(6-CP) The "Intelligence" Spy System

[pineappledan]

Partly to balance the sides, but also partly because having the Level 3 Gold connection sort of exposes the fact that you're spying on them, but there's no consequences for that anymore. It would make more sense if you were doing it through the legal channels.

I don't see how?

I guess I didn't really think this through, the Tourism is only the 20% value, so to mirror that you'd have just 20% gold coming in -- there's no reason to have the Luxury for free.

I'm going to lower that to 15%. 20% is pretty strong, and having that lineup comparison does sort of drive home that Diplomats are relatively strong vs spies.

It's a %tourism modifier on empire, compared to 1 city's gold income from all trade routes to/from that 1 city. The gold you will gain is highly variable

That said, the free Luxury might have weird knock-on effects with monopolies? Is that a concern?

The luxury you get from this is an imported luxury. Functionally, it's like a trade deal that you have with that other civ, except they don't lose a copy of that luxury, and you don't give them anything in return.
Imported luxuries don't contribute to monopolies unless you are the Dutch.

The wonder notification just feels like nice QOL if the city you're spying on starts it anyway, no need to hide it under a Level 3 global effect.

You have vision of that spy's host city, so you already know exactly what that city is building. What the notification does is it tells you if ANY city in that host empire has started a wonder.

do you think the spy ones are stronger? Honestly they seem pretty piddly. the diplomat bonus is WAY stronger for CV play, the only thing that makes it not the strongest period is that any war can boot your diplomat and lose all of the xp.

Yeah that was my general impression too. The Diplomat lvl 1 and 2 both are strictly better than the spies, doing everything the spy does and more. The nice thing about spies is you have a lot of choice about what permanent end-bonus you get from them (until you move them), they give you a nice extra piece of intel, and you can have more than 1 of them in the same civ at a time.

Also not mentioned here is that Diplomats level up faster, because they ignore security ratings in the host city. So they will reach their lvl 3 bonus faster than spies will.

It's a little bit less of of a concern, but it's also weird that for example spying for science has a big swing if Korea is in the game.

Statecraft also gives 1 to all specialists. There's various civ/policy bonuses that will affect trade income, etc.

You will have vision of that city, so you will have access to that city's yield source breakdown. You will be able to make an educated decision about what yield is the biggest/best for you at the time.

 

[Recursive]

I really don't like this proposal because it denies a bunch of information to humans that the AI still has, and we've been working to reduce AI information cheats, not increase them.

If you amend it to also deny it to the AI, then that would require considerable AI changes to accommodate for it, and I predict it'd be a nightmare to teach the AI how to use spies, especially because it doesn't have the ability to remember after the spy leaves the city like a human would.

I won't veto it as I feel the community should decide here, but I'm really tempted.

 

[Stalker0]

MAGI: Needs to add a clause explaining how the "coup a CS" and "spy on civ X times" quests are impacted by this new system. @pineappledan

 

[pineappledan]

If one doesn’t already exist (pretty sure it doesn’t), I would replace the coup quest with a CS rigging quest.

City state asks you to rig an election in X other city state.
Reward: a small amount of Influence and science

 

[axatin]

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