Gus_Smedstad
Jan 12, 2008, 06:56 AM
I'm finally playing Beyond the Sword seriously, and I'm having trouble getting a handle on the use of espionage.
I do understand the mechanics. Initially I found espionage frustrating, until I understood that it was pointless to obsess about defense - the benefits the other players are getting are things they've paid for. You can delay it, but you can't exactly stop it, any more than you can stop them from getting research they've purchased.
Well, with one exception. I've yet to actually use a Great Spy as anything other than Golden Age fodder. Is he more resilient than regular spies?
They do seem pretty fragile, to the point that it seems pointless to deploy them until the techs are running 10x a spy build cost. Sometimes they manage to get into a city and wait the full 5 turns for -50% cost, but other times they die the moment they hit shore. That's one aspect of the rules that is pretty much opaque to me.
On the offense, most of the espionage missions don't seem that interesting to me. Sure, it's annoying when the AI poisons one of my cities, but typically it doesn't seem terribly important. The obvious exceptions are stealing technology and, if you can time it exactly right, putting a city into revolt just as your army attacks to eliminate the defensive bonus. The latter seems tricky to time, so mostly I'm thinking about technology.
Even with the full stationary bonus, typically stealing tech costs about the same number of espionage points as researching it. So actually spending money on espionage doesn't seem like a very good deal. Yes, eventually you can get large spending multipliers, but by the time you get 'em, your science bonus is in the +75% per city range anyway.
The only clear exception is Spy specialists. A scientist specialist generates 3 beakers, and the spy specialist is 1 beaker and 4 espionage. That's a 2:1 trade, so if you have a specific target in mind, that's helpful.
Targeting a single civ at a time seems like a good idea. When I started playing, I left the espionage weightings alone. Once I started trying to experiment with actually using espionage offensively, it seemed like the thing to do was spend all the espionage on the civ whose tech I wanted to steal.
So how do you use espionage? I gather it's a big part of catching up with the other civs on higher difficulties. I've found the series has gotten harder for me as it moves along despite a decade of experience, and I'm hoping that understanding the proper use of espionage is will improve my play significantly.
- Gus
I do understand the mechanics. Initially I found espionage frustrating, until I understood that it was pointless to obsess about defense - the benefits the other players are getting are things they've paid for. You can delay it, but you can't exactly stop it, any more than you can stop them from getting research they've purchased.
Well, with one exception. I've yet to actually use a Great Spy as anything other than Golden Age fodder. Is he more resilient than regular spies?
They do seem pretty fragile, to the point that it seems pointless to deploy them until the techs are running 10x a spy build cost. Sometimes they manage to get into a city and wait the full 5 turns for -50% cost, but other times they die the moment they hit shore. That's one aspect of the rules that is pretty much opaque to me.
On the offense, most of the espionage missions don't seem that interesting to me. Sure, it's annoying when the AI poisons one of my cities, but typically it doesn't seem terribly important. The obvious exceptions are stealing technology and, if you can time it exactly right, putting a city into revolt just as your army attacks to eliminate the defensive bonus. The latter seems tricky to time, so mostly I'm thinking about technology.
Even with the full stationary bonus, typically stealing tech costs about the same number of espionage points as researching it. So actually spending money on espionage doesn't seem like a very good deal. Yes, eventually you can get large spending multipliers, but by the time you get 'em, your science bonus is in the +75% per city range anyway.
The only clear exception is Spy specialists. A scientist specialist generates 3 beakers, and the spy specialist is 1 beaker and 4 espionage. That's a 2:1 trade, so if you have a specific target in mind, that's helpful.
Targeting a single civ at a time seems like a good idea. When I started playing, I left the espionage weightings alone. Once I started trying to experiment with actually using espionage offensively, it seemed like the thing to do was spend all the espionage on the civ whose tech I wanted to steal.
So how do you use espionage? I gather it's a big part of catching up with the other civs on higher difficulties. I've found the series has gotten harder for me as it moves along despite a decade of experience, and I'm hoping that understanding the proper use of espionage is will improve my play significantly.
- Gus