After reading some more of these posts I realized that espionage plays very differently depending on what difficulty setting you are playing on.

I always play on Suicidal and I am NEVER the #1 race until very, very late in the game.

On Suicidal the other races are always more powerful. It is an upward struggle.

So spies aren't being targeted at me until very late in the game.

If espionage is painful then maybe you might try playing on a harder setting so that the emphasis won't be on you.

Of course I have no idea what settings people are using, so perhaps everyone complaining is also playing at the highest levels, but in my games I am NEVER being ganged up on until very late game, and by then most races are extinct.

- Livonya

This thread answers all of the questions I had about espionage in DA.   That said, I really like how it all works and think its a large improvement then the abstract way it was handled in GC2. For example, if I am wanting to drop the pop on a particular planet I could target the farms with spy agents without even declaring war. Then I can plant a spy and also see exactly what structures are built on a particular planet. If I am wanting to greatly reduce research, I can do that as well. So this will allow me to catch up to a more advanced race by planting spies on research facilities throughout their empire. It all allows for much more strategy and option choices available then what we had before DA when it was just a slider to allocate funds.

Wouldn't it be more effective to take out their economy improvements? No matter what kind of production they have, once their economy tanks and bottoms out, they can't produce anyway, and hurting their revenue also prevents them (eventually) from countering your own spies.

Just wondering. If slamming factories is a better tactic I'll try that.

Personally, I don't target economic targets, this doesn't do much damage in the short term.

I try to keep my spies more focused.

For instance I want to stop them from finishing the Galactic Bizaar. I will then drop 3 spies on that planet. Target 3 factories. This gives me the delay I need. I might only need to leave them for 1 or 2 weeks, and then I can remove them.

You don't have to leave your spies. You can do hit and run missions. Sabotage a planet, and then pull back.

I try to always use at least 3 spies at once, and then I pull them off in a few turns. This way some of the spies are still active, and can be used again.

Most likely the AI won't be hording their spies for defensive reasons. So they might not have many available if they aren't being constantly assaulted, or they might only kill one a turn.

If you place one spy a turn and they die each turn then you got 1 turn out of your spy. If you place 5 spies and one dies every turn then you got 15 turns out 5 spies. It pays to use them in concert.

I have been playing around with spies, and so far it seems way more effective to build up a surplus and then do hit and run missions.

I have a test game were I have 10 spies available. And now I am just trying lots of different strategies to see what works most effectively.

So far the best strat I have found is to delay the construction of unique buildings. Why spend 2,000 or 3,000 BC to buy a unique building when you can put that into spies and then use the spies to make sure no one else gets to finish their unique building first.

- Livonya

I dont let other civs build any galactic wonders I care about anyways. The ony time this is tough is in the very beginning when youre racing the Arceans to build diplo trans(when you wouldnt have the economy to build spies anyways). After then, everyone in the galaxy is too busy waging the wars I engineer from behind the scenes to bother me much, or to rush production on any wonders.

Once again, spies worthless in this regard.


You can supress industrial production to *some* degree on a single planet, but unless youre playing on a tiny world map or with settings that only allow each race to have a few planets, the many other industrial worlds each race has makes this insignificant.

Again, worthless.


The hundreds to thousands of BC you need to spend to proliferate spies high enough to place them effectively, are much more dangerous in your bank account, buying ships, factories, labs, allowing you to run at 100 % productivity while keeping a lower tax rate (hence higher growth, hence more money, etc), buying techs, buying econ and diplo bases, and paying off other civs to go to war. You can do much, much more damage doing these things than aggressively investing in espionage.



The only reason to build spies is because its now in DA been forced on the player as a money sink, for defensive purposes (to nullify other agents). Mandatory Excessive cost for negligeble benefit = Money sink. Its simply a tax on your economy without redeeming qualities under the guise of "gameplay depth". Sure...its more involved than it was in DL but nearly as worthless, except now its involuntary...and I think as more and more players get over the novelty of the new system, theyre going to become increasingly resentful of the new tax.



Im happy that Stardock put effort into trying to add more depth to the game in this area, but they went in the wrong direction. They tried to make the worthless espionage concepts in the game more complex, instead of trying to establish real value for espionage by limiting the wealth of info players are easily able to obtain from turn 1.




Some questions to consider:

* How much more apprehensive would you be about starting a war with someone that you didnt know the exact number of ships, with the exact specifications , or how many troops you needed to invade with, by simply clicking on one of their worlds on the map? (unless you had good intel)


* What if you didnt know even what weapon types the opposing ships had, until you faced them in battle the first time? (unless you had good intel)


* In the Diplo screen (where you can get pretty much all the info you need to know),all the races now seem to have "Trademarked" technoloigies that they generally wont trade because its too important to them. If I know my political speak, this means "Top secret". How much more of a jump would it be to have each race classifiy x number of their techs as "top secret", and they dont all explicitly show up on the diplomacy screen? What if agents you placed on enemy worlds could be actively assigned to try and "research" one of these "top secret" techs as long as they were on-world?



* What if you didnt know exacly how much money races had, and exactly how much you could get from them per trade (unless you had good intel), and diplomacy required more risk and guesswork (like it does in most other games)?


* Shouldnt uncovering an enemy agent be seen as an act of war by the nation that sent it, or at least as a serious affront that would alter relations several stages? Meaning that youd want your spies to be as skilled as possible before you start placing them recklessly on worlds, meaning an espionage skill tech tree.






Im perfectly happy to consider espionage as a "cost of doing business" if its going to get me the answers to questions like these. But nobody "needs" espionage the way the game is set up right now, except for the fact its now been set up as Tax on the economy with no real payoff other than as a pesticide.

I think you should be able to deploy agents to some other places. For instance, putting an agent at your Initial Colony or Capital City would inspire discontent (lower influence) and lower approval. It would make the planet more likely to revolt to you.

In GalCiv1, you had the ability to destabilize empires using a slider. So, an agent at an Initial Colony would do this for you. The amount of damage done to morale and influence would be connected to the 'spy skill level' techs.

Placing an agent on a starbase would lower the effect of the starbase- a Military Starbase that provides a 2 armor assist wouldn't do anything. You'd be allowed to select which module to neutralize, like on planets.

Placing an agent on an asteroid base would lower the industry points produced- or even cause the asteroid to revolt and beam resources to you instead.

I recently had a scenario where espionage worked brilliantly. I had colonized a heavy gravity 19 planet named Ratha I within my neighbor, the Terran Alliance’s backyard. They had possession of the system’s two remaining planets, Ratha III with high PQ and the other, Ratha II of lesser quality, thus dominating the sector. Further into the bout for influence, as I lacked the military might necessary to simply wipe them out, and I wanted to avoid open war if I could, my planet Ratha I dipped in its moral and influence. I started building influence star bases and upgrading them, while keeping taxes low. This is where the spies earned their costly keep.

I sent in three agents to hamper the Alliance’s political capital, which they’d constructed on Ratha III, along with a media center, and a cultural center for extra measure nixing a farm or two as well. This along with my star bases was enough to lower the systems’ overall moral and influence to the brink of rebellion, and soon after they flipped to join up with my empire. Not a shot fired, and now I have complete authority over the Ratha star system, thanks to my cunning agents

The thing I noticed too is that the more spies you send at once against a single opponent the longer it takes him to nullify them. If he does, have others in the works and standing by to hit him again. It's worked for me so far.

Also to note, and many obviously are aware of this, but economy is everything. I've noticed in DA that it's tougher to build up a hardy stream of income, so do this first and get it solid and steady, and then raise that espionage bar!