How can espionage be altered so it's not so annoying?

J

jpinard

Martian
Joined
Jan 18, 2002
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I hate the way Espionage is used in the game right now. It requires way too much micromanagement (except in smaller shorter games) and though it has its moments, mostly just annoys the hell out of the player. Therefore, I'd like to discuss ways to fix it in 2 different ways:

#1
How can Firaxis (realistically) make patch changes to help espionage be less tedious?

#2
What changes can we make, to make espionage less tedious?
 
#2

I don't know how you all feel about this... but I think raising the cost of spies (how much I don't know) and all their missions will help slow down the ridiculous number of spy issues. I'd also like to totally remove destroy improvement. If there's one thing in the game that makes me want to punch my monitor - it's seeing that happen every stinking turn.
 
The destroying improvements has pretty much brought back the much-hated fun of moving a stack of workers every turn to repair the latest damage. Forment unhappiness really annoys me too, if I have more EPs than my enemy and 2 of my own spies in a city they should NOT be able to screw my city up. It's pointless and annoying.
 
What really annoys me is when my cities get their water supply poisoned (seriously, I've had it happen like every 10-15 turns) or when unrest is incited, because I play on epic or above.

Change log says they fixed this so we'll see.
 
deathr0w said:
What really annoys me is when my cities get their water supply poisoned (seriously, I've had it happen like every 10-15 turns) or when unrest is incited, because I play on epic or above.

Change log says they fixed this so we'll see.
Click to expand...

Every 10 to 15 turns? Man, that must be nice, I've had games where it happens ever 3-5 turns. Then again, I play with 18 civs and on normal.
 
Honestly, they only ever destroy improvements, which my idle workers fix in no time, or poison water, which ussually only results in an annoying green look for my cities.

Either way it's just a minor nuissance.
 
Blaarg said:
Honestly, they only ever destroy improvements, which my idle workers fix in no time, or poison water, which ussually only results in an annoying green look for my cities.

Either way it's just a minor nuissance.
Click to expand...

Its not so much the effects that annoy me, its the fact that the AI can pretty much spy spam with impunity. Rarely do I know exactly which AI civ is doing it, so I have to send a spy to every single civ to do counterespionage.

There should be a penalty if a spie gets caught, especially if the spy is poinsoning water for Petes sake. As it is, using spies is the AI's way of playing the old "I'm not touching you" game that kids do to annoy each other.
 
a way to fix it is to remove it from the game. espinage is the worst addition to any civ game ever. its not fun. its not clever. its tedious, repetitive, monotonous and really bloody annoying.
 
If you invest more in your espionage slider then this won't happen as much. This is just another part of warfare. Your enemies sending a bunch of spies to knock out your cities is just as annoying as them sending SOD's to take out your cities, but you invest in your army properly to counter that. You should do the same with your espoionage slider, and the problem is lessened greatly. Either that our perform counter espionage missions with your spies. There are ways to stop what is happeneing to you besides just modding it out. Sure it makes you play a different sort of game than what you want to, but you can learn to deal with it. You could mod the game so that the other civs never attack, but then how much fun would that be? The only time it bothers people is when they can't have their science slider on 100%. You have to eveolve to the game you are playing. That's what makes civ great.
 
King of Town said:
If you invest more in your espionage slider then this won't happen as much. This is just another part of warfare. Your enemies sending a bunch of spies to knock out your cities is just as annoying as them sending SOD's to take out your cities, but you invest in your army properly to counter that. You should do the same with your espoionage slider, and the problem is lessened greatly. Either that our perform counter espionage missions with your spies. There are ways to stop what is happeneing to you besides just modding it out. Sure it makes you play a different sort of game than what you want to, but you can learn to deal with it. You could mod the game so that the other civs never attack, but then how much fun would that be? The only time it bothers people is when they can't have their science slider on 100%. You have to eveolve to the game you are playing. That's what makes civ great.
Click to expand...

thats fine. But i think you missed the point. The game is about having fun. At no point in my entire experience has espionage been fun, and believe me ive tried to make it fun. When an enemy attacks you with 50 tanks in a SOD, initially u might think "bollocks, im done for" but if you play it out, sort out your tactics, its really is very fun to come away from that war intact. whereas having improvements destroyed every turn from espionage is not fun. its even less fun having to send the workers to rebuild them in a single turn. its even less fun when your empire is huge and you cant bloody find the improvement that was destroyed in the first place. And yes, i do use counter espionage, and i do use the slider. but i have not found a fun way of using espionage.

espionage is now just one more thing that has to be taken into account when playing the game. i love what they have done with the overall game mechanics (im not even bothered by unit spamming) but in my opinion they've added more than necessary with espionage.

I am however interested to know if they have changed it in any way in the new patch??
 
its even less fun when your empire is huge and you cant bloody find the improvement that was destroyed in the first place.

That cracks me up, I feel that pain. From what the changelist says they did put a lot into espionage with AI. It is supposed to be less prevelant from what it sounds like, so maybe it will be balenced enough for the game to be fun for you again:)
 
I've had lots of fun with it against a human player. Seems the AI overdo it a bit, but it's a AI problem and not a espionage one. After all, sending a ton of spies destroying random improvement is not cost effective at all.
 
King of Town said:
That cracks me up, I feel that pain. From what the changelist says they did put a lot into espionage with AI. It is supposed to be less prevelant from what it sounds like, so maybe it will be balenced enough for the game to be fun for you again:)
Click to expand...

Lol, looking at it again has made me chuckle!

Yea i had a quick scan through the new patch changes, and a lot of it seems to have been put into making espionage a little better. tho in practice i dunno how its gonna work. However it seems like the AI puts less priority on actually building spies but more one building espionage buildings and tech stealing and similar espionage missions. might wait a bit and finish of my current games before putting the patch on... mostly to see how it fares and wheat people think about it!

take it easy all :)
 
If you boost your espionage through the sky by sacrificing your science a bit, the problems do largely go away, and you get to investigate their cities and get to see their teching. That's pretty cool in my book.

Would it be less annoying if the enemy could just lop populations off or some similarly catastrophic event for a large amount of EPs, rather than small nuisance cuts every so often?
 
The Mircro-management involved with espionage is a valid complaint, especially as there's no way to let the game just take care of that aspect on its own. Honestly though, I find it to be a fun and very useful tool in supporting my military and/or diplomatic efforts. And repairing improvements isn't that bad, as by mid game I usually have a group of surplus workers not doing much as I'll have already improved most of my land.
 
In the BTS manual there is a Passive Mission "Spies Cannot Enter Our Borders" if you have enough points, apparently it never made it into the final cut, but someone at one time must have thought it was needed.

As it is why not just have a way to turn it off in a custom game?
 
I was just playing a game where the espionage was so bad, for every spy I discovered up to shenanigans, there would be two or three that poisoned a city, or destroyed an improvement. This was happening just about every 2-3 turns it seemed. It got so bad, I had to just quit and walk away before my laptop became a ballistic object. Maybe I should have cranked the spy slider up a notch, but I built many of the espionage buildings, and ran a few counter-spy missions against my neighbors, but it just wasn't enough.
 
The problem is no matter how many espionage points you have your opponent can still 'spend' whatever points he does have against you, and there's basically nothing at all you can do about it except do it back to them. It's not fun, it's gay.
 
I think the easiest way is to get rid of spies (not espionage) altogether.
This way you could still perform all the missions but wouldn't have to build and control spies, so no tedium.
To balance this the spy missions would have a minimum number of turns requirement.
As for enemy spies: they hardly ever cause me any trouble, max they can do is poison my water supply in 1 city, which is usually not a big deal.
 
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