Espionage needs spiced up badly

from GalCiv2 Forums
Spying is boring.

At this point in time it's not an interesting game mechanic at all. You pay x credits and get y amount of information in z amount of time.

There's no spice to it whatsoever. You might as well replace it with a button that takes 500 credits and gives you all the information. Or you could even make it automatic, since there are few situations where you wouldn't want to spy, if the game is long enough.

Basically in a long enough game everyone knows everything about everybody and there's no way to stop it.

It needs to be drasticly expanded to start being fun. There should be ways to prevent your empire from being spied upon. There should be ways of feeding bad information to empires that are spying on you. And lastly, getting caught in high-level espionage should be considered an act of war.
12,871 views 12 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It's been announced that an upcoming expansion will add more depth to espionage.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
An upcoming expansion, or an upcoming patch? Because having to pay $20 to get a non-boring form of espionage would suck.
Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Expanison pack. It seems to me if they are going to significantly re-work/enhance it, an expansion pack would be an appropriate place to provide it. The expansion pack will have a lot more than just espionage enhancements.

Tony
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I'm not sure if it will be a parch or expansion. GalCiv1 was enhanced significantly before the expansion was released.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The total lack of counter-intelligence is appalling. ATM, espionage is simply 'bought', with no resistance from the target, no way to 'lose' levels (unless you stop funding), and no way to 'protect' valuable information.
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Expanison pack. It seems to me if they are going to significantly re-work/enhance it, an expansion pack would be an appropriate place to provide it. The expansion pack will have a lot more than just espionage enhancements.


No, that's not an appropriate place for it, considering the fact that it should have been in the original game to a much greater degree than it was. It's so incredibly simplistic right now that it's essentially broken. Might as well just remove the option from the game and automatically give each empire the information about all the others.

What does espionage as it stands right now add to the game? Nothing. If you added a few credits to the cost of something else and just made every empire omiscient it wouldn't change the game one bit in the end.
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Brad has mentioned before that espionage will be enhanced and deepened significantly in future updates. There will be several major feature updates that will be for free. They do plan to make one or two $20 expansion packs in the future. I think they said the first one would be available around the end of the year. The free updates will be before then. the 1.1 update (primarily a feature update) will be available in a few weeks. Brad has not yet released a list of what will be included in the 1.1 update.

Yes, espionage needs a bit more depth for strategic game play value. Streamlined enough to keep the pace of the game up, but enough depth to integrate into various strategies. At the very least, there needs to be some kind of balanced defense against it and you should always have to pay for espionage to keep it going. The whole pay once and forget about it approach isn't very sensible, but Brad sounds like he has alot of plans for this in the future.

In the past for galciv 1 Brad made alot of gameplay changes and feature improvements for free. They had one major free update that added alot extra features and content to the game (1.20) Then they released an expansion that added an editor, campaign (there was no campaign in galciv1), and two new races with their own ai, plus a host of other updates.

If that still sucks to you, then I guess you are s.o.l
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It needs more than a bit, I'd say. I understand that some features need to be charged for, but as far as putting a basic espionage framework in the game, it needs to happen in a free update. If they want to go above and beyond that and include advanced espionage in an expansion, that's fine.
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Goodie-goodie! I also thought that soying was a weak point. The question is: will it simply be brought to be similar to GalCiv1, or will there be some strategy implied with the spying system?
Reply #12 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
If they're looking for models, Space Empires 4 has one of the best systems I've encountered.