the Counter Espionage tech, and then build this improvement on your planets.  You can only place one per planet, but it makes the planet immune to any agents being placed on it from that point forward.  I think we can all agree that building this improvement after already having some agents on your planet should not immediately nullify those agents, you should have to still do that yourself.

In general, we are still in Beta, tweaking numbers as we balance the game.  Agents may become harder to obtain, the AI may nullify them faster, etc...  As always, player opinions are being read and taken into consideration.

Thanks for playing,
Charles

The reason for this is simple, when each turn is a week, and a portion of your population goes without food for that long, they cannot survive.

The average human can survive 4-5 weeks without food as long as there is shelter and water.

Anyway,,the problem seems to be that spies can be moved around without 'returning to base' so to speak.
Putting in a delay between withdrawing the spy and it getting available for use again should solve that.

Thanks for playing, Charles

And thank YOU Charles for showing that we do not type our opinons in vain.
Although we realise that not everything we suggest will be incorperated into the final game,,it *is* very satisfying to know that they are considered

The average human can survive 4-5 weeks without food as long as there is shelter and water.

If you were to decommision your own farm, on one of your own planets, you would also lose it's population cap benefits, and any population that your planet has over the new population.  It works the same way if an agent is on your farm.

For example:
If you had a planet with a 6 Billion population cap, and then built a farm, it would bring your population cap to 9 Billion.  Hit the turn button a few times, so your actual population gets somewhere between your old max of 6 Billion, and your new max of 9 billion.  Once you get to this situation, decommission your basic farm.  Your max population will go back down to 6 Billion, and after hitting the turn button, you will have lost any population that was over your new max of 6 Billion.

Decommissioning an improvement and placing an agent on it, are similiar in their behavior.  Decommissioning an improvement gets rid of it completely, meaning all bonuses and the maintenence cost.  Placing an agent on an improvement disables any bonuses that that improvement gives you, but you still have to pay the maintenence on the improvement, if any.

Putting in a delay between withdrawing the spy and it getting available for use again should solve that.

The problem with this is that as a player, you may accidentally put an agent on one tile, when you really meant to put it one tile to the left.  Being able to quickly remove that agent, put it back in your pool of available agents, and then put is elsewhere is a decision we made early on.  Also, let's say you put an agent on an enemy improvement.  They don't have any agents to nullify the agent, so they decommision that improvement, but then build it somewhere else on the same planet.  If you only had that one agent in your possession, removing it and then having a delay before you could use it again to put it on the new location of the improvement would be irratating at best, and we'd have threads upon threads of people complaining about that instead.

Certain aspects of the game are still being tweaked numbers wise, but new gameplay elements added at this point in the project would do nothing but delay the release date, since the AI would then have to be re-configured to handle such things.

Thanks for all the comments about this issue.  We appreciate the dedication of all our fans and beta testers!

Charles

Can an agent be placed on the initial colony improvement? If so couldn't you kill the entire planet in a single turn by placing an agent on the initial colony and any farms on the planet?

Can an agent be placed on the initial colony improvement?

No, that's not permitted.

You cannot place an agent on the initial colony improvement or on the the Civilization Capital. In the Planetimprovements.xml file there is a new tag for Dark Avatar which is "CanHaveAgents" and can have a value of 1 or 0. So if you wanted to keep people from putting agents on farms you'd just have to change that value to 0 for all the farm improvements. I personally like the idea of agents coming in and "poisoning the wells" so to speak. I feel like it gives them a bigger role than just lowering production. Another pre-invasion softening up trick is to use agents to disable the morale improvements on high-pop planets and then use the information warfare tactic.

In the Planetimprovements.xml file there is a new tag for Dark Avatar which is "CanHaveAgents" and can have a value of 1 or 0. So if you wanted to keep people from putting agents on farms you'd just have to change that value to 0 for all the farm improvements.

This is true, just like you could also change the bonus amounts to your economy for market center or whatever.  But if you want to play a metaverse game, and you change these values, you'll be flagged as a cheater and your score will not be submit-able.  Modding is allowed in regular games, so go ahead and tweak as you like.

Charles

I dont like the new espionage over 5000b for 1 agent is a little ridiculous and it is the only way to to get to low, medium, high and advanced. should put back the old system and tweek the new one.

When a spy agent hit a farm, perhaps you could not lose all unsupported population in one turn.What i mean is that after a spy destroy a farm and you have 9 b people, while your planet can support 6 b people instead of losing 3 b people at once you lose 500 million people per turn.I think it would be more balanced and realistic.

Charles,

We understand the mechanics of why the population bottoms out but I think allowing 1 agent to essentially "kill" 3b population that easily is too easy. Especially since the chance of getting caught in 1 turn is much lower (hop the same spy around turn after turn, reducing all planets to ~6b, crushing their economy, making them easier to invade, reducing their overall influence and I'm sure there's more effects. Of course, you will, oddly enough, increase their morale).

It's probably too big a change to see it happen in time for DA launch but I would greatly prefer to see removing farms (either by decomissioning or spy) to cause a negative pop growth effect. It makes sence that it would also cause a negative morale from watching people starve but that might also be too efficient use of a spy.

You cannot place an agent on the initial colony improvement or on the the Civilization Capital. In the Planetimprovements.xml file there is a new tag for Dark Avatar which is "CanHaveAgents" and can have a value of 1 or 0. So if you wanted to keep people from putting agents on farms you'd just have to change that value to 0 for all the farm improvements. I personally like the idea of agents coming in and "poisoning the wells" so to speak. I feel like it gives them a bigger role than just lowering production. Another pre-invasion softening up trick is to use agents to disable the morale improvements on high-pop planets and then use the information warfare tactic.

One agent being able to commit acts which kills 3 BILLION people is just silly. Wasnt that the reason that planetary bombardment is not introduced, so that you wouldnt be able to commit such acts of genocide?

The reason I would consider this an exploit is because there is no way to counter it. You need to be given a fair chance to nullify the agent before they die. Sure, you could build a counter espionage center, but then all you do is plant an agent on a different planet's farm. You can't read their mind.

I think we can all agree that building this improvement after already having some agents on your planet should not immediately nullify those agents, you should have to still do that yourself.

Actually I completely disagree! I was playing a gigantic abundant game and got the 'every planet gets a spy' event and got 236 enemy agents! That number is IMPOSSIBLE to nullify. I have suggested elsewhere that building a conter-espionage center remove a spy and send it home rather than nullify it outright. This would allow gigantic empires to eventually get rid of such infestations rather than just shutting down espionage down for the rest of the game as it does currently.

Scincerely,
Scintor

I'd say that the best feasible way to avoid massive unwanted changes from GC II while taking the good from DA and not ruining the AI, is to not allow spies over farms like is now over initial colony or starport.