Problem with Espionage

If you have such a big tech lead that the AI steals from you every few turns, then maybe you should try a harder difficulty setting. If the AI is ahead in tech, then they can't steal from you. You can try to steal from them. Tech stealing serves as a great equalizer.

Don't bother with tech stealing. Steal some of them in the beginning, stay or become #1 into ren/indu eras and put all your spies for free cs influence. They will not be able to reach you even with tech stealing after you build public schools and later research labs.

The AI can steal you a lot of techs, but they are scattered between all of them. In fact one AI can steal you 1 tech per every X turn(if they succeed). It's really not so bad.

If you can't stay top 2 into the industrial era and later you need to rework your strategy.

You can be 'ahead' or 'behind' them in total research and both of you could still be stealing from each other. It depends on the research paths you take.

I'd asked about what happens when you decline embassies in a thread not too long ago and someone said that if you refuse an embassy from a Civ request, that Civ can't put a spy in your capital. Guess that would also mean you can put a spy in any of his cities, or just the capital? I'm in the middle of a big game and haven't tried it yet, is this true?

You can only spy on a city that you can see. Establishing an embassy allows the player to see your capital. So the answer to your question is "kinda".

If they see you capital through natural exploring, it doesn't matter if you established an embassy or not.

Infantry#14 said:

I agree spies are too powerful. In other threads, I propose the idea that every time someone wants to steal a tech, that player should pay up 500 gold for a chance to steal and 1000 gold for guarantee steal (either way may lose the spy). This should balance the game because a player needs to "invest" in tech stealing instead of getting stuff for free.

Unless they fix this, I feel like not enabling spies in gameplay.

Click to expand...

Now, the thing is this allows players in higher level difficulties to keep some parity - and it allows AI on lower levels to keep some parity.

So this is not free - In order to steal a tech:

I have to not defend my own capital with a spy.
I am not using it on city states.

Considering the 2 things i am NOT doing as payment, there is no reason to punish the weaker player by making them pay - i see this as giving the "far behind" civ's a way to get back in the game.

I have said many times i don't like the "place and forget" method of espionge, i wish there were a "fun button" of sorts. I also wish that when an AI agrees to stop spying, it will auto-ban spies for 20 turns.