Diplomatic consequences of spying?

See here.

They can't get mad at you since they don't know it was you.

Spying is completely anonymous, so no civ can tell who put the spies on them. So no, there are no diplomatic consequences.

So it seemingly just was bad luck i got a declaration of war shortly after the civ nullified my spies - thanks.

Does this also hold true when there is only 1 AI left? By process of elimination, it should know that it is you who is placing all the spies. Can minor races place spies? Can they even make spies? There should be diplomatic consequences. In many cases, it wouldn't matter, but if you are trying to buy time to build up your forces, it could be a problem if the AI declares war before you are ready.

I call for a bit of in-depth added to the spy system too, for the purpose of diplomatic issues. The AI already recognizes when you pull the trick of placing transports near their planets(I LOVED IT the first time I saw that hilarious "Stop...just stop" message.) I don't see why they couldn't randomly discover where a spy came from too.

I agree. It's a nice touch in Sins where the AI message you if they think you raised their bounty. A similar behavior could add some risk to using spies in this game.

We need to be able to spy on a certain area; technology, military, government, economy etc.. and each of them will either give us a success or failure. I'll leave it to you people what success could mean and what failure means. Any ideas?

Wow, that just reminded me of the game PTO, on 16 bit Super Nintendo. TBS game based on World War II in the Pacific. You could plant spies for passive info, and each turn you had the option of sabotaging fortifications, aircraft, supplies, or morale.

Kinda off topic, but thanks for the nostalgia.

Yeah, i really would appreciate more depth in spying. I rarely use spying because its just boring - u click on a building, disable it and next turns the spy will be nullified and you have to do this again. Especially in later game phases i have no motivation to spend my money setting spies on a few planets just to lose them a few rounds later. Your suggestion with different areas to spy is very good, but it will need some balancing. It would be really cool if you can set economy spies eg, that derive a small percentage of the enemy`s economy towards yours while he loses it. Or government spies that better your diplomatic stand towards a civ - but for the risk that the swindle gets discovered and you now get a malus to your diplomacy. Espionage spending could modify this. Maybe there really should be an chance that spies get discovered and impact your relations which in turn could be regulated by the spendings and would give them more plasticity. Military spying could sabotage built ships and let them have less hitpoints or weaker weapons/armor. Spying should become less clicking on a building and more roleplay depth. Of course this would be a lot of work - i do not know if the devs have the time and the patience to enhance spying that way and test it for balance (which the community could overtake - it works well as we see in TA)

Well to me, the current system is based more on how MUCH advantages you can get from any spying rounds on a given race without being twarted fast enough by the opponents.

I sure would also like a more complex features_filled type of espionage context (I won't try repeating all what everyone & i've suggested in the past, cuz it's HUGE).

One of the key points to spying is that (if you're lucky or smart enough) once you get to the High Level you benefit from straight access to opponents' planet surfaces to inspect as you wish, reports are complete, etc.

True sabotage would certainly be a welcomed option, though.

Lemme give you all a few tricks to raise your chances at an optimal (almost undetected, at times) distribution of active spies;

- Hit ***only*** the buildings which are upgrading. The AIs just seem to forget those quite often.
- Gang up on them planets. A single lonely spy has much more higher odds against it... three_four--- can seriously up the ant in your favor.
- Start with the nearest threat(s) in this ethical order; Neutral-Good-Evil.
- Never, ever bother with the Krynn - unless you have tons of inventory! (i'd recommend at least EIGHT). You'd spend tons of BCs uselessly as they can swiftly dispatch of anything present.
- Always keep a single spy into your roaster in idle state. It is quite helpful to just use that one to simply scan around every now & then.
- Once the enemy begins to target your Capitals & other important stuff, i'd say that your priority has shifted to nullification until it's all cleared up.

The essential is to stay ahead of your choice of potential target races.

An example of my previous idea would be, let us say I want to spy on an enemy government, I would train spies like usual and place them on the enemy government and not necessarily a "building" like the current system. The more spies you put on an enemy government, the better, since the longer your spies are present and doing their job the more they do damage as long as they dont get all nullified. As long as you got at least one spy your ok. There should be a time meter, let us say you were able to constantly send spies on an enemy government and you reach week 200, you would be at a stage where you can break alliances for example. Once you lose all your spies in a given area (eg.government) or all of them get nullified, you lose the abilities and the empire will regain their initial diplomacy rating.

Example:

week 50 = gathering info stage
week 100 = sabotaging diplomacy rating (eg. 70% to 50%)
week 150 = sabotaging relationship with one race (eg. friendly to neutral)
week 200 = Able to break the alliance with one race.

*PS: Counter-espionage should give the receiving empire an advantage. Training counterspies should cost less then normal spies. Lets say you invest 6 spies on an enemy government and that it cost you a total of 600 bc, 6 counterspies would cost you
300 bc plus any other race specific bonuses or rebates.