ShannonCT
Deity
Espionage and its Uses
Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of warfare. - Sun Tzu
The following article is designed as a general primer on the use of espionage in BtS. I wrote it a while back as an espionage introduction for my succession game teammates. I hope people find it useful and are motivated to experiment with espionage strategies in more of their games. Suggestions for additions and corrections are welcome. (Note: the analysis below assumes a game of Epic length)
1. Acquiring Espionage Points and Great Spy Points
In BtS, a Civ accumulates espionage points (EPs) much like it accumulates culture – that is, through specific buildings, specialists, and the espionage slider. Cities can accumulate base espionage points every turn in the following ways:
Palace: 4 EPs
Courthouse: 2 EPs
Jail: 4 EPs
Security Bureau: 8 EPs
Intelligence Agency: 8 EPs
Spy Specialist: 4 EPs
Settled Great Spy: 12 EPs
Espionage Slider: 1 EP for each commerce spent on Espionage
The base espionage points can then be increased by a certain % in the following ways:
Jail: +50%
Intelligence Agency: +50%
Castle: +25%
Scotland Yard: +100%
Nationhood Civic: +25%
Additionally, Great Spy points can be earned in two ways: wonders and spy specialists. The Great Wall, Kremlin, and Pentagon each give 2 Great Spy points per turn, and the Forbidden Palace and West Point give 1 Great Spy point per turn. Spy specialists each give 3 Great Spy points per turn, and can be assigned by building a courthouse (1), intelligence agency (2), jail (2), security bureau (2), or the Kremlin (2).
Great Spies can be used in 4 ways: starting a golden age, building Scotland Yard, settling in a city as a Great Spy, or accumulating 4500 EPs against a single Civ of ones choosing.
2. Assigning Espionage Points Against Rivals
At the beginning of the game, you will be earning 4 EPs per turn from your capital, but until you actually meet a rival, those points will have nowhere to go. As soon as you meet your first rival, you will begin accumulating 4 EPs per turn against that rival, until you meet your second rival. When you meet a second rival, you will by default begin splitting your 4 EPs per turn between your two known rivals. As you meet more rivals, your EPs will continue to spread thinner across these other Civs.
If you meet a fifth rival while you’re still earning only 4 EPs per turn, no EPs will accumulate against this rival unless you make adjustments in the espionage screen. This fact becomes important to remember when one is trying to gather information about newly met rivals. If one is about to attack a neighbor with the purpose of eliminating it early in the game, there is likely no reason to continue accumulating EPs against that Civ. Before one researches Alphabet and starts building spies for active missions, espionage points are mostly useful for getting demographic information on ones rivals, (information that was available for free in Vanilla and Warlords). As a general rule, one should only accumulate enough EPs against an early victim to be able to view its score, power graph, etc. One only needs to accumulate large numbers of EPs against rivals that will be around long enough to perform active missions against. So, the further away a Civ is, the more EPs that should be accumulated against it.
3. Using Espionage Points: Active Missions
After acquiring the Alphabet tech, one can begin producing spies to perform active spy missions. Most active missions are specific to the city on which they are performed: investigating the city, sabotaging production, poisoning water, fomenting unhappiness, and inciting city revolt. Additionally, spies can steal the known techs of their target Civs. City specific missions have a standard EP base cost (e.g., the cost for inciting revolt is 650 EPs), while the base cost for stealing a given tech is 150% of the beaker cost of that tech.
The final EP cost of a spy mission can be lower or higher than the base cost. The final cost is calculated in a two-step process. First, a subcost is calculated from the base cost using the following multiplicative % adjustments:
Stationary Spy: -10% per turn, up to -50%
Trade Route with Target City: -20%
Own State Religion is Present in Target City and You Own that Holy City: -25%
Own State Religion is Present in Target City and Target is a Different Religion: -15%
Distance Penalty: varies, but typically +10% to +30%
Security Bureau Present in Target City: +50%
In the second step, the subcost is increased or decreased based on the total number of EPs ones own Civ has earned over the course of the game relative to the total number of EPs the target Civ has earned over the course of the game. This adjustment can range from a cost decrease of 50% to a cost increase of 50% or more.
Example: Stealing Monarchy
Monarchy has a beaker cost of 672 on an Epic length, Standard sized, Monarch difficulty game. The base EP cost for stealing Monarchy will be 150% of 672, which is 1008. Let’s say that we have stationed our spy in a nearby city for 5 turns, and that we have a trade route with that city, but don’t get any religion discount. The target city is quite close to our capital, so the distance penalty is only 15%. These discounts and penalties give us a subcost of 463. Now if we haven’t been spending much on Espionage, the final cost may be 20% higher than the subcost, that is 555 EPs. However, if we had acquired a Great Spy and spent it to gain 4500 EPs against any Civ, the final cost may be 40% less than the subcost, that is 277 EPs.
If one focuses on maximizing EPs and if the circumstances are right, one can steal techs with up to 80% off of the beaker cost. Compare this to traditional research, where the best discount one can get (for knowing 2 prerequisites and knowing many other civs with the tech) is 41%.
4. Spies: the New Siege Weapon
Spies now have the ability to reduce the culture defenses of a city in one turn (and for one turn) with the ‘Incite Revolt’ mission. The base cost of this mission is 650 EPs, but this can often be reduced by 50% or more. Using spies to take down city defenses for one turn instead of using the traditional catapults and trebuchets can be especially useful against cities with walls (and castles). Walls and castles reduce bombard damage from pre-gunpowder siege units by 50% and 25% respectively and can significantly lengthen the time it takes to conquer a city. Spies cost 60 hammers each (compared to 75 hammers for cats) and are reusable when they succeed with their missions. Spies can be caught on their way to their target or while waiting inside an enemy city, but face no vulnerability to damage or destruction from traditional units. In BtS, siege units have been significantly nerfed. They can no longer win battles, and they are especially vulnerable to mounted units, receiving damage whenever a mounted unit survives a battle against another unit in the same stack.
With spies able to use enemy roads, thereby acting as two-move units, using spies in conjunction with mounted-only armies is a viable strategy for conquering a rival quickly. Horse Archers are mediocre city attackers but Knights are quite adept at taking cities until Pikemen show up in significant numbers. A Knight-Spy rush can be a good way to finish off a Conquest victory. Or at a slightly later stage of the game, try combining spies with airships and Cavalry.
5. Uses for Great Spies
With the Great Wall providing 2 Great Spy points per turn in BtS, it is quite easy to get a Great Spy as ones first great person. Researching Code of Laws will speed up the birth of the Great Spy as one can build a courthouse in the Great Wall city and hire a spy specialist for 3 additional GS points per turn. So what to do with an early Great Spy?
A Great Spy can be used to start a Golden Age (the first Golden Age can be started by a single GP in BtS). However, as starting a Golden Age is not an ability exclusive to the Great Spy, there is no reason to target a Great Spy in particular for this use. If one wants an early Golden Age, the best way is usually to build a library and hire two scientists.
A Great Spy can be settled in a city and grant 12 EPs and 3 beakers per turn. This use of the GS is quite versatile, because it allows one to assign those 12 EPs against the rival Civs where they are needed most. Without even touching the Espionage slider, a settled Great Spy along with the Palace and one courthouse will grant you 18 EPs per turn. Directed at a single Civ, one can generally accumulate enough EPs to cause one city revolt per 20 turns. Or one could accumulate enough EPs in 25-30 turns to steal Monarchy, for example.
A Great Spy can also be used to build Scotland Yard, which grants a 100% bonus to base EPs produced in that city. If one builds Scotland yard in the capital, along with a courthouse, Scotland Yard would give 6 additional EPs, or 10 if one also hired a spy specialist. This is obviously inferior to settling the Great Spy, at least until later in the game when one acquires Constitution (for Jails) and Democracy (for Security Bureaus). The only case where Scotland Yard enjoys an advantage over the settled Great Spy in the early game is when one leans heavily on the Espionage slider. If a capital city is making 20 commerce per turn, and one is able to turn the Espionage slider up to 60%, 12 commerce would be converted to 12 base EPs, and Scotland Yard would give 12 more, in addition to 4 more base EPs for the Palace. So in the early game, the only way to make good use of Scotland Yard is to commit to an Espionage Economy (discussed later).
Lastly, the Great Spy can march into any enemy city and “spy bomb” that Civ, granting 4500 EPs to be used against that Civ. Using the Great Spy this way is much like using any other great person to bulb a tech – the immediate advantage can be great in the right situation, but there is less versatility. (Or is there?) Accumulating 4500 EPs against one Civ may seem like overkill. Unless you are playing at a high difficulty, you aren’t usually going to be facing an early nearby rival that has a lot of expensive techs you don’t know. You might be able to burn a couple thousand on stealing techs and another couple thousand on causing city revolts (spies as siege weapons), but this might require you to keep that Civ alive longer than you normally would. If the game is one where you want to conquer your starting continent early and then tech to Astronomy, spy bombing a rival may be quite a waste. After all, all of the unused EPs vanish after the target Civ dies. But there is one often overlooked advantage to spy bombing a rival Civ. When the cost of a spy mission is calculated, the subcost is either increased or decreased by a certain %, depending on your total EP earnings over the course of the game so far. Acquiring 4500 EPs early in the game will tend to give you a 40-45% reduction of the subcost (as opposed to a 10-20% increase in the subcost if you haven’t been focusing on accumulating EPs). So using the spy bomb does in fact give you some versatility in the way you use your EPs – the EPs that you accumulate every turn are now worth nearly twice as much (just as they would be had you built Scotland Yard).
6. The Espionage Economy
Following in the great traditions of the Cottage Economy (CE) and the Specialist Economy (SE) (not to mention the trade route economy, the gold/gems mine economy, and the forest-chop-overflowing-into-gold economy), the new Espionage system provides yet another way to climb your way up the tech tree. Accumulating EPs for the purpose of stealing techs from ones neighbors has several advantages over self research and tech trading, and some disadvantages.
Advantages: as we saw before in the example of stealing Monarchy, using EPs to steal a tech can enjoy a significant advantage over self-researching the tech. If one has used a Great Spy as a spy bomb, accumulating the EPs to steal a tech will tend to be 1.5-2.5 times as fast as accumulating the beakers through self-research. Building libraries can mitigate the self-research disadvantage a little, but for the player who is committed to using the Espionage Economy, self-research can’t compete in terms of beakers per turn. As an alternative to trading techs, stealing techs enjoys two clear advantages: Civs are often unwilling to trade away their more advanced techs, either because they don’t like you, or because they want to maintain a monopoly on their best techs. Stealing techs circumvents this all too common problem. The second advantage that stealing techs enjoys over tech trading is that one does not have to give up a valuable tech to get one in return. Trading away a valuable tech to one Civ often means trading it away to several Civs. Stealing techs allows one to maintain a monopoly on self-researched or lightbulbed techs for a longer period of time.
Disadvantages: the glaring disadvantage of the Espionage Economy is that espionage only allows one to acquire techs that other Civs already know. One cannot beeline to Astronomy or Mass Media with espionage alone. At low difficulty levels, where one can easily out-tech every single AI simultaneously, the Espionage Economy is quite useless; the greater the difficulty level, the more useful it becomes.
On a typical Monarch-difficulty game, a skilled player may not have much trouble in beelining to its desired techs faster than the AI. So the Espionage Economy doesn’t help in that regard. However, at this difficulty level, one will often see AI acquiring techs that are off of the main beeline, but that are useful nonetheless. Many of the faster-teching, peaceloving AI are quick to tech things like Monarchy, Calendar, Feudalism, Theology, and Aesthetics – all techs that the team may not be able to justify self-researching, but may be able to justify stealing if the discount is high enough.
Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of warfare. - Sun Tzu
The following article is designed as a general primer on the use of espionage in BtS. I wrote it a while back as an espionage introduction for my succession game teammates. I hope people find it useful and are motivated to experiment with espionage strategies in more of their games. Suggestions for additions and corrections are welcome. (Note: the analysis below assumes a game of Epic length)
1. Acquiring Espionage Points and Great Spy Points
In BtS, a Civ accumulates espionage points (EPs) much like it accumulates culture – that is, through specific buildings, specialists, and the espionage slider. Cities can accumulate base espionage points every turn in the following ways:
Palace: 4 EPs
Courthouse: 2 EPs
Jail: 4 EPs
Security Bureau: 8 EPs
Intelligence Agency: 8 EPs
Spy Specialist: 4 EPs
Settled Great Spy: 12 EPs
Espionage Slider: 1 EP for each commerce spent on Espionage
The base espionage points can then be increased by a certain % in the following ways:
Jail: +50%
Intelligence Agency: +50%
Castle: +25%
Scotland Yard: +100%
Nationhood Civic: +25%
Additionally, Great Spy points can be earned in two ways: wonders and spy specialists. The Great Wall, Kremlin, and Pentagon each give 2 Great Spy points per turn, and the Forbidden Palace and West Point give 1 Great Spy point per turn. Spy specialists each give 3 Great Spy points per turn, and can be assigned by building a courthouse (1), intelligence agency (2), jail (2), security bureau (2), or the Kremlin (2).
Great Spies can be used in 4 ways: starting a golden age, building Scotland Yard, settling in a city as a Great Spy, or accumulating 4500 EPs against a single Civ of ones choosing.
2. Assigning Espionage Points Against Rivals
At the beginning of the game, you will be earning 4 EPs per turn from your capital, but until you actually meet a rival, those points will have nowhere to go. As soon as you meet your first rival, you will begin accumulating 4 EPs per turn against that rival, until you meet your second rival. When you meet a second rival, you will by default begin splitting your 4 EPs per turn between your two known rivals. As you meet more rivals, your EPs will continue to spread thinner across these other Civs.
If you meet a fifth rival while you’re still earning only 4 EPs per turn, no EPs will accumulate against this rival unless you make adjustments in the espionage screen. This fact becomes important to remember when one is trying to gather information about newly met rivals. If one is about to attack a neighbor with the purpose of eliminating it early in the game, there is likely no reason to continue accumulating EPs against that Civ. Before one researches Alphabet and starts building spies for active missions, espionage points are mostly useful for getting demographic information on ones rivals, (information that was available for free in Vanilla and Warlords). As a general rule, one should only accumulate enough EPs against an early victim to be able to view its score, power graph, etc. One only needs to accumulate large numbers of EPs against rivals that will be around long enough to perform active missions against. So, the further away a Civ is, the more EPs that should be accumulated against it.
3. Using Espionage Points: Active Missions
After acquiring the Alphabet tech, one can begin producing spies to perform active spy missions. Most active missions are specific to the city on which they are performed: investigating the city, sabotaging production, poisoning water, fomenting unhappiness, and inciting city revolt. Additionally, spies can steal the known techs of their target Civs. City specific missions have a standard EP base cost (e.g., the cost for inciting revolt is 650 EPs), while the base cost for stealing a given tech is 150% of the beaker cost of that tech.
The final EP cost of a spy mission can be lower or higher than the base cost. The final cost is calculated in a two-step process. First, a subcost is calculated from the base cost using the following multiplicative % adjustments:
Stationary Spy: -10% per turn, up to -50%
Trade Route with Target City: -20%
Own State Religion is Present in Target City and You Own that Holy City: -25%
Own State Religion is Present in Target City and Target is a Different Religion: -15%
Distance Penalty: varies, but typically +10% to +30%
Security Bureau Present in Target City: +50%
In the second step, the subcost is increased or decreased based on the total number of EPs ones own Civ has earned over the course of the game relative to the total number of EPs the target Civ has earned over the course of the game. This adjustment can range from a cost decrease of 50% to a cost increase of 50% or more.
Example: Stealing Monarchy
Monarchy has a beaker cost of 672 on an Epic length, Standard sized, Monarch difficulty game. The base EP cost for stealing Monarchy will be 150% of 672, which is 1008. Let’s say that we have stationed our spy in a nearby city for 5 turns, and that we have a trade route with that city, but don’t get any religion discount. The target city is quite close to our capital, so the distance penalty is only 15%. These discounts and penalties give us a subcost of 463. Now if we haven’t been spending much on Espionage, the final cost may be 20% higher than the subcost, that is 555 EPs. However, if we had acquired a Great Spy and spent it to gain 4500 EPs against any Civ, the final cost may be 40% less than the subcost, that is 277 EPs.
If one focuses on maximizing EPs and if the circumstances are right, one can steal techs with up to 80% off of the beaker cost. Compare this to traditional research, where the best discount one can get (for knowing 2 prerequisites and knowing many other civs with the tech) is 41%.
4. Spies: the New Siege Weapon
Spies now have the ability to reduce the culture defenses of a city in one turn (and for one turn) with the ‘Incite Revolt’ mission. The base cost of this mission is 650 EPs, but this can often be reduced by 50% or more. Using spies to take down city defenses for one turn instead of using the traditional catapults and trebuchets can be especially useful against cities with walls (and castles). Walls and castles reduce bombard damage from pre-gunpowder siege units by 50% and 25% respectively and can significantly lengthen the time it takes to conquer a city. Spies cost 60 hammers each (compared to 75 hammers for cats) and are reusable when they succeed with their missions. Spies can be caught on their way to their target or while waiting inside an enemy city, but face no vulnerability to damage or destruction from traditional units. In BtS, siege units have been significantly nerfed. They can no longer win battles, and they are especially vulnerable to mounted units, receiving damage whenever a mounted unit survives a battle against another unit in the same stack.
With spies able to use enemy roads, thereby acting as two-move units, using spies in conjunction with mounted-only armies is a viable strategy for conquering a rival quickly. Horse Archers are mediocre city attackers but Knights are quite adept at taking cities until Pikemen show up in significant numbers. A Knight-Spy rush can be a good way to finish off a Conquest victory. Or at a slightly later stage of the game, try combining spies with airships and Cavalry.
5. Uses for Great Spies
With the Great Wall providing 2 Great Spy points per turn in BtS, it is quite easy to get a Great Spy as ones first great person. Researching Code of Laws will speed up the birth of the Great Spy as one can build a courthouse in the Great Wall city and hire a spy specialist for 3 additional GS points per turn. So what to do with an early Great Spy?
A Great Spy can be used to start a Golden Age (the first Golden Age can be started by a single GP in BtS). However, as starting a Golden Age is not an ability exclusive to the Great Spy, there is no reason to target a Great Spy in particular for this use. If one wants an early Golden Age, the best way is usually to build a library and hire two scientists.
A Great Spy can be settled in a city and grant 12 EPs and 3 beakers per turn. This use of the GS is quite versatile, because it allows one to assign those 12 EPs against the rival Civs where they are needed most. Without even touching the Espionage slider, a settled Great Spy along with the Palace and one courthouse will grant you 18 EPs per turn. Directed at a single Civ, one can generally accumulate enough EPs to cause one city revolt per 20 turns. Or one could accumulate enough EPs in 25-30 turns to steal Monarchy, for example.
A Great Spy can also be used to build Scotland Yard, which grants a 100% bonus to base EPs produced in that city. If one builds Scotland yard in the capital, along with a courthouse, Scotland Yard would give 6 additional EPs, or 10 if one also hired a spy specialist. This is obviously inferior to settling the Great Spy, at least until later in the game when one acquires Constitution (for Jails) and Democracy (for Security Bureaus). The only case where Scotland Yard enjoys an advantage over the settled Great Spy in the early game is when one leans heavily on the Espionage slider. If a capital city is making 20 commerce per turn, and one is able to turn the Espionage slider up to 60%, 12 commerce would be converted to 12 base EPs, and Scotland Yard would give 12 more, in addition to 4 more base EPs for the Palace. So in the early game, the only way to make good use of Scotland Yard is to commit to an Espionage Economy (discussed later).
Lastly, the Great Spy can march into any enemy city and “spy bomb” that Civ, granting 4500 EPs to be used against that Civ. Using the Great Spy this way is much like using any other great person to bulb a tech – the immediate advantage can be great in the right situation, but there is less versatility. (Or is there?) Accumulating 4500 EPs against one Civ may seem like overkill. Unless you are playing at a high difficulty, you aren’t usually going to be facing an early nearby rival that has a lot of expensive techs you don’t know. You might be able to burn a couple thousand on stealing techs and another couple thousand on causing city revolts (spies as siege weapons), but this might require you to keep that Civ alive longer than you normally would. If the game is one where you want to conquer your starting continent early and then tech to Astronomy, spy bombing a rival may be quite a waste. After all, all of the unused EPs vanish after the target Civ dies. But there is one often overlooked advantage to spy bombing a rival Civ. When the cost of a spy mission is calculated, the subcost is either increased or decreased by a certain %, depending on your total EP earnings over the course of the game so far. Acquiring 4500 EPs early in the game will tend to give you a 40-45% reduction of the subcost (as opposed to a 10-20% increase in the subcost if you haven’t been focusing on accumulating EPs). So using the spy bomb does in fact give you some versatility in the way you use your EPs – the EPs that you accumulate every turn are now worth nearly twice as much (just as they would be had you built Scotland Yard).
6. The Espionage Economy
Following in the great traditions of the Cottage Economy (CE) and the Specialist Economy (SE) (not to mention the trade route economy, the gold/gems mine economy, and the forest-chop-overflowing-into-gold economy), the new Espionage system provides yet another way to climb your way up the tech tree. Accumulating EPs for the purpose of stealing techs from ones neighbors has several advantages over self research and tech trading, and some disadvantages.
Advantages: as we saw before in the example of stealing Monarchy, using EPs to steal a tech can enjoy a significant advantage over self-researching the tech. If one has used a Great Spy as a spy bomb, accumulating the EPs to steal a tech will tend to be 1.5-2.5 times as fast as accumulating the beakers through self-research. Building libraries can mitigate the self-research disadvantage a little, but for the player who is committed to using the Espionage Economy, self-research can’t compete in terms of beakers per turn. As an alternative to trading techs, stealing techs enjoys two clear advantages: Civs are often unwilling to trade away their more advanced techs, either because they don’t like you, or because they want to maintain a monopoly on their best techs. Stealing techs circumvents this all too common problem. The second advantage that stealing techs enjoys over tech trading is that one does not have to give up a valuable tech to get one in return. Trading away a valuable tech to one Civ often means trading it away to several Civs. Stealing techs allows one to maintain a monopoly on self-researched or lightbulbed techs for a longer period of time.
Disadvantages: the glaring disadvantage of the Espionage Economy is that espionage only allows one to acquire techs that other Civs already know. One cannot beeline to Astronomy or Mass Media with espionage alone. At low difficulty levels, where one can easily out-tech every single AI simultaneously, the Espionage Economy is quite useless; the greater the difficulty level, the more useful it becomes.
On a typical Monarch-difficulty game, a skilled player may not have much trouble in beelining to its desired techs faster than the AI. So the Espionage Economy doesn’t help in that regard. However, at this difficulty level, one will often see AI acquiring techs that are off of the main beeline, but that are useful nonetheless. Many of the faster-teching, peaceloving AI are quick to tech things like Monarchy, Calendar, Feudalism, Theology, and Aesthetics – all techs that the team may not be able to justify self-researching, but may be able to justify stealing if the discount is high enough.
