This is to replace the last messed up poll :rolleyes:

So what I really want to know is, do any of you use missions like steal gold or influence culture?

And darn, I should have taken Bleys advice and made the two polls worded the way he recommended. It would have been much clearer. ah well.

Common spread culture is useful :-/ Don't blame the mission if you can't use it... Practically, you can reduce future mission costs by an additional 20% with 8 cheap culture spread missions.

Insert culture can be useful, but is generally quite expensive when I want to use it. Steal gold rarely gets enough gold to be worth it (though sometimes it does, if the civ is rich enough).

Not sure about the third - I tend not to use poison water/foment unhappiness much, so I went for the latter

For me, the culture wins for the most useless mission hands down. I've had the sad story of experimenting with this more than once. It literally does nothing so far as flipping a city goes. And after spending rediculous amounts of points, I am lucky to get a 5% discount on future spy missions, and you have to keep doing it because the 5% turns to 4% the next turn. Oh and did I forget to mention that every time you try to add culture you seem to get caught like a Mofo, which gives more - diplo penalties, and lost hammers for more spies. What a rediculous system.

Steal gold I find consistently useless - the amount stolen is generally negligible, and the conversion rate is lousy anyway. Steal Culture, while not completely useless, doesn't function in a logical manner, and is rather limited to a heavy espionage economy. Destroy building should be powerful, but is bugged so it isn't available in the vast majority of cities, so I'll add that one as the third.

Steal gold I find consistently useless - the amount stolen is generally negligible, and the conversion rate is lousy anyway.

It is situational. I had a game with Suleiman where Justinian had built the AP and the Buddhist shrine (with 81 cities) but he had been reduced to 3 cities himself. With nothing much to spend gold on it accumulated. Raising my EPs until I could look into his cities, I saw he had 14000 gold, even though he would only trade with about 800 for any techs I could sell him. Under those conditions I was stealing his gold at an effective rate of 1 gold for 2 EPs. Most of the EPs I spent came from passive bonusses and specialists so it was a good way of getting something useful from my EP infrastructure while maintaining my spending bonusses against other civs. The biggest theft was 4000 gold (for 8000 EPs) and after that the amounts went down as it was stolen. After about 7 missions I had stolen almost all the gold and only lost 1 spy. So stealing gold can be very lucrative :)

Stealing gold has it's time and place, like when I finally have an AI ready to vassal to me (no other cities left) you can get quite a bit. But that culture thing is just bugged/silly. Oh, and as for the destroy building, I agree it is severely bugged too. Often I have to go far deep into the enemy lines just to find a city where this works.

Once again, we see how terribly Firaxis plans the workflow of its non-beta tested releases.

I think just about EVERY spy mission has at least one bug related to it. Even something as simple as city revolt suffers from this too.

Stealing gold has it's time and place, like when I finally have an AI ready to vassal to me (no other cities left) you can get quite a bit.

I'm interested in hearing more about how people are using these types of missions. Can you get a lot of gold from just one mission, or do you have to do several missions? If so, then is the cost of making and moving so many spies worth it for the gold? In other words, when is it worth it do perform steal gold and how do you go about doing it effectively? thx

The spreading culture helps I *think* if you're trying to flip a key resource square between an AI city and yours.

I have to admit I don't put alot of focus on espionage so you have to take my views with a pinch o salt. I generally find poision water/forment unhappiness not very useful from a human player perspective even though the AI seems to love them, they are more an annoyance to the victim than actually really damaging and I never seem to get much use out of the steal treasury, although reding some of the posts here I'm not using it in the right circumsatnces.

Anyway, My votes went to,

Poision water, forment unhappines and steal gold.

Steal gold for me. The AI rarely has any gold in its treasury, not making it worth the time spend to send the spy there.

I find spread culture to be useful in accelerating the inevitable culture flip. Heck, I even sent it in one time, and the city revolted the next turn. :D