Are the advanced spy actions working as intended?

[smorgasborgas]

In the last 3 games I played I switched to Marathon speed. To my surprise, I found it much much easier than Standard. I was typically 50/50 win/loss on Emperor, but these last 3 games with Aztecs, Egypt, and Korea, I was far and away the point leader throughout the game. I mean like >175% of the next closest competitor.

I bring that up just to establish that I was 'the threat' for all the other civs.

Here's what I believe is an issue. Starting in the Modern era, I was the (successful) target of multiple Advanced Spy Actions almost every single turn. I am not exaggerating when I say only 1 out of every 5 turns had no successful Espionage. Even with counter-spy agents in most of my major cities and a +500 gold per turn income, I am left with a 0 treasury.

Assassinations, riots, and tech stealing was also happening so frequently that:

• I don't think I was able to research a technology without 'bonus' science for the entire Modern era until I built Arsenals in all my cities.
• I lost out on 2 wonders because of 3 riots and sabotage in my Capital city in a space of 30 turns. My other major cities also rioted at least once every 10 turns.
• I was only able to get great people through Faith purchases.
• P.S. I had counter-spy agents in ALL of the affected cities. And there were many dead enemy spies, but the attacks kept coming.

For this reason from Arsenals I am forced to beeline Police Stations to prevent gold theft, but they are so near the end of the tech tree that the game is usually decided already.

And to top it off, even AFTER building the protective buildings, I maintained a 0 treasury because the spies were stealing my ENTIRE treasury from my 2 puppeted cities. As if I keep all my money and do all my scientific research in an occupied border town. I ended up having to annex them and build Arsenals and Police Stations in them.

Some establishing information. I had 18 cities >25 population and as I said, I was point leader. The enemy spies came from EVERYONE. Friendly, Neutral, Guarded, Hostile, everyone. I searched the forums and the GitHub and didn't see any complaints. This is why I have the question as to whether this is intended or a bug. Perhaps this is a result of playing on Marathon, I don't know.

There needs to be a larger diplomatic penalty for Spy Actions and land stealing. Its ridiculous that a friendly neighbor steals my King Solomon's Mines and then everyone else gets mad when I take it back by force. And similarly for theft and Assassinations. There should be no warmonger penalties for a civ that retaliates for these things. One medium-sized city worth of warmonger penalty should be excused if I declare war within 10 turns of a land theft or Spy Action.

Anyway, I just wrapped up a game dealing with 300 turns of this so I hope I don't sound disgruntled.

 

[Stalker0]

In the last 3 games I played I switched to Marathon speed. To my surprise, I found it much much easier than Standard. I was typically 50/50 win/loss on Emperor, but these last 3 games with Aztecs, Egypt, and Korea, I was far and away the point leader throughout the game. I mean like >175% of the next closest competitor.

I bring that up just to establish that I was 'the threat' for all the other civs.

Here's what I believe is an issue. Starting in the Modern era, I was the (successful) target of multiple Advanced Spy Actions almost every single turn. I am not exaggerating when I say only 1 out of every 5 turns had no successful Espionage. Even with counter-spy agents in most of my major cities and a +500 gold per turn income, I am left with a 0 treasury.

Assassinations, riots, and tech stealing was also happening so frequently that:

• I don't think I was able to research a technology without 'bonus' science for the entire Modern era until I built Arsenals in all my cities.
• I lost out on 2 wonders because of 3 riots and sabotage in my Capital city in a space of 30 turns. My other major cities also rioted at least once every 10 turns.
• I was only able to get great people through Faith purchases.
• P.S. I had counter-spy agents in ALL of the affected cities. And there were many dead enemy spies, but the attacks kept coming.

For this reason from Arsenals I am forced to beeline Police Stations to prevent gold theft, but they are so near the end of the tech tree that the game is usually decided already.

And to top it off, even AFTER building the protective buildings, I maintained a 0 treasury because the spies were stealing my ENTIRE treasury from my 2 puppeted cities. As if I keep all my money and do all my scientific research in an occupied border town. I ended up having to annex them and build Arsenals and Police Stations in them.

Some establishing information. I had 18 cities >25 population and as I said, I was point leader. The enemy spies came from EVERYONE. Friendly, Neutral, Guarded, Hostile, everyone. I searched the forums and the GitHub and didn't see any complaints. This is why I have the question as to whether this is intended or a bug. Perhaps this is a result of playing on Marathon, I don't know.

There needs to be a larger diplomatic penalty for Spy Actions and land stealing. Its ridiculous that a friendly neighbor steals my King Solomon's Mines and then everyone else gets mad when I take it back by force. And similarly for theft and Assassinations. There should be no warmonger penalties for a civ that retaliates for these things. One medium-sized city worth of warmonger penalty should be excused if I declare war within 10 turns of a land theft or Spy Action.

Anyway, I just wrapped up a game dealing with 300 turns of this so I hope I don't sound disgruntled.

Did you only notice the problem going to marathon or you saw it on Standard as well?

 

[smorgasborgas]

You're right I didn't really notice it in Standard. On the other hand, I never really had such a huge lead in Standard either. So it could be caused by either.

 

[IcyAngel]

Spying aside, Marathon is easier because it plays on humans' superior long-term planning abilities.

Maybe you were heavily targeted by spies because you were so ahead. If it's a generally recognized problem, a penalty to spying could be applied for each additional spy present in a city.

 

[smorgasborgas]

Heavily targeted is fine. The issue is the rate of success. Enemies stealing gold, stealing science, sabotaging buildings, and causing riots at an average rate of around 3 successful spy operations per turn does not feel intentional. It feels more like there's a faulty scaling with game speed or something.

In addition, the quantities stolen were something like my entire ~1700 gold treasury, all from a puppeted city. That doesn't seem intentional.

EDIT: I didn't mention it before but there were 11 other civs

 

[stii]

This seems like a scaling issues with game speed more so than being ahead.

Even when I'm clearly ahead and most civs hate me due to warmongering the advanced actions are pretty minor.

 

[rubixx]

IME playing on mostly epic and standard the gold stealing would be at most 20-25% of my current treasury. What I find most frustrating about advanced actions, in addition to the few things you mentioned, is the great people sabotage. It seems like, without fail, in the industrial era onward, whenever one of my non-capital cities is approaching 90% completion of a great person, it is sabotaged. I don't mind the sabotage itself, just the predictability of when it will occur. It makes working specialists for GP in secondary cities feel bad w/o Mandirs (which is obviously a perk or that belief).

 

[smorgasborgas]

I'm playing another game on Marathon. I'm in the middle of the pack and I'm still getting targeted by roughly 3 successful Advanced Spy Actions per turn on average. I just have to disable them for now.

 

[youngsteve]

To be honest I normally turn spying off as it is to irritating & similar to problems you have. Spy defences never make much difference whether you have them or not. For this version as Spain I am using it, but early days yet, to see how it plays out. The only country will use it is England, & also Greece if going for diplomacy.

I do agree there should be more diplomatic actions against it, as in real life it causes massive friction.

 

[Zuizgond]

I have started to turn off spying as well. The spy mechanisms have so many flaws in civ5 and there's not much you can do to prevent science/gold/tech stealing until very late game. Very frustrating

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

Is there a way to leave spying on but turn off the advanced spy actions?

 

[smorgasborgas]

Go to:
.\MODS\(1) Community Patch\Core Files\Core Values\CoreDefines.sql

And Change the 18 to 0 in the block below

-- Spy Stuff

INSERT INTO Defines (
Name, Value)
SELECT 'BALANCE_SPY_SABOTAGE_RATE', '0'
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM COMMUNITY WHERE Type='COMMUNITY_CORE_BALANCE' AND Value= 1 );

I believe that everything but the Advanced Spy Actions are still enabled, but I haven't checked yet

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

Thanks @smorgasborgas I've made that change and now I'm going to give it a try!

 

[Elhoim]

Apart from 0, which I guess it's disabled, how does that number work? If I want them to happen less often, should I increase or decrease that value?

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

I just hit Banking and the next turn I assassinated 210 GP points from Siam, so apparently it is still enabled?

What does this line do:

"<!-- Advanced Spy actions - COMMUNITY_PATCH -->
<Row Class="6" Name="BALANCE_CORE_SPIES_ADVANCED" Value="0"/>"

This is in CoreTables\CustomModOptions.

Would setting this to 1 actually disable the advanced spy actions (which seems counterintuitive) or is this for something else?

 

[smorgasborgas]

Oh dang, I was going by this post:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/release-cp-60-2-cbp-9-2-8-20.532335/#post-13403879

I haven't had time to start a new game (and probably won't this week), so I'm still not sure how those entries function.

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

So I can disable each type of advanced action in the CoreTableEntries.sql, but it seems like it would be easier to just move enable advanced spy actions to Future Tech or something -- but for now I may just adjust that sql file.

In any event, I'm not sure that advanced actions should be available until police stations are also available, but that is completely my personal opinion.

 

[Elhoim]

Yeah, what I find quite grating is the gold one. I mean, I have 2000 gold, a enemy spy goes to a city, and steals 1000. What is half of my treasury doing there? I think that for gold or any other yield it should be capped at the yield to substract divided by cities. So if I have 20 cities, the max that can be stolen from one is 100 gold. Could be by population to make it a better representation of city importance. But right now it's quite ridiculous and for many turns I was not able to get any gold at all due to spies in cities in which I was counterspying.

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

Found the way to move the function to Future Tech, I think. Time to test it (in TechChanges.sql, you can change it to a different tech that you like in place of Banking).

EDIT: This doesn't seem to be working (at least according to the Science Tree) so I'm going to set the enable to zero and see what happens instead.

 

[Elhoim]

Try with the one in CommunityPatchDLLChanges.sql

UPDATE CustomModOptions
SET Value = '1'
WHERE Name = 'BALANCE_CORE_SPIES_ADVANCED';

I'm still trying where to find the balancing. I like them, but it's freaking crazy the effect. I have Order ideology, the double agent civic, constabularies and spies in my city, and 2 spies just stole half of my treasury from a single city.