espionage upgrade!

Howdy.
Let's face it, using spies to gain "high" levels of intel on other races is just not worth the effort. All you really gain is the ability to look at their planets, something you can do in the spy placement screen regardless of your intel level (although it's a smaller display, the improvements are still instantly recognisable if you're familiar with the game). I've been going through entire games neglecting espionage completely, because a) the information gains are too small, and

sabotaging alien improvements are extremely costly since they tend to "nullify" a new agent within four weeks tops, usually within two.

The game boasts that at "HIGH" espionage levels, you know more about them than they do, and yet you can't even see what their tax rate is. I suggest some real gains: where their sliders are, what their income and expenditures are, what they're researching, where their ships are going, which planets they're focusing on if busy attacking, what their short-term, mid-term and long-term plans are, even what their general strategy is. If espionage can help one determine where their weaknesses are, THEN I'd say it's pretty damn useful. Looking at their planets is fun, but not worth 300bc per week.

J.

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

You can already see a lot of that with existing levels of intel. You can't tell exactly what planets they are targetting, but you can see where their ships/fleets are targetted, and that's usually good enough.

You can't see where their sliders are, but you CAN see their tax rate, income/expense details, current research topic & how long to research, ship maintenance expenses, etc in the foreign relations tab (under Reports IIRC). Espionage can tell you what their weaknesses are, it just won't spoon-feed the data to you. The info is there, analysis is your job.

If your spies are getting neutralized that quickly, you're doing something wrong. Specifically, you're deploying them one at a time. Drop 10 on one civ at one time and you might lose 3 or 4 in the first few turns, but the rest will linger for some time. I have two spies on the Altarians in my current game that have been in place for at least a full game year.

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My big problem with spies is generally I get more bang for my buck with ships at anything past 2000bc a spy. That's ludicrous - plus I've had spies on the Torian words, 7+, for a full year after having max intel and they still aren't stealing any techs.

How irritatingly useless.

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300bc a week is fairly cheap in the long run lol.

Don't forget the stealing of tech at Advanced levels when you have spies still placed. There is a benny.

As for strats w/ spies, as Willthemailboy said, a wave of spies is important as the AI won't necessarily be stockpiling spies to combat 10 or so. They will chip away at them however, but as long as you can produce spies as fast or faster than them, it will sort out in the end.

Spies also make for a great economy killer. As long as your economy can deal with long-term spy combat, you can sell some stuff to the AI to empty it's treasury, then pile on the spies until their spending becomes more than their income...target morale and econ tiles (not necessarily farms if you can kill the morale buildings to make them dive in morale, if no morale buildings then axe those farms). Once you see them faltering due to long-term economy crunches they will back off of the spy spending and you'll really have them all good to go for war

Hint, when selling techs pre-war and pre-spy econ crashing...go for planetary improvements that they share the tech tree with you...their social spending will crunch them as well.

Same goes for some high end race you want dethroned (not by you though) while they are at war. If you can clamp their economy, their war won't last too long.

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