So I'm tooling along in a sandbox game.  Just me in my custom race against seven other races and eight minor races in an immense galaxy.  Now, I understand that the underlying premise of the campaign is that the Dread Lords are lurking in the background, working towards destabilizing all of the sentient races.  But along about turn 100, WHAM! _25_ enemy spies turn up on 25 of my planets.  How do you eradicate them?  You expend one of your Spies to Nullify one of their embedded Spies.

The thing is, your first Spy will cost about 100 BILLION credits.  Each subsequent Spy costs more.  By the time you get to Spy 004, the pricetag is about 800 BILLION credits.

I shudder to think what the pricetag for Spy 025 will be.  And since you can create Spies at the rate of one per turn **at best**, that means enemy Spy 025 has had 25 turns of damage inflicted on your economy.  And enemy Spy 024 had 24 turns of havoc.  Etc. 

If I did nothing but invest in Espionage, I still would not have been able to buy enough Spies to Nullify the incursion.

Just ran the progression of escalating costs and it looks like Spy 010 costs 51.2 TRILLION credits all by himself.  The nine before cost about 51.1 TRILLION credits.  And I'd still have another 15 Spies to pay for.

Would there ever have been a James Bond 007 if he came with 6.4 TRILLION British pounds price tag?

I almost get the feeling that the idea is to NOT Nullify the enemy Spies.  It actually might be cheaper to simply take the losses involved from their sabotage than to invest in the domestic Spies needed to eradicate the incursion.