are spies useful?

[Dick Fosbury]

Does anyone have useful experience with spies they can share? On lower difficulties I would build Scotland Yard, crank out my limit of spies, and sabotage and steal plans as much as possible, and nothing. My spies would never gain level. It's nice to have recon, but on higher difficulties (currently trying for my first win on Emp) I have other proiorities. So how do spies gain level? (only with XP wonders/civics?) Do they gain new abilities? Subvert city was always my favorite. Long story short, please share your secrets

PS. May I suggest a Great Spy to modders or Firaxis folks.

 

[Gherald]

Spies are of little use in singleplayer. Recon is about as good as it gets.

However, recon is much more important in multiplayer, because human players are much better at surprise moves (e.g. 50 cavalry rush out of the blue, "gg"). Assuming the game gets as far as Communism (which is relatively rare), spies can be decisive in determining which units will best counter your opponents' SoD, or whether they are going for Apollo or Manhattan, etc.

 

[tombeef]

spies are useful in any type of game if another player/AI is ahead of you in the space race, just sabotage there cities with the parts to catch up.

Expionage is also very good if you're about to go to war. Allows you to see what kind of troops are in an opponents city, although you could also do this with religion.

 

[scooter]

they're sweet in space race mode, and when you know or are pretty sure the AI is building a wonder and you want to see if they are ahead of you. The nicest thing is being able to see the city screen w/o losing the spy or even getting caught.

 

[Sisiutil]

Spies are invaluable! No, I've never seen one get promoted, but they're crucial in late game. In addition to the uses listed above, the most important mission my spies perform is sabotaging crucial enemy resources: oil wells and uranium mines in particular. One or the other are required to build modern-era naval, air, and armored units. Deny your enemy the ability to do that, and you have a huge military advantage.

 

[atreas]

Spies are invaluable! No, I've never seen one get promoted, but they're crucial in late game. In addition to the uses listed above, the most important mission my spies perform is sabotaging crucial enemy resources: oil wells and uranium mines in particular. One or the other are required to build modern-era naval, air, and armored units. Deny your enemy the ability to do that, and you have a huge military advantage.

Exactly - but with a small additional point: destroying an oil well is much better, because it takes LONG to be rebuilt, while destroying a mine is very costly compared to the fact that it can be rebuilt easily and is also a more common resource.

Another one of my favorites (I have written it again) is to punish the financial civs for spreading tons of cottages in the open: when you turn their towns to villages, all their "Universal Suffrage" strategy goes in vain and they stay without production, sitting ducks for my tanks. Of course, it's a bit costly but it is also VERY funny. For even more sadistic suffering, you also go another round and turn their villages into hamlets .

P.S. When using spies, it's better to destroy tiles that don't have units on them (you have bigger success rate). With towns I counted 90% overall success rate in my last game.

 

[BeuwolfAgate]

In later games I find sabotaging aluminium, oil and iron resources whenever I am about to attack a civ. Scout out their area with the spies (essentially I send all my spies to one civ). Then take our their oil, alum & iron resources wherever they are and then you build your powerful military and march it to the city with the least amount of strength.

This way, even if they are space racing, you can declare war on them and they will switch over to military and you still don't do much as they will send in their troups and you can take them out in your turf with the powerful military as they wont have the resources.

This is far more useful in an OCC game especially. When you have only one city to protect, if you get waves of power coming at you, you are doomed.

 

[HankSSSI]

Resource sabotage. Do it, love it.

 

[Solo4114]

It's also effective to let the enemy build up a wonder, get within, say, three turns of completion, and then have your spies try to sabotage the wonder.

Not only do you get to gain an advantage on the AI, but they also have now wasted all that production. Essentially, you've kept that particular city from building ANYTHING for however many turns it took to get the Wonder to that point. To me, that's absolutely worth a few hundred gold pieces.

Unfortunately, you can't sabotage or bribe enemy units anymore (at least from what I can tell), but spies are still useful for recon even aside form the abovementioned uses.

For pure recon purposes, though, I'd rather use religion. Especially since religion also gives financial bonuses.

 

[Sisiutil]

For pure recon purposes, though, I'd rather use religion. Especially since religion also gives financial bonuses.

Religion is great for intelligence in early/mid-game. I always try to spread my state religion to rival civs' capitals, border cities, etc.

However, spies take over intelligence duties from religion as part of the mid/late game transition. By that point, I've usually changed civics to Free Religion, which has many advantages--that +10% tech per city is not to be scoffed at. But FR's one main disadvantage is with no state religion, you lose your religious "spies".

While spies must be actively gathering intelligence as opposed to simply having your religion in a city, they have the added tactical benefit of sabotage.

 

[ulsterman88]

the best use i have found for spies so far is to destroy the improvements in enemy territory which harvest resources a few turns before going to war. Especially ones like mines to stem military unit building.

i found that if you concentrate on stopping the AI having 1 key resource such as aluminum in the modern era greatly affects a civ's ability to wage sustained war.

 

[TrailblazingScot]

As the first poster said, the key use of spies is recon and that is of best application in MP. That said, I always like to know what is on the other side of the hill.

 

[Black Waltz]

I love being able to see the city screen. The ability to see what the other civs are researching is especially useful. Shame there is no way to encourage cultural flipping and the such, however.

 

[Ovidian]

I'm in complete agreement with the others. I never leave home without them. You can bet that if I have an invasion force off your coast, I've got at least 2 or 3 spies in your country.

I'm convinced that they helped secure my last win. I was England and was having problems with both America and Persia. They didn't seem to want to give me their land or cities for some reason. Anyway, after they came to their senses, I noticed that China had completed the Apollo program. My troops were tired and I wasn't sure if I had the time for a domination win. My own space program had just began. So, in go my spies. By the end of the game, I don't think China even completed one Casing. My lovely ladies absolutely wreaked havoc in China. Afterwards, I sent them diamond necklaces in appreciation.

 

[Sisiutil]

I'm also fond of certain late-game wonders (Pentagon, Three Gorges Dam, Eiffel Tower, Kremlin, Space Elevator, one or more of the Broadway/Rock n Roll/Hollywood cultural trio). Having spies roaming my closest rivals' cities gives me a heads up on whether I can take my time or should rush them. Or...

In one game, I was building Broadway but planning for a war with Ghandi. One of my girls let me know that HE was building it in Bombay, and was further along than me. Heh. So I changed my Broadway-building city to spamming infantry instead, collected the consolation-prize gold when Ghandi finished the wonder, and then took it from him when I captured Bombay ten turns later.

 

[Darkhrse]

With regards to spy promotion, yes, they don't get it but in the last Prince game I played (which I haven't finished yet because it was becoming tedious) they seem to be enjoying better successes at sabotaging resources even when manned by enemy forces after they've succeeded a few times on unguarded ones.

Anyway, there is one complaint about the game I have since I played with spies. In the game I mentioned above, I was able to successfuly sabotage Asoka's two oil wells, one uranium and one aluminum mines, put guards on each one so they don't get rebuilt. In spite of this however, I am suprised to see that he was still able to either promote or build mech infantries. How is this possible? The only way I could think of is if he was able to get the other civs to trade uranium, alum and oil to be able to do so. Any ideas?

 

[cabert]

Anyway, there is one complaint about the game I have since I played with spies. In the game I mentioned above, I was able to successfuly sabotage Asoka's two oil wells, one uranium and one aluminum mines, put guards on each one so they don't get rebuilt. In spite of this however, I am suprised to see that he was still able to either promote or build mech infantries. How is this possible? The only way I could think of is if he was able to get the other civs to trade uranium, alum and oil to be able to do so. Any ideas?

mech inf have no ressource requisite
No way to prevent this, other than killing the AI's economy and production.

 

[chipix]

I have only used spies to spy the other nations (tech, building and etc.)

However, I believe I should use the destroy resources ability.

If my spy fails to destroy a resource, does produce negative effect to the relationship with that civ?

 

[Dizzy75]

I also notice the resources thing - it's important in principle, but it seems like there's no way to prevent other AIs from trading oil to your victim? In my last game I had pillaged all of Khan's horses, but he kept throwing Keshiks at me until the very end. Then I noticed he had a coastal city, so must have been trading for them with someone else...later on Alexander (whose cities were about 50% coastal, he was on a long skinny continent) kept throwing mounted units at me, even after I'd pillaged his horses (not that they did any good vs. my tanks/bombers).

I wish there were some sort of "blockade" option, actually. It might make the naval warfare aspect more interesting, too.

 

[Sisiutil]

Chipix, yes, if your spy is caught, you get a -1 in your relations each time.

Dizzy, you can use the diplomacy screen to find out who is trading what with whom. You can then meet with the traders (traitors? heh) and ask them to stop trading with your enemy.