I've played a few games now and was just wondering about espionage. I quite like the aspect but the way it is administered could use a bit of a shine in my view.
The method of obtaining spies (by era) seems a bit clunky. The player does not have to put any input in to obtaining the spy- if someone else gets to Renaissance you get a spy. Nice, but unearned. However, the biggest problem I have is that the faster an entity gets science the more spies they obtain. There may be a negative in that they are so far in front there is no science for them to steal, but a player who is lagging behind is the one who needs more spies to try and even things up by stealing technology. I understand they are not there to balance poor research techniques, but it seems a bit about face. Recruitment of spies should not be tied to scientific development.
It turns espionage into a walkover if you're the tech leader (but then everything's a walkover if you're the tech leader), but there are trade-offs:
1. You can choose to beeline reaching the next era instead of focusing on finishing other techs you need in your current era first, which is an interesting dynamic.
2. If you're the tech leader, your spies will actually have a very hard time gaining experience. In my last game I had more spies than Gustavus (only rival on a duel map), but he'd successfully stolen techs from me while all I could do was keep an eye on him, rig elections and sit back on counterintelligence, none of which increase a spy's level unless he catches an enemy spy while performing counterintelligence duties (which mine never did). Coups lead to experience gains, but a recruit-level spy is unlikely to successfully pull off a coup anyway (and in this specific case, occasional successful Swedish coups aside, I was firmly allied to all three surviving city-states so coups weren't an option). The result was that Gustavus had a more experienced spy than any of mine, and in the late game this translated into greater success rigging elections and inciting coups as we engaged in a clandestine war for diplomatic victory, as well as being able to steal my tech despite my having a spy, Autocracy, and a police station in the targeted city.
Secondly, Maybe it could be factored in that scientific advancement promotes spies. For instance, development of electronics could be used to promote a spy (listening devices, code breaking etc).
See above. Everyone suggests additional spy abilities, but on reflection I think promotions need to be limited (or spies easier to kill), because there does tend to be a tradeoff between having more spies and having better spies that helps to balance the game. And to limit promotions you need to limit the ways of obtaining them, which means fewer abilities and no 'automatic' promotions from tech advances.
spies should have more option, man, like in c4: bts, poison city water, oil revolution, sabotage production, steal national plans (reveals all units for 1 turn), sabotage improvements, sabotage deferences (decreases city tile defence bonus)(with this spies were good siege weapons)...and loads more....
I'd like sabotage production, and potentially sabotage defences, options (the latter would really help the AI take cities, which it needs to do), but as above I think these might work poorly with the experience system by making it too easy to promote spies. Have you ever played Shogun 2? That game has a lot of what's suggested here - the spy character (unlike previous Total War games) serves as both spy and assassin, so he gains experience from pretty much anything - looking at cities, sabotaging the gates, killing people. By the time he's gone up two or three levels he's pretty much impossible for the AI to deal with and can kill anyone/sabotage anything (depending on how you've specialised him) with complete impunity, and you can almost always rely on him to successfully open the gates for your army.
I've been playing a lot of Shogun 2 and an earlier game in the series, Medieval II, concurrently, and I can tell you that - purely because the Shogun 2 ninja combines the abilities of both the older game's spies (who have an easy time gaining experience) and assassins (who have a slightly harder one and have to select targets more carefully when inexperienced) - the ninja is drastically overpowered in Shogun 2, at least against AI opponents.
I'd like to see more empire info... along with the occassional revelation of AI plans to attack it'd be nice to get tidbits of info like the empire "has 10 coal and 8 are being used for buildings" or a breakdown of its GPT or science
Yes, I'd like to see this. In my last game, once I had a second spy I had him on permanent intel-gathering duty in Stockholm (just in case Gustavus decided to become aggressive and suicidal after all, I'd get advance warning - he never did). I was pleased to find I got notifications whenever he started building a Wonder (Stockholm was his only city until 1810 AD for some reason, but for a civ that has more cities so I can't just keep an eye on his entire empire's production with a single spy this would be useful info). Intrigue is a great addition to the game, and more could definitely be done with the types of info you can reveal with it (EDIT: Yes, including map stealing).
Spying and espionage should be more involved that just 'go here, sit for 20 turns and maybe tell me something useful'. Like others have said, Civ IV BtS is a pretty good place to draw ideas from - sabotage, map revealing, etc., all can be implemented within Civ V's system. I'd really like to see an 'anti spy' option to let you try to remove those pesky enemy spies that park themselves in CS's for permarevolutions.
I'm really hoping there will be further enhancements to espionage, because right now it feels very lackluster.
I hear this a lot, but I'm really enjoying this system. It integrates with the 'whole game' much better than previous Civs' "it's a unit with special abilities" and Civ IV's completely separate resource to draw from that isn't used by anything else in the game - as I mentioned above it influences tech decisions, and it can very actively be used with city-states to promote your victory condition or obstruct an opponent's. Poisoning water was incredibly annoying, but didn't actually achieve very much in terms of either beating an opponent or helping you win the game.
I also think people underestimate just what spies are capable of:
- Stealing tech
- Gathering intelligence on enemy strategy
- Allowing you to view the area around a specific target city indefinitely (and without risk to the spy)
- Allowing you to view production in the target city on the same basis
- Rigging elections in city-states (an underestimated effect, more reliable than coups and works with CSes who are allied to you).
- Foiling enemy designs on city-states where your spies are placed*
- Instigating coups in city-states
- Performing counterintelligence to capture enemy spies.
* I only realised this when reading the details of the rigging election effects in the long tooltip in my last game, but if multiple spies are competing for the same CS, the one which has been stationed there the longest and which has the greatest experience has an advantage over the other, so you can essentially station a spy in a city-state to protect it from enemy election-rigging and coup attempts.
That's not a particularly short list of abilities for a spy unit to have, and one ability (rigging elections) can essentially be thought of as two - you can either use it to keep a CS on your side in the long term without needing to worry about quests, or you can use it aggressively to lower enemy influence with less risk and more chance of success than a coup.
Put a spy in another major Civ's city:
- steal a Technology (speed depends on City's Science production)
- steal a Social Policy (speed depends on City's Culture production. Must be in a tree you've already opened, and must be one that you're eligible to take.)
- steal some gold per turn (say, a random amount equal to 10–20% of that City's Gold output. Owner is only told "A spy is stealing approximately x per turn from one of your Cities!")
- reveal the map/terrain
- reveal all units near that City (only if you know the map/terrain)
- reveal the location all of that Civ's units, anywhere on the map... but only where they were 5 turns ago, not now
It already does everything except steal social policy (which, as mentioned, seems odd and unrealistic), gold stealing and revealing all units, neither of which is something I see much need for.
Put a spy in a City-State:
- raise your own Influence
- lower a specific other Civ's Influence
- reduce effectiveness of other Civ's Gold gifts ("Another civilization's spy has halved the effectiveness of your gift to Monaco!")
- orchestrate/attempt a coup (prepare for 20 turns; then, it can fail quietly with no diplomatic consequences, fail publicly, or succeed)
- the same 3 reveal options from above
- counterintelligence: seek and destroy other Civ's spies in that City-State
I like all of these - rig elections could be modified so that you get the option when the election round begins to favour a particular "party", maybe based on social policies (and 'Government Type' would show on the City State's screen). For instance:
- National Socialists: Civs with Order or Freedom social policy branches lose influence. Civs with Autocracy gain influence at a greater rate.
- Liberals: Civs with Autocracy or Order social policy branches lose influence. Civs with Freedom gain influence at a greater rate.
- Communists: Civs with Freedom or Autocracy policy branches lose influence. Civs with Order gain influence at a greater rate.
I'd rework coups the way you suggest, but perhaps add an option for the type of coup:
- Democratic transition: Works as now (with the cooldown and diplomatic effects you suggest added). If the coup replaces a dictatorship, allows election-rigging. If publicly discovered, worsens relations with Autocracy-loving civs to a greater extent than other civs.
- Install dictatorship: Normal coup effect, but election-rigging becomes impossible for a fixed number of election cycles, or until a democratic coup occurs as above. If publicly discovered, worsens relations with Freedom-loving civs to a greater extent than other civs.
Though with all the options already available for reducing influence, I think I'd pass on the 'reduce gold gifts' one - it's a nice idea in principle, but in practice too narrowly-targeted and trivial to be useful, especially since you can't judge how much another civ relies on gold.
To some extent the counterintelligence feature with regard to CSes already exists, but it would I agree be nice to have a chance of killing (or at least expelling) enemy spies from that CS.
Gold output. Owner is only told "A spy is stealing approximately x
Influence
