OK - So, I consider myself to be a reasonably competent Civ IV player (I win on semi-regularly on Emperor) and I love the game. But I am tired of seeing my City Governor fill the Spy specialist slot as its first choice over more useful (in my mind) Engineer / Scientist / Priest etc slots. :mad::mad::mad:

I rarely play a Espionage-focused game (I take my normal points and spend them to see demographics and research, that's about it. Don't use Spies much or the slider ever), so I basically consider it to be a waste of a specialist.

It looks like the Governor AI sees the 4 Eps as equal in "value" to 4 beakers / coins / hammers etc. so of course it runs it. :rolleyes:

I have searched this question on the forums before and have seen these responses:-

1) "Why don't you just Turn off City Governor?" Nope, I'm not going to micro manager 20 cities in the late game, thanks!
2) "If you force Scientists / Merchants / Priests etc then the Governor only puts them on". Nope, once there are no slots left, the next specialist picked by the Governor will be a Spy and I am not micro managing (see 1).
3) "Turn off Espionage on the game menu". I like the idea of espionage, and I like the system as a whole, I just don't like the City Governor choosing the Spy Specialist. So this is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because of my little gripe!
4) "There is no solution." But there must be a solution! :D

The way I see it, either I:-

1) Mod the "Governor AI" script (if there is one...?) so that it does not value the 4 eps like 4 beakers / coins etc. and thus the spy is considered a less good choice.
2) Mod the Courthouse, Jail buildings themselves, so that it does not have Spy slots. Hmmm. I don't ever really want to generate a Great Spy, so no major loss, but this might be another baby / bathwater solution (see 3. above).

Any ideas? And any advice on how to do either of the above solutions?

i hate this too. i was thinking that maybe it has something to do with the order in the specialist.xml but i havent looked into it.

I'm not sure how much you like it otherwise, but you could just remove the spy from the game fairly easily in XML.

I rarely play a Espionage-focused game (I take my normal points and spend them to see demographics and research, that's about it. Don't use Spies much or the slider ever), so I basically consider it to be a waste of a specialist.

Couldn't agree more. No luck here either... :confused:

It is not a waste of a specialist, once all other slots are full. Which will happen if you focus the city's surroundings on food, specialists take care of other things once happiness starts rolling in. 4 ep > 1 hammer from citizen as it hampers spywhore ais.

The reason why spy specialist sucks is because espionage sucks. Generally espionage is more valuable in defense than offense, as spy units tend to die a lot. The passive effects have their uses though. I don't like replacing my units constantly. Sabotaging has low chance of success too and costs too many eps to make espionage an useful offensive weapon. Furthermore, spending eps for something that might not even succeed can push you under the investigate city treshold, which sucks. Finally, even if the spy succeeds, she returns to your capital, which might be on another continent entirely, on the other side of the map. Whoever makes these decisions in Firaxis really must hate espionage.

Hello,

I was thinking the same at the beginning but then later when I started to use my Great Spy properly I understood that it is the best Specialist that you can get. IT can bring you up to 2 techs in MidAge, which is double performance in comparison to any other GP.