The more time you spend with agents deployed, the more the espionage level will rise on your target race. Having more agents out there at once will make it rise faster.

I'd expect it's constant, but I don't know what the thresholds are.

Mmm, 2nd thought - what we're missing from the old method is the "fire and forget" aspect. You could just manage sliders and these agents handled themseleves invisibly. Now it's an active aspect of the game, where you have to choose where to put them and what to put them on (I noticed the AI left agents on non-valuable resources longer).

So if you miss being able to adjust sliders and forget about it, this new mode simply won't appeal to you.

If you enjoy crushing the production of a specific planet's unique resource (and replacing the agent a lot)... uhh... then you do.

I'm not overly enamoured with the new espionage sytem either. But its early on, and Im sure Ive not mastered it yet. But thats another point in disfavor...In DL it was maybe overly simple, but it was also straighforward and grasped pretty much instantly. With the new system, you feel like to have to discover the "trick" to making it work.


1) To a first time player, it seems like the espionage system involves placing an agent, generated at great expense, on a planet for a minor penalty on a single improvement, only to have it killed the next turn or so. Its very easy to see many players not bothering to include it in the remainder of their games based on this impression...I almost didnt.


2) So it seems, to get any bonus you have to save up agents( again, at great cost...producing agents in excess of the ones you need to simply keep enemy agents off your territory is prohibitive) and use them in handfuls ( Ive been instructed to use groups of three). Then if they survive long enough ( you still have to replace one every few weeks), youll start getting a higher espionage level...on that one race. The most civs Ive been able to maintain this on by the time the game is already essentially over, is two( out of 8 or 9).


3)If youre one of the top or three civs youre going to be beset by enemy agents, from all other civs, and just the cost of swatting these off your worlds will keep you from proliferating espionage.



So, is this by design...do they not want you to be able get esionage info on more than a couple races the entire game? Was espionage info so overpowered it required a nerf? It seems to me the only thing of any real value gotten from espionage was the ability to see ship destination (nice, but I live without), and the far too rare occurence of occasionally stealing a tech.


All other race info can be gleaned from the diplomacy screen, and you can use the "spy" function on planets when you have a single agent in stock, to see whats built on the planet. Weve always been able to see troop numbers (population), and enemy ships present(with their precise statistics!)


Sure you can use it to supress enemy production to some degree if you manage to proliferate your spies high enough to keep it supressed indefinitely, but I cant help to think Id do much more damage with all the extra money it takes to do so(and to maintain supression), rush buying ships, factories, and wonders, outright buying any tech I want with that bankroll, flipping planets with super-upgraded diplo bases, etc.


I'm assuming I have this wrong....it seems unlikely that much effort would have gone into something so fussy and so money draining, without equivilent payoff. What am I not seeing, or what have I not discovered yet?

I don't think there's a way to do totally non-destructive spying. However, I've found that if you put the spies on a marginal improvement on some armpit-of-the-universe backwater, it'll minimize the damage done and, in doing so, maximize that agent's life expectancy.

I'm pretty sure the answer is "No." Harrumph.

I would like to know that as well. Does anyone know?

This for me gets to the nub of the problem with espioange as currently implemented. In catual fact from turn 1 the player already has in essence a fully fledged spy network which can instantly tell you planet population, a detailed breakdown of enemy ship statistics, and a list of all the techs the other empires have researched alogn with their financial situation via the diplomacy window. What does greater espionage actually tell you? That planet x makes 85 credits a week? Was that information really worth all those BCs? Only at the highest level does further relevant information present itself. And of course the strangeness of having one spy in reserve to cycle through all an opponents planets has already been mentioned.

The sabotage aspect of spying could do with some tweaking but at least functions coherently. It just seems like most of the information you start with should only come with espionage otherwise you're largely picking up worthless information.

Good point.

One thing I'm curious about. Do AI races espionage each other? Posters have described having to keep a pool of spys available as every other race is spying on them. If I'm in a game with 9 other races and they all spy on me alone, I would be very hard pressed to keep up.

Galen

Yup. I'll frequently come across agents on alien worlds that I didn't put there.

in DA do u still have the ships u had in dl and the new ships in DA or r they all completely diferent

Yes, they spy on you in relation to how big of a "threat" you are. If youre the number one race, you will be assaulted by handfuls of spies every few turns. Just keeping up defensively will keep you from proliferating your spies high enough to spy on a single other race, for something thats not even *worth* investing in. Youd recieve much more benefit from putting the thousands youll waste in keeping up spy production to the rate you need to even fight off the hordes of spies assaulting you, into your infrastructure, buying techs, paying off other civs to decalre war, factories, ships, wonders, etc.


Im making thousands of BC a turn in my current game...turning the espionage up high enough to keep the 3 or 4 enemy agents I get hit with every few turns off my worlds would reduce my profits to a couple hundred a turn. I *know* how to grow my economy...I put considerable effort into doing so each game...its just not worth the investment for any other reason than its being forced on me.


IN DL, espionage wasnt great, but at least it was optional. Now its just a mandatory money sink. I guess the idea is they want to force you to build those anti spy buildings on every single one of your worlds...which is retarded. More effort should have been put into actually making a real "value" for espionage (limiting info gleaned from the diplomacy screen, limitng the info players can get for free simply by clicking on enemy vessels,planets) rather than in contriving a new system to "force" it upon the player, and hamper the players economy, which is already tougher to grow in DA.


I gave it a chance, but now I really just want to be able to turn it off altogether in my games. Not that I want to have it taken away for anyone who actually enjoys it...I just want a "disable espionage" checkbox. Some people dont like tech trading...I dont like the new espionage system. Its a curse. Please Stardock, lift the curse.