Espionage broken in TA

Are you saying spying doesn't work against minor races? Or that it doesn't work at all? If the latter, have you actually placed any agents on any other race's planets?

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.

Ahh, I begin to understand now. I'm used to throwing cash at the problem and over the next couple of turns, getting back results. I'll try throwing agents at people instead.

Is the agent-placing requirement actually spelled out anywhere, or is this something people have figured out through experience?

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 espionage system was changed in Dark Avatar, and the TA manual (though not yet updated for TA) does cover it (see page 32). In addition to gaining information on the civ you're spying on, an agent placed on an improvement on a planet will partially disable the improvement's function.

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'll agree with that, it took me forever to figure out how to set a starport rally point .

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've been finding agents pretty much a waste of time. I spend money on one, send it into a planet, next turn it's been found out and it's gone, repeat adfinitum, regardless of the planets I send them to.

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.

Well, having just made a whole bunch of agents, I'm experimenting with placing *all* of them on one opponent at a time. Sure I might lose 1-2, but 20+ agents gets you a lot of information in a hurry. I can also do a serious number on somebody by suddenly disabling every financial and/or morale building I can find.

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.

Here's a suggestion i've written a looong time ago - can't remember which thread but, it was somethin' like;

AIs do seem to 'forget' their work-in-progress-buildings somehow... so, place a spy on the enemy's yet to be completed Econo-capital (for example) and i assure you, you may very well get to an overall Medium level if you're lucky.
As with any other pending assets shown on the planet map with hammers.

Always keep a single spy in idle mode to inspect & view surfaces of a specific race empire, while consulting the side-bar planets list to find how much turns they have left for the current build and off you go. A kept agent is better than a wasted/nullified one!

The more spies directed at a single target race and their many planets, the faster you can exploit the advantages, too.

...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.

That's the other thing, a civ that's spending as much as you in espionage can kill your agents as fast as you place them. It'll take them a lot longer to kill 20 spies so you can shove them all in, just lose a couple, then move them to another civ when you hit the desired intel level.

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.

Of course, if you're the one with the build-up you'll have the agents available to neutralize those spies, but the AIs probably don't.

...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

Points for GC2 variability: more than one poster around here scoffs the CE Center because we think them a waste of valuable tile space. I suspect this preference indicates a long-game bias (like I have).

On the WTF channel, I also don't recall seeing anyone yet mention 50+ spies?!? I typed in another thread today about how having a spy-mass advantage could give you an overall advantage if you fought through the Swarm o' Spies, but darn, if I'd had that many the event wouldn'a bothered me at all.

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.

Wasn't this Brad's #1 bug he squashed during the TA beta?

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.