Any ideas on more meaningful espionage ? =)

Espionage should affect the following:

1) Price on buying off another race to start a war, after all, you know whos who and who votes which way.
2) Knowing what vote is coming up in the UP, not when - thats simple, what.
3) Affecting income, yours and their, successful spy attempts should net money, influence points, and/or techs not just techs.
4) A better chance at intercepting those infrequent random events, such as these colonists are in a drought or this mining colony is in danger, that way you can play the good race more often.. or vice versa.
5) The higher the level, the less fog of war surrounding enemy starbases, planets and fleets.

Thats just off the top of my head.

Good hunting.

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

This has been mentioned before - maybe divide Espionage into 2 or 3 catagories for each race: Espionage, Destabilization, and Counter-Intelligence.
Espionage would require a continuous stream of money to maintain your level, or at least a minimum amount per turn. In turn, it would let you gather information about their ships, planets, and starbases, occasionally steal technology from them, and eventualyl give you a massive diplomatic against them. If you built up the level to Advanced (or higher) on every surviving race and kept it that way for 6 months (24-26 weeks), you could win an Espionage Victory.
Destabilization would function similarly. Each race would have a slider you could set each turn. Activiating Destabilization against a given race would cause that race to slowly lose morale points up to a certain point for each level you had in Destabilization (ie -5 morale maximum cap at Low and -25 at High). At the higher levels, it would occasionally give you random events such as a freighter crashing near one of your planets and you recovering all of its cargo, a Planetary Improvement blown up on their home planet, etc. At the very highest level (and it would be set up so it would only work if you also had a certain level of Espionage against that race, so you couldn't destabilize a given planet without having at least a High level of Espionage against the planet's race) you would be able to pick and choose your targets in that race for a cetain amount of money that would be determined by their level of Counter-Intelligence and Espionage against you; options could include sabotaging starships, crashing ships in orbit, deactivating, capturing, or blowing up starbases, and sabotaging planetary improvements (poison a farm, so it stops producing food for 10 turns and kills 2 billion automatically, or scrambling a factory's automated computer system so it produces faulty starships, etc.). If the other race has a High or Very High level of Counter-Intelligence, there is a random, large chance they will discover who destabilized them and teact appropriately (ie war).
Counter-Intelligence would (finally, this is the only thing that really needs to be added) let you counter all of this. By setting your own level of Counter-Intelligence (its expense would vary with how advanced your civilization was and how many races were spying on you), you can shut down Espionage and Destabilization. It would cost about the same as the two others combined, with an added factor of 5% for every level of Espionage and Desbailization a race already had against you.

Espionage Victory.

Er.. what does an espionage victory really mean in real world terms?

Having your grubby fingers in every pie up to the point where you are the *real* power behind pretty much any scene I guess

Espionage per definitionem does not anything to destabilize another race's empire.
BUT the things Shadow mentioned is a much more plausible approach.
Except for the espionage victory though...
Galciv is of course not supposed to be another MoO3 in that regard, but I also think that it would be fun to have these adjustments. Training special individuals for the infiltration missions like in MoO3 would be putting too much emphasis on this aspect of the game though IMO.

wow, you guys have more ideas than I thought

If you really want to add some flavor to espionage, take a look back at Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Spies in that game could:

* Plant propaganda to reduce popularity with the government (reduce morale in GC2)
* Sabotage indivudual buildings, sometimes destroying them
* Steal techs
* Plant viruses in the computers that caused odd effects or sap money from their treasury
* Turn colonies against the governing body
* Recruit troops or citizens from one side to another
* Poison a city's water or food supply causing casulties or engage in some form of terrorism

Good stuff.

Recruiting citizens would probably mean those people deciding to move to another system owned by the destabilizing party which means more pop hence more tax. Sounds good.

well I would like the following ops

1) vs planetary morale: reduces drasticaly morale of a random planet
2) vs planet government: you take over the planet
3) sabotage vs planet: some building is destructed

4) sabotage vs ship / fleet: target is destroyed
5) infiltrate ship/fleet: you take it over
6+7) the same for starbases

8) sabotage research: target loses some % of current research (depending on success)
9) infiltrate economy: for some rounds the targets economy is cripling (receiving less cash)
10) steal cash

11) assassination of leader, causing imense disorder, the target civ cant do anything for a couple of rounds

any operation should be random only, so you cant say "sabotage this and that ship", the game would pick up any ship and try to destroy it etc

taking over planet/base/ship should be very very expensive with low to little success rating, the same for assassination

of course counterops should be possible. either by a new slider in the "inner" window or by new buildings that increase espionage points. the higher this counter value, the higher the chance to detect a secret operation vs the own empire and prevent it.

once a secret op is detected, it should drasticaly hit the relationship between the involved two civs, up to a war

I'd just like to say that if the espionage was to be given an active role (actually doing something instead of simple info gathering) you need strong counter-espionage options as well. Otherwise espionage would be far too powerfull.

That said, your spies could incite a revolt or just lower the happyness on a planet so that more people would join you in the informational war (invasion).

I would like to see some lore/backstory added to the game. Tidbits are revealed about specific races as you gain levels in espionage with them. If you gain levels with more than one race, you also get extras about their historical relationships. It would make it a little more fun.

On top of my head:

- Reduce morale of a target planet. This will only be helpful if low morale will actually hurt a planet. As it is, I've never seen planets go into revolt so the only hit is on pop growth and taxing. I could be missing something, though.

- Cause a planet to change a percentage of the influence to your kind instead of it's native kind (represents it becoming easier to defect to your side). This is a replacement for snatching a planet. Now, you need to be close enough to get it in your sphere of influence. It will only make it a little easier, it won't flip on its own.

- Destroy or block research. Target empire loses reseach points or won't generate them for a limited number of turns.

- Steal tech. Obiquitous aspect of the espionage game. I find it very frustating to lose tech to others this way so I'd love some form of counter-espionage.

- Reveal the position of Galactic Wonder/Achievements or inform when they are being built. Reveal planet with most research/manufacturing/population. This should make it easier to target planets then having to look through all of them.

- If caught, your standing should drop with all races, not just the target. After all, if you spy on one of them, what's keeping you from spying on all of them? There could be a modifier: spying on an enemy at war should not be as 'costly' as spying on an ally or good friend should be. The type of espionage could also be of importance. Plain information should not be punished or very lightly, subversion should be penalised heavily. I'm not sure of this, it might make espionage too costly.