Disable Agents

Won't this prevent the collection of intelligence? I thought in DA that in order to increase your espionage rating against an enemy civ that you had to put agents on their worlds...

If you create just one spy, then you can still click on "place an agent" on an enemy world and scroll through their worlds to get intel on each world. Whether you consider this cheating and choose to do so is up to you.

Yes

For those of us who believe intelligence and sabotage are fundamentally different, unmodified DA also prevents intel collection, at least as a goal in its own right.

Currently, there is no way to build a "file" about an AI unless you want to do at least moderate damage to them. I look forward to Stardock polling about what changes/additions people want most for the first major update to DA. I suspect this spying problem will rank high for many folks.

I must say i would have preffered the old version for intel gathering and the new spy system for sabotage. i wonder if the powers that be could just add the old verison back in and keep the new version just for sabotage..

The Galactic Core Forums - Home of the Metaverse Council

I too would like to see individual espionage sliders work like they did in Dread Lords (by race) while your total espionage spending is used for buying agents. This seems like a straight forward solution that would please everyone.

I also don't like the new system of espionage. The original system was kinda nebulous but to me it fit the scope of the game better. This new system is kinda ridiculous in that it's kinda crazy to be managing individual agents on the intergalactic scale.

If the new system is kept, it'd be nice to be able to do something with agents other than destroy. Like maybe just plant an agent in an a civ purely to gather intel (easier mission, harder to get detected) or purely to try to steal tech (harder mission, easier to get detected).

It would also be nice if there was a chance of figuring out WHO is sending the agents, so you know who to put the smack down on with REAL troops, or if there was some kind of diplomatic hit involved. You could even tie it in with the ethics system in the game:

Sir, we've discovered a single spy, who is somehow singlehandedly halting the production of our entire manufacturing capital, as ridiculous and amazing as that might sound. You ponder the frailty of the cosmos, and then...
(good) Ask the spy nicely if he'll reveal his origin, then let him go with a slap on the wrist (+5% diplo bonus, no chance of discovering who sent the spy)
(neutral) Slap the spy around a little then throw him in jail forever (+0 diplo bonus, 25% chance of discovering who sent the spy)
(evil) Use any means necessary to pry out the origin of the spy, then send his remains back to his home world in seperate packages (-5% diplo penalty, 75% of discovering who sent the spy (25% chance of killing the spy trying))

That's one of the most interesting alignment-related ideas I've read in a long time.

Personally I much prefer the new system. In the old one it was much, much too easy to max out intel on everyone in the game with a minimum of spending and absolutely no interaction. Not much of an espionage system. What would be nice is the ability to place an agent without disabling a planetary improvement. That, to me, would resolve the whole issue without reverting back to the trivial, silly "intelligence crawl" of DL.

I agree, it would be nice if you could toggle Espionage/Sabotage for each agent. Since I'm a relatively benevolent overlord (spineless rookie), I'd like to be able to keep an eye on my rivals without hurting them. Overall I like the new system, I just wish I could declaw my agents...

I really like Swicord's alignment suggestion for removing agents too.

The option i can see to rectify this without having to undo all the work done to the game is this...
Maybe Frogboy can make it so we can place an agent on the Capital or Colony base of a planet as well as the improvements. Placing your agent on the colony tile would give you the intel bonus and return you some intel without 'sabotaging' the infrastructure on that planet. That way we get the best of both worlds, those that want to cripple the AI can still place agents and those that just want the intel can do that too.

The Galactic Core Forums - Home of the Metaverse Council

Drengin's suggestion is a good one IMO.

I also think Drengin's suggestion is a good one. So much so, in fact, that I was about to post that very same idea until I saw that he'd beaten me to the punch

We really just need some way of telling the agent what to do after they are placed...

Shipyard
Spy - Increase Intelligence Reports
Delay Production - Slow down the rate of ship construction
Sabotage Hull - Reduce a ships HP

i agree, and i'd want to change it. but i don't think gathering intel should simply revert to what it was before (unless it's that or nothing). i like the fact that it's difficult to gain intelligence, but i wish i could do it in a way that was harder to neutralize. perhaps to incorporate the old system would be to allow an counter-espionage slider, so that you can attempt to neutralize their intel-gathering without throwing away all your spies. just a thought. i like it that you can counter espionage, but it's not the best system i'd have imagined.

That was Voqar's neat idea; I just seconded it

At least the old system was optional...which was fitting for something of such dubious merit. This time( though still of dubious merit) its forced on you as a money drain, just to keep agents off your worlds.


I too would like to simply disable it and be done with it until some more thought goes into the system. In the meantime, an option to disable it altogether in game setup, or better yet, maybe a toggle to choose "dread lords style" ( not because it was so good, just because it was much less annoying) espionage, would be very welcome.


Ive given it a chance now, and tried not to have knee jerk reactions to it. But unless theres something Ive missed (always possible), its not much more than a distracting money-sink.

See this thread for more in-depth on-topic discussion:
WWW Link

The money sink is the problem, mostly because it appears to be yet another exponential increase, like the population approval thing. This limits the number of agents you can purchase for all practical purposes to a rather small number, depending on what you consider to be acceptable spending. True, you can spend 25% of your income on agents, but who can afford to do that? And what do you get for it compared to what you can get by spending the same money on other things?

This is the short version of my first experience with agents: Huge map, three oppnents, mid-late game. Every player has 20-30 planets with an average PQ of about 9. That gives >500 potential tiles which I can place an agent. By the time I got to agent 15-20, don't know the exaact number, I have to spend more than 10% of my income of about 4000 bc to get an agent every five turns. About half of the ones I bought went to nullify about one in four of the agents I got from the agent on every planet mega event. At this point, a new agent costs ~2000 bc and the per turn drain is almost equal to my wartime fleet of about 30 well armed medium sized ships. I noticed that the mega event chose no maintenance improvements first if there were any on the planet, so most of the agents were on banks. If freeing the bank gets me another 15 bc/turn, then it will take me about 130 turns or 2.5 game years to see a profit on that investment.

And that is just for the next agent. I have no idea what I would pay for agent #30 after another 10 increases in cost. All in all, I think the system is broken. There may be people here who can use the system as an effective weapon, but I strongly doubt that favorable circumstances to do this would present in every game, or even a majority of them. And even if you could win every game this way, who would want to? It would have to rank very high on the list of boring and passive ways to win. Frogby made a good case for not including multi-player in GC II, and I very much agreed with what he said. The devs for Neverwinter Nights II made the same arguments and I agreed with them too. They developed the game for the way most people actually played it, not for a vocal minority who live on Internet message boards. But isn't that what we have here? Maybe the beta testers like the new agents, a vocal minority if there ever was one, but from what I have seen that was by no means unanimous.

I think one one way to salvage the agents would be to allow us to remove agents by destroying the improvement they are on, if it can be destroyed. This would give us another option for dealing with agents at a cost that isn't game busting. I would think this would be easy enough to code compared to some other options. We would still be faced with nullifying agents on capitals and such, since they can't be destroyed, nor would you want to destroy them. Agents would be a costly setback, but not the bugbear they are now. Of course, rethinking the cost of agents would be nice too.

I'm part of that beta "vocal minority," but my response to the new system remains mixed and leans toward an unfavorable opinion (probably influenced by my preference for Huge and Gigantic maps).

I'd love to see a galciv2.com home page poll on this issue, something along the lines of: What do you think of the Dark Avatar espionage system?
a) I love it
I want to be able to choose the old system or the new one
c) I should be able to disable espionage
d) I want spending sliders for counter-espionage and intelligence gathering--the new units should be offense only

I think this sort of poll is too simplified. It limits the choices. By changing this features functionality From DL to DA, Stardock has clearly indicated that more breadth can be added to the espionage portion of this game. Repeated threads on this forum have indicated the problems with the current system. I would hope that the developers of this game would look at each discussion of this feature and consider how to expand it so that more people are satisfied. Let's not go too far in the direction of, "it's not perfect, let's throw it out." I'd rather go in the direction of, "It's not perfect, what can make it better."

Lot's of ideas exist. I suggest a moderator create a sticky thread that groups together espionage improvement ideas so we can keep adding to the suggestion pile.

Galen

Some really nice ideas here and it all goes for a mantra I have been over and over again. The current Espionage system is too simple, it does not have any flexibility into it.

Too bad Frogboy has somekinda obsession about the implemented system and its not likely they will change it. Atleast thats how I interpreted hes comments while the Espionage discussion was heated during DA beta.