The Spy who came in from the AI

Yikes, I'm being cherry picked by spies. I am on turn 810 (Marathon) and I have been hit seven times, twice by three different countries. How can this be? On the rare occasions when I put a spy in a civ, I have to wait well over a hundred turns to steal a tech. I have my one spy doing counter intelligence in my capital, shown to be my most lucrative target and a constabulary in every city. Come on guys this is getting a bit silly. Washington stole Astronomy AFTER founding the World Congress. It is remotely possible that this could happen - but judging from the map, unlikely.

This AI talent for espionage needs to be nerfed. After G&K I learned to build constabularies and police stations at the first opportunity. My first two spies always go to counter espionage. The important point here is, when you can get cherry picked like that, "what's the point?" When the game provides a mechanism that doesn't work (counterspies and constabularies), why use it? It becomes self defeating for the game design.

I have run up against a similar issue I don't know how many editions back on trading. I see people in the forums saying trade away your excess luxuries. I got so accustomed to proposing trades with a AI Civs for but a single luxury and getting counter offers demanding every luxury resource, every strategic resource I owned and GPT that the thought of offering a trade never occurs to me to me any more - for as much as I try to remind myself that I should give trading another chance. I have been conditioned to think that proposing trades merely slows the game play.

It's clear that the intent here has been to re-balance the game giving the AI more power - and that's a good idea, given that winning at Civ has always been too easy but this is a tweak for the AI that needs nerfing.

AI does seem to have boosted steal rate on higher diffs. I was surprised how Monty that was lagging era behind went autocracy and kept rapid stealing higher tier techs, including Plastics 3 turns after I discovered them. All you can do is put your spy as counter and hope for RNG. Do note that you only get targeted if you are leading in tech, which means you are winning anyway, they are merely closing gap. If you seriously want to hinder that, go Order with Double Agents or build Firewall.

As for luxes, if AI is neutral/friendly he will always trade lux-for-lux (or for 8gpt/5strat) unless it's his last copy, then it's triple price. If that is not true, it means he is angry towards you. You can most of the time stay peaceful and friendly with whole map (even with both two warring nations among each other) at least until Ideologies so it's probably your own diplomatic fail somewhere .

No matter how friendly I am with Gandhi he always takes the piss with trades, I've never had a straight lux for lux deal with him.

I find when you play on a continents map when you meet the cive a continent away (so post astronomy) they will almost always straight swap.

uncle bulgaria said:

No matter how friendly I am with Gandhi he always takes the piss with trades, I've never had a straight lux for lux deal with him.

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Really? There must have been something to tick him off. I've had good peaceful games with Ghandi as a neighbor. Although he starts hating towards to end trading was not an issue.

I personally love it when the AI spies on me! It means free level ups for my spies if I'm in the tech lead! The thing is, enemy spies can only steal tech from you when you have researched that tech, and if you're in a tech lead, you should be able to keep the tech lead no matter the difficulty you're on. Even on deity I've found the difficult quest is catching up in tech, not in staying ahead. If the computer steals a tech from me, I don't mind at all. The computer gets a small boost, but you don't lose anything, and there's a chance your spies will be more efficient later.

Washington founding the world congress before astronomy is a little fishy, that's just weird, unless it was a Pangea map. Not sure how that can happen. If it was Polynesia, that would make sense, but...

To Nivrax, Monty probably got industrial espionage, probably the best lvl 1 autocracy policy in the game if you're well behind in tech.

redwings1340 said:

Washington founding the world congress before astronomy is a little fishy, that's just weird, unless it was a Pangea map. Not sure how that can happen. If it was Polynesia, that would make sense, but...

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Maybe he just used a Great Admiral...

What the problem of founding World Congreess without astronomy? Depends on map, of course, but Astronomy is very popular tech for AI, so if everyone got it, than every1 will find Washington, so all he need is to research Printing Press.

Tech theft rate is determined partially by the percentage of your empire's science that is being generated in the targeted city. The AI tends to go wide, which means less science concentrated in any one city, which means slower theft.

I'm not sure if they also get a bonus due to difficulty.

I fondly remember a multiplayer game with a friend where I saw this dramatically. I was Babylon and (surprise!) almost all of my research came from my capital. He was a wide warmongering menace. He could steal techs every 4 turns from me, while it took me 20+ turns to steal from him.

Were you generating a lot of your science in your capital, out of curiosity?

The steal of a Spy is basically as if you were reasearching a tech with the target city output .

So yeah , if you play easy mode your capital might be just a paradise to exploit by spies while them poor cities are just a big garbage hole for your spy to spend hundreds of turn.

If you go tall, your capital tends to produce 50+% of your science; actually even on wide, any city with high science output is vulnerable to tech stealing.

AI will sometimes avoid your capital and steal techs from one of your core cities; or even a captured AI capital that is itself a powerhouse.

Best way to defend is constabulary>Police station ; doesn't hurt that you'll get NIA national wonder out of it, which is much more useful now with the expanded roles of spies.

Even if they manage to steal, their next theft will take so long it won't be worth it for them. If multiple AIs, try to steal, they all get 1 tech each. In that case, the feeling like you're being victimized may be real, but it's all in your head. Multiple AI getting 1 tech from you each isn't the end of the world.

sometimes... i swear there must be secret programming that just makes an AI grab a tech that they should have already, depending on the timeline. like if it's around 1490AD, an AI will always successfully grab Astronomy from me. conspiracy!

^ I assume when AI successfully steals a tech; they pretty much use the same algorithm to decide which tech to 'take' from the list of possible techs.

That could explain why it's fairly consistent what they steal given a certain level of technological progress.

[/QUOTE]Were you generating a lot of your science in your capital, out of curiosity?[/QUOTE]

As I recall, this was a game where one and possibly two of my other cities may have been more lucrative targets than my capital and that is invariably the scenario when I am hit hardest by spies. Once I get Banking I will place my spy in the city that presents itself as the prime target for enemy spies.

I confess that I am sometimes at a loss as to how spy targets are prioritized. I was taken aback the other day, when I discovered that after my, capital a puppet, located in a jungle was shown as the principal target.

Nivrax said:

Do note that you only get targeted if you are leading in tech ... ...

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That is not always the case. On Immortal I have often been lagging in tech when I reached the spy era and I have still lost techs to other AIs. I have even been targeted when I was eighth out of eight in tech!!

Honestly I wouldn't make such a big deal about the AI stealing tech from you. Unless you absolutely eclipse everyone in tech, using your first spies to actually spy is a good idea. If you DO eclipse everyone in tech, opt to beeline through eras and ignore patches of techs that you then intend to steal later. I personally tend to like a strategy of just, surging straight forward into the Renaissance via Acoustics or Astronomy, and then stealing all those ignored Classical/Medieval techs right away.

But yeah, if an AI steals astronomy from you, so what? Unless you're actively enemies with someone, it shouldn't be that big of a deal. Being incredibly protective and frantically building up spy defense buildings isn't really worth all that much to you, and really the main reason you'd be building Constabularies and Police Stations is so you can get that delicious NIA. Otherwise it really doesn't benefit you very much, so you're better off just letting them steal techs and dealing with it.

vixafox said:

That is not always the case. On Immortal I have often been lagging in tech when I reached the spy era and I have still lost techs to other AIs. I have even been targeted when I was eighth out of eight in tech!!

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There are tech paths that AI will follow that many not be the same as the human, the AI is stealing techs in a part of the tree they didn't research to save time.

basically if you're tech leader, choose Order-> Double Agents, then watch the piles of enemy spy corpses pile up in your cities.

I've noticed that since BNW the AIs are much more likely to target your highest-population city than your capital when those are different. I see this as improved AI, since I use the same heuristic when I'm trying to steal a tech.

yeah it's all about the percentage of your science output that city is providing (and your overall output of course).

So in an OCC you will have the highest possibile potential, making you a big target. The wider your empire is, the less attractive the individual target cities are and they will be targeted less.