Need help with game-ruining Event (no espionage)

Please help! My friend and I have been playing for awhile and we like to turn select "No Espionage". Problem is, there is some kind of random event (could be part of an unofficial patch) where you find an enemy spy in your territory. With espionage off, your ONLY option (option #3) is for the enemy to declare war on you and you get a bunch of tanks. This leads to horrible situations in long games with long-term allies declaring war, and defensive pacts is ugly.

How do we turn this event off?? I searched all over but I can't figure out what file to modify or whatever it is. Also, if there is a way to turn the culture growth back to normal (first growth is changed to 60 instead of 30 in the most recent patch) that would be very helpful. With espionage off, a cultural win is virtually impossible against other victory conditions.

Thanks in advance for any help!

It would be possible as the Tsunami event is turned off. You'll need to alter an XML file somewhere and make the chance 0.
I'm sure someone will know exactly how

Cultural growth back to normal? Are you certain that the difference in cultural thresholds you are noticing is due to the espionage option rather than gamespeed? If you are playing on epic or marathon it is going to take more culture in a city to reach each level(since you have more turns to rack the culture up).

Farm Boy said:

Cultural growth back to normal? Are you certain that the difference in cultural thresholds you are noticing is due to the espionage option rather than gamespeed? If you are playing on epic or marathon it is going to take more culture in a city to reach each level(since you have more turns to rack the culture up).

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I play marathon games and 30 is the threshold for popping the second ring of tiles. I have never seen 60 as a threshold, so I assume the no espionage option somehow double it at least for this pop level.

Huh, never heard of that and am being too lazy to do a forum search. But on a side note....Bleh, marathon. Might as well just turn on "always war" anyhow and admit it

Turning off Espionage causes all producing buildings to produce instead (so that those buildings arent completely useless). So to balance it, the developers simply doubled the cultural thresholds (which still ends up making cultural victories much easier).

mechaerik said:

Turning off Espionage causes all producing buildings to produce instead (so that those buildings arent completely useless). So to balance it, the developers simply doubled the cultural thresholds (which still ends up making cultural victories much easier).

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Yes, with espionage off, culture thresholds are doubled. However, the espionage buildings do NOT get multiplied by the culture multipliers, only the espionage multipliers. As a result, while you can get culture a little faster than normal, doubling the requirements is WAY WAY too much. 100% increase is definitely the lazy way out.

Does anyone know the exact file to modify? I really need to know

mechaerik said:

Turning off Espionage causes all producing buildings to produce instead (so that those buildings arent completely useless). So to balance it, the developers simply doubled the cultural thresholds (which still ends up making cultural victories much easier).

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Does it really? How many -producing buildings do you unlock in a typical cultural-victory game? Compare that to the number of -producing buildings; there's no contest.

If I recall correctly, the -producing buildings are the Palace, Courthouse, Jail, Intelligence Agency, Security Bureau (the castle and Scotland Yard also enhance output without making any points themselves). Otherwise your only options for generating are spy specialists and the slider. Granted that these buildings all produce more than 1/turn, it's still pretty hard to make a city focused on -production without relying heavily on the slider -- and then you may as well just produce directly. For that matter, the Jail, Agency, and Bureau all come pretty late, well after you should already have produced most of your .

While I think that converting to is a reasonable way to "turn espionage off", I don't think the recalculated caps are necessarily accurate. I'll grant that I hardly ever go for cultural victories (and always play with espionage on), though, so I'm just speaking theoretically here.

Farm Boy said:

Huh, never heard of that and am being too lazy to do a forum search. But on a side note....Bleh, marathon. Might as well just turn on "always war" anyhow and admit it

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Not so. I mostly play on marathon and rarely get involved in a war. I play for the various peace victories and just enjoy the long games.

Well, marathon does have a built in bias for violence. If you play on normal speed and switch to marathon it is very much like you chop the hammer cost for all units in half and then triple their movement speed.

s.bernbaum said:

Not so. I mostly play on marathon and rarely get involved in a war. I play for the various peace victories and just enjoy the long games.

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Some people do like Epic-length games. You should do what you enjoy, absolutely. That said, Marathon does favor the warmonger and the faster speed favor the more peaceful approach. A peaceful victory on Marathon is a little harder than Normal.

IIRC it's harder to avoid war on Marathon because a lot of the war decisions made by the AI aren't scaled properly. I could be wrong, however.

Ataxerxes said:

Some people do like Epic-length games. You should do what you enjoy, absolutely. That said, Marathon does favor the warmonger and the faster speed favor the more peaceful approach. A peaceful victory on Marathon is a little harder than Normal.

IIRC it's harder to avoid war on Marathon because a lot of the war decisions made by the AI aren't scaled properly. I could be wrong, however.

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But harder is half the fun! I do build military, I just don't use it if I can help it. In my last marathon game I had by far the largest military and by the end of the game it was several tech levels more advanced than the next largest military, which was only half my army's size. Thus war was avoided by the deterrent value of my military. This was as Ghandi with Shaka as my immediate neighbor. We were buddies all game long, while he wiped out most of the other AIs. Of course, I always declared war when he asked me to, I just never followed through on it!

Not trying to quell the discussion, but it got a little off topic and no one answered my original question(s). What xml file holds the events?

If anyone still wants to turn off or reduce the doubling of the cultural thresholds when no espionage is selected, Look for NO_ESPIONAGE_CULTURE_LEVEL_MODIFIER in the global defines xml file

Jackciv said:

If anyone still wants to turn off or reduce the doubling of the cultural thresholds when no espionage is selected, Look for NO_ESPIONAGE_CULTURE_LEVEL_MODIFIER in the global defines xml file

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You do realize you bumped a 6 year old thread for a bit of information most already know AND was not pertinent to the original thread topic as well? Please check the dates of threads before bumping needlessly.