:espionage: Economies-- I've heard they exist, and they sound pretty fun. I wanted to know if anyone had any ideas on how this works, how to make it work, or if it's all bunk. Oh, and if anyone has a manual or .pdf on the economy, I'd love to see it.

It seems to me that this kind of economy is really a SE, but we have the :espionage: slider to 60% or higher. I'd take suggestions of the best Civs to pull the :espionage: econ off.

Thanks,

Couple of ways to approach it.

1) Get the GW and use the GSpies accordingly. Either infiltrate or settle or whatnot.

2) After alphabet turn down the science slider and crank up the espionage slider to steal techs and other things. Relies on commerce still.

3) After col run spies off courthouses to generate espionage and GSpies. Otherwise, tech normally.

4) Mid-game opens up some more options. One is to designate one or more cities to running mass spy specialists with the appropriate buildings (jail, etc.). It is possible to get >200 ep/t/city this way.

5) Another option is to shut down research after communism/democracy and crank up the esp slider while getting all the espionage buildings in your commerce cities asap. This allows you to crank out a lot of ep/t.

Those are some ideas to play around with.

I actually played a game where I turned off research at alphabet and used espionage to stay up in tech. Did this at monarch and it seemed pretty easy overall (although I did win via AP cheese, so don't know how it would hold up in the late game).

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=312036&page=3

I think one of madsci's roleplays also was espionage only.

Suleiman is great for it, because he can get the GW built fast, and also can generate the first couple great spies pretty fast - once you settle a couple spies, you'll be stealing loads of techs.

It's all bunk.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=309988

I have played a few espionage games with teh slider and it works very well.

Here is a link to one of my RPC games where I got a space race win after turning the science slider off and running only espionage and gold.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=306844

I stopped researching manually after Code of Laws and either stole or traded for every tech afterwards. I also used espionage to prevent another AI from getting a culture win in the same game.

Here is a link where I exploited settled Great Spies

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=268640

I had the slider set for science and manually researched alot of techs, but I also stole about 20+ techs from the AI. Again, another space race win.