MagisterCultuum
Great Sage
Espionage was my favorite addition to BtS, and I was hoping to see it fully incorporated in FfH. As much as I love the unique abilities of the Council of Esus units, I miss the more advanced espionage abilities of BtS spies. I never liked pre-BtS espionage (getting city details, sabotaging buildings, or especially improvements. I almostnever want to pillage the area around a city, I want to capture the city with the infrastructure. If I did wan to destroy an improvement, why not just use a unit that can pillage? That would gain me gold not cost it.), and am disappointed that those are the only abilities that Esus recon units can use (apart from their unique spells, of course). Plus, I just hate to see balance of espionage points displayed during diplomacy always read 0/0, and never mean anything anyway.
Before Shadow was released, I added all the BtS Espionage missions to .25, added espionage points to several buildings (mostly palaces and UBs) and gave espionage abilities to a few units. I can't say that my implementation was particularly balanced, elegant, or thematically correct, but it was fun to play around with for a while.
Now that we've seen the first version of Shadow, I've refined some of my earlier ideas to make them a little more thematic:
1. All the BtS active espionage missions would be included (and maybe a few more), but would cost Gold instead of Espionage points.
2. Any Council of Esus Unit could perform espionage in rival cities (I might decide to limit different missions to different types of units, or require higher levels for the more damaging missions)
3. Instead of requiring that the unit not be seen when trying to conduct espionage, I would require that the unit's Religion not be seen.
4. A CoE unit's religion would be visible to the owner and to all CoE state religion players.
5. Espionage Points would be changed to "Divination Points," and would require the Divination tech to begin collecting.
6. All Passive Espionage Effects would be included as Passive Divination Point Effects (including making espionage more expensive for rivals, letting you see the graphs/demograhics, seeing the line of sight in rival cities, etc.) with a change to one of them (# 7)
7. The "uncover spy" chance would, instead of killing any unit capable of spying, remove the Invisible, Hidden, or HN promotions or reveal the units true religion. This would most often have diplomatic penalties.
8. The Revelation would remove all 3 of those Promotions and reveal the true religion of all the units on the surrounding tile at once.
8. A passive effect of Sun mana would be to grant a small amount of Divination Points against each of your rivals per turn per number of Sun Mana sources you control.
9. A passive effect of Shadow Mana would be to subtract a small amount of Divination Points that each of your rivals have against you per turn per number of Shadow Mana sources you control.
10. There would also be new buildings/wonders for making Priests/Great Prophets and Sages/Great Sages generate Divination Points. These would probably be available at Divination too.
11. Certain normal buildings (Temple of the Empyrean, Temple of the Overlords, Asylums, etc., and maybe some new UBs, like Balseraph Fortunetellers) would also generate Divination Points.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to make these changes. I've taught myself a fair amount of python and XML, but I've yet to master it completely. I haven't even started trying to teach myself C++. I thought I'd just go over some of my ideas here to see if someone could advise me on how to improve/implement them. I'd love it if the team instead just decided to steal all the ideas and do the hard work themselves, but otherwise I'm thinking of releasing a modmod including this and several other changes I've made (giving barbs leader many of the best militant traits, but costing them at the deaths of Barbatos/Orthus; substantially changing the way the train spell spells work/adding them for every sphere; rewriting the Khazad World Spell to make Peaks provide +1 hammer/+2 gold plus putting mines or quarries on most of them, many of which also having resources, letting dwarven workers/slaves move impassible and making roads buildable on peaks; giving Hyborem/Basium extra traits and starting techs to make up for their late start, a couple minor civic changes, minor unit/building changes, etc) plus some I have yet to add (Levee/Dike and Customhouse/Feitoria like buildings, mana-based "power plant" type buildings, several new random events, making new types of weapons promotions with different strengths and weaknesses which are taken in the same manner as the Crew promotions, etc)
A publicly released modmod is probably still a long ways off.
Before Shadow was released, I added all the BtS Espionage missions to .25, added espionage points to several buildings (mostly palaces and UBs) and gave espionage abilities to a few units. I can't say that my implementation was particularly balanced, elegant, or thematically correct, but it was fun to play around with for a while.
Now that we've seen the first version of Shadow, I've refined some of my earlier ideas to make them a little more thematic:
1. All the BtS active espionage missions would be included (and maybe a few more), but would cost Gold instead of Espionage points.
2. Any Council of Esus Unit could perform espionage in rival cities (I might decide to limit different missions to different types of units, or require higher levels for the more damaging missions)
3. Instead of requiring that the unit not be seen when trying to conduct espionage, I would require that the unit's Religion not be seen.
4. A CoE unit's religion would be visible to the owner and to all CoE state religion players.
5. Espionage Points would be changed to "Divination Points," and would require the Divination tech to begin collecting.
6. All Passive Espionage Effects would be included as Passive Divination Point Effects (including making espionage more expensive for rivals, letting you see the graphs/demograhics, seeing the line of sight in rival cities, etc.) with a change to one of them (# 7)
7. The "uncover spy" chance would, instead of killing any unit capable of spying, remove the Invisible, Hidden, or HN promotions or reveal the units true religion. This would most often have diplomatic penalties.
8. The Revelation would remove all 3 of those Promotions and reveal the true religion of all the units on the surrounding tile at once.
8. A passive effect of Sun mana would be to grant a small amount of Divination Points against each of your rivals per turn per number of Sun Mana sources you control.
9. A passive effect of Shadow Mana would be to subtract a small amount of Divination Points that each of your rivals have against you per turn per number of Shadow Mana sources you control.
10. There would also be new buildings/wonders for making Priests/Great Prophets and Sages/Great Sages generate Divination Points. These would probably be available at Divination too.
11. Certain normal buildings (Temple of the Empyrean, Temple of the Overlords, Asylums, etc., and maybe some new UBs, like Balseraph Fortunetellers) would also generate Divination Points.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to make these changes. I've taught myself a fair amount of python and XML, but I've yet to master it completely. I haven't even started trying to teach myself C++. I thought I'd just go over some of my ideas here to see if someone could advise me on how to improve/implement them. I'd love it if the team instead just decided to steal all the ideas and do the hard work themselves, but otherwise I'm thinking of releasing a modmod including this and several other changes I've made (giving barbs leader many of the best militant traits, but costing them at the deaths of Barbatos/Orthus; substantially changing the way the train spell spells work/adding them for every sphere; rewriting the Khazad World Spell to make Peaks provide +1 hammer/+2 gold plus putting mines or quarries on most of them, many of which also having resources, letting dwarven workers/slaves move impassible and making roads buildable on peaks; giving Hyborem/Basium extra traits and starting techs to make up for their late start, a couple minor civic changes, minor unit/building changes, etc) plus some I have yet to add (Levee/Dike and Customhouse/Feitoria like buildings, mana-based "power plant" type buildings, several new random events, making new types of weapons promotions with different strengths and weaknesses which are taken in the same manner as the Crew promotions, etc)
A publicly released modmod is probably still a long ways off.
invisible/commando 60
I think that when I was looking through the SDK recently I basically found out how to do it. I don't know how I could create another espionage-like counter, but it should be possible to make the missions cost gold instead. If I leave the passive effects as they are then divination should work as I proposed (letting you uncover spies, making espionage missions more expensive, ect). I also plant to make the Revelation spell be great for counter espionage.![[to_xp]Gekko](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/74/74677.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
