Hi everyone, this is my first post to CivFanatics.

I love BTS, but man is espionage unintuitive and poorly documented. Can anyone explain how this could happen:

On the Foreign Advisor (F4), on the Techs screen, Huanya Capac has 180:gold:. Opening a trade with him shows the same thing: 180:gold:.

My Spy's been parked in Huanya Capac's city of Machu Picchu for five turns. Our espionage ratio is 461/1298 in my favor. I select the Spy and click Perform Espionage Mission. I mouse over Steal Treasury and the popup says:

Steal 817:gold: from the Incan treasury
2451 :espionage:: Base Cost
-20%: for Trade Routes
-15%: for our State Religion
+41%: for Distance
-50%: for Stationary Spy
--------
-7%: for Espionage Point Spending
--------
1053:espionage:: Total Cost
Chance of Success: 68%

I execute the mission successfully. Now I have 854:gold: in my treasury (up from 37), and I have 245 EP left against Huanya Capac. But on the Foreign Advisor screen, he still has 180:gold:. Next turn, he still has 180:gold: (so it's not like the F4 screen or trade window was lagging one turn or something).

Civilopedia says, "Steal Treasury - Steal a portion of your opponent's treasury, between 10 and 100%." I got 450%! Can anyone explain what happened? I could try attaching my save file if that's how things are done around here.

rexman,

I don't know exactly what the number in the foreign advisor's window represents, but it is NOT their total saved up currency*. I recently played a OCC which involved a lot of trading. I kept tabs on who had how much money. Then the random little "Wealthiest civilization" poped up. Surprisingly it wasn't me, and I had about 1000 gold! It was another civilization, and the screen only showed about 200 or so.

*my guess is that is how much they're willing to trade, not how much they have in storage.

Oh, that makes a lot of sense, Kesshi. Thanks!

Yeah, Blake said that AI reserves gold for some purposes, and this sum is not available for trading (thus not shown on the FA screen).

If you have enough EP to see their cities, you can see how much gold they really have in the city screen.

What i wondering about is how you got to 817. I never was offered to steal more than 15 gold per shot, so i quit using the mission....

I've never actually seen more than 12 gold available for stealing via the spy mission. I always thought, "Well, that spy mission has to be about the most useless one available." It was a trade off of a couple hundred EP's for a lousy dozen gold! Meh...

I ran into this difference between what they have and what is in the trade window with a vassal. Being a vassal, I could click on the city and open it up and saw 150 gold in the treasury. When I demanded tribute, the amount was zero. I didn't execute an espionage mission to steal the treasury because it indicated that I would have gotten only 17 gold. I'm going to test this at the next opportunity.

Why would you steel 817:gold: for 1053:espionage:? Well, if he is already your vassal and it is not probable he will have a tech you want to steal because he won't be willing to trade it, then it is possible you might not have anything better to do with those :espionage: points, since you are getting city visibility for free anyway. But otherwise, I'd save them for tech stealing and if he's backwards for city visibility, so I can conquer him easily.

Why would you steel 817:gold: for 1053:espionage:?

Because you're going to kill him next turn and the EPs will go to waste?

Because he's your best friend, you have EPs and he has no techs?

:king:

...Only time I though of using the mission this perspective quickly told me to quit it:
Steal 1 :gold: from enemy treasury
Total cost: 4 :espionage:

Is that a lousy ratio? I think it is!

When I saw that my vassal had only 150 gold, I rearranged the EPs so that none went to my stockpile against him. Then, since there were two Empires on my continent and I was catching spys pretty regularly, I assigned half the EPs being generated to each. The two Empires on the other continent were bumping shoulders so I figured that they were too busy to send spys to check on me. Sure enough, when the Space Race got hot, the two on the other continent went to war with each other and suddenly my cities had their water poisoned. The accummulated EPs against my two neighbors paid off. I sent five spies into one of their big cities and was able to destroy production, increase my culture, poison the water and do a counterespionage mission. That must have caused a big setback to each of them because I handily won the Space Victory and there weren't any more spys caught in my Empire.
The only problem/issue is by that time it would have cost over 7700EPs just to see what was in production in the city, so I had to blindly destroy whatever it was and hope that I got a SS part.
The reason that I only did four missions is that the first spy got caught (always happens) and that's why I had to send in five at the same time (thanks Bhuric for the description of Espionage Cost).