ai city management

[Seraiel]

"Best 2nd-rate" depends on the definition. If you're i. e. stealing from 5 Civs and got all their techs, it still can be you having the most techs of all compared to the others.

The rest of what you write is right, EE allows you to be higher than you'd be with other economies, but being the top-dog is not impossible with it, only thing that's impossible with "pure-ee's" is being first or getting tech-monopolies, but being first is something only needed for Liberalism, and tech-monopolies are something of high value, so "pure-EEs" are not necessarily the strongest choice.

What I was trying to say was morely something like "if somebody's got a tech already, steal it instead of researching it, because it'll be cheaper in 9x% of the cases" , which should make people aware that espionage is a feature they could (and imo should) think about, because the balance of it is basically so bad, that it can be game-changing (meaning espionage can give you wins, where you'd had no chance before) .

This goes just back on the "negative opinion" I felt people have about those "Spy-Specialists" and "Great Spies" , imho not noticing, that they should be happy about them, because they're simply awesome in the hands of players who know what they have to do with them.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I think espionage giving you cheap access to techs that other civs have is a realism feature. Once other civs have a tech it gets a little easier to research (or was that in Civ 3) but nowhere near enough. It doesn't take 'research' or scientists or much of anything else to 'discover' horseback riding when some foreigner rides up on a horse, for example, and if your army shoots arrows at the less developed enemy you can assume that it won't be too many engagements before they are shooting them back. In the game it doesn't happen automatically, but shifting to much more efficient EE and stealing it makes sense to me.

 

[The_Ambassador]

This goes just back on the "negative opinion" I felt people have about those "Spy-Specialists" and "Great Spies" , imho not noticing, that they should be happy about them, because they're simply awesome in the hands of players who know what they have to do with them.

I know I'm not happy. Espionage may be generally powerful, but you can't go from that premise to the conclusion that one *should* always be happy when a governor arbitrarily assigns one. The point in this thread is to highlight the insistent obtuseness of the city governor. Auto-spy assignment illustrates this point all too well (albeit the fact that EE can be very powerful is still worth pointing out in passing).