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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

No, that's not permitted.

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

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.

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?

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