In TA, you need to place those agents on another civ's planet(s) in order for them to gain info. The more agents you place with a particular civ, the faster you will gain the intel you want. This is one of the changes re: espionage from DL/DA.

You can stop training agents now. 22 should be more than enough to carry you through the rest of the game. Actually, without knowing it, you have done a good thing. Getting an early lead in agents in this game can be very advantageous later on. Good luck.

There's a place agent button on the espionage screen, and theres one on the main UI bar at the bottom left, right next to the create rally point button. Or you can click on a planet and click the spy button on the bottom of the UI bar as well.

The lack of a sturdy in-game help/manual system is probably my single greatest gripe about GC2. Your basic question about espionage was all over the forums around the time DA was released, but if I'd been depending on the PDF and the game UI, I'd have been left with too many questions for too long.

One of the most radical sets of changes from DL to DA was espionage functionality. The devs replaced the budget-centered view with a unit-centered view. For many of us, this introduced a major frustration: in DA, you can't gather intel without directly harming the target. On the other hand, before DA, you couldn't do a thing with your intel spending but read reports.

I hated the change at first, but now I want both options. Also, I could *almost* swear I read some TA rumours that the expansion would restore budget-based, non-aggressive intelligence gathering along side the sabotage agent system. But maybe I'm confusing my own past pleas for change with casual chit-chat about dev plans.

I too would prefer to see a more comprehensive manual or help system, but for the specific instance of the rally points, aren't they covered in the tutorial videos?

I'm not using them much either. One interesting idea I saw over in the strategy forums was to place agents on morale improvements on a planet you're about to invade, to make the information warfare tactic more effective. By lowering the morale with your agent(s), you get more people to join you during the invasion.

I'd stick to the econ buildings until you have them all covered or run out of spies. BCs are an empire's lifeblood. I became way less hostile to the new system after someone around here suggested this strategy and I tried it out.

I've seldom had more than a dozen spies except very late in a game, but even a dozen can seriously slow down an enemy economy. I think it can have a double-whammy effect when you make an enemy burn out their whole spy corps while you still have a horde choking their cash flow. Be sure to keep a few in reserve for defense and to slap right back on the Econ Capital if you can.

...wow, THAT was an interesting couple of turns. I'm playing on a Gigantic scale so the game's still chugging along, but going from nothing to Medium to High in two turns on each of the other nine races makes my life so much easier.

Slapping 25 spies on somebody usually means I run out of econ buildings. And morale buildings. And I start working my way through intelligence buildings. It was kind of interesting to note that every race out there was making research buildings like crazy. I guess if you jump ahead in the tech race they start getting a little bit crazy about research.

Was very interesting to note too that only 2 out of the 9 opponents have researched Planetary Invasions three years into the game. The new research prices have made it so they get to choose to fight in space (The Torians and most of the other races), fight on the ground (Drath), or go absolutely crazy on military research at the expense of everything else (The Korath, go figure.)

I guess it does mean my troopships aren't going to face much resistance, but still, that's a little odd.

One thing to keep in mind about having massive spy services: some mega-event theorists around here suspect a high spy count in one empire opens the door to that Swarm o' Spies thing, which could quickly eat up your whole corps even if you have 20+ agents. If you haven't disabled mega-events, that is.

...and if you have that large of a buildup of spies, the odds are that you have CE buildings on all/most of your planets. My current game, I have 50+ spies in use and the event went off. I had a total of 3 spies placed on my planets since they were in the process of building up after gaining them via invasion.

Sadly, not too long from that, the disease event happened reducing all abilities to zilch and then I got that cleared up. A bit longer the 'all uninhabited planets 2 sectors from have been increased to PQ16'. The AI never was able to recoup from those hits since it was still fending off the spies and disease, while I colonized and terraformed those planets to PQ19.....all 30 or so of them. This game is over, the AI just doesn't know it yet.

That and I did it on a large map with the Iconians on Tough....Yes I had tech trading on and I have stock markets now...it's hard to keep below the 20k mark even after netting 1 spy a week.

Throughout the game when I saw I had a huge surplus of cash per week, I'd just devote the money to spies. When it came time to use them I was able to plop down a good 30 or so on the Thalans to try and snip their economy and thus their war machine. Ever since then, my economy/spy spending has been better than theirs so I was gaining spies faster than they could nullify them.


I haven't done any tile cost analysis, but now in TA the AI seems to be using spies more/smarter and I'd rather take that 25% morale building and know I don't need to spend more money on spies to defend that planet.

Hrm, I also remember myself going WTF!!! when I saw the Iconians got their Espionage bonus changed from +50 to +100. Combine that with some hefty bonuses to research (and creativity) and I'm a fairly unstoppable fleet (bought every +hp tech from other races, tack that on top of my hp techs and you have a sick ship) that's just sitting back and laughing at the Terrans/Thalans/Kyrnn.

I think so, but it's somehow still present in DA.
More of an AI algorithm glitch than a bug, to me though. There will always be some sort of exploits to find in such a huge & complex game - add the multiple trees factor to the equation and you get yourself a heck'o'fride, that's a given.