Check out my first super-espionage city

[futurehermit]

Hermit,

spys are MOST powerful pre-medieval. if you see someone like mansa teching towards beurocracy.. they'll only have each tech for 1 turn before you do. it becomes impossible for them to pull ahead. they may have invested in espionage but cannot compare to the 4000-9000 points you got from infiltration (varies by game speed)


when your points are exhausted you can go pound on them or something. I usually research military related techs while i'm stealing their econ techs. last game mansa hit beurocracy.. I stole it as my last tech and DOW with a stack of swords and cats. used the leftover points to forment revolutions in his cities.. no cultural defense. was pwnage

NaZ

Very interesting. This is something I am going to have to consider in more detail...thks!!!

EDIT: I think spies are quite useful late-game though too! In my Dutch space-race victory I had all my espionage against Hannibal--my main competitor. I used spies to take out all his production and science buildings in his most important cities (starting with the security bureau that defends against spies). Plus you can also sabotage aluminum, coal, and copper, etc. Usually you will only have one competitor and with enough spies you can ensure they don't catch you. I love now that there is NO LIMIT on the # of spies you can produce

 

[NaZdReG]

yes I would agree with the late game evaluation too. though I got complacent and didnt do as much as I could. while it becomes prohibitively expensive to steal late game techs, the cost to pillage resources is cheap. sabotaging critical buildings (happiness or health generating buildings)
sabotaging critical construction in progress (space parts)

Also I have 1 spy in every single city as part of mandatory garrison. major protection from espionage

somewhere else I saw a thought about 0% research coming back.
edit: its in the link below

you being the master of specialist econ.. do you think you can run cottages and scientists at the same time? I ask because raw commerce is what translates into EP's. with the dutch I tried to do a little of both.. but a philo leader might be able to run like 70% espionage while running scientists and rely on stealing techs. then midgame transition to running spies instead of scientists and switching the slider to 70% research

I think this needs as much research as the whole debate we saw over the CE and SE. is an espionage based econ possible?? or a hybrid like I just suggested??

2nd edit.. how gross is our phi/fin english leader now???

NaZ

 

[futurehermit]

that's a good question. i think it is too early to tell.

i think the AI techs slow enough (monarch/normal) that you could easily rely on lightbulbing and trading if you aren't concerned about getting a super-fast tech pace. the nice thing is that you could subtract the "trading" part of that sentence and insert "stealing" instead.

so, have say 2 cities dedicated to pumping great people for lightbulbing then use 1-2 early great spies in high-teching AI empires to steal techs. have your remaining cities cottage-spammed and raise the espionage slider high. you steal techs and lightbulb techs.

however at some point you will have to transition because you cannot support this indefinitely (as you point out). so then you switch to having 1-2 dedicated spy-cities and run the science slider back up.

i think it could definitely work. it would just be a matter of working out the kinks.

i might try it out. if you want to try it out as well we could discuss our findings here.

i wanted to try a game anyways where i tried to squeeze out everything i could out of espionage. it's a new feature, let's see what we can make it do!!!

 

[NaZdReG]

I was going to try new creative/philo greek leader anyway. I will make several saves and try to remember to capture screenies. and we should either share here or gather the data and put it in a new thread for the beancounters to see.

for consistency i am going monarch, marathon,
hemispheres: 2 massive continents w/ regular islands.

I'll put in a couple of hours and see what I come up with

NaZ

edit: not sure I'll end up going greek, havent started yet but will choose a philo leader for sure.

 

[Phrederick]

One thing I was amazed to find out is that spys can pillage towns to nothing with a single mission; you don't have to pillage to village, then to hamlet, then to cottage. So for 100-200EPs/town, you can eviscerate a cottaged city pretty quickly and cheaply, compared to pre-BtS.

Also, has anyone figured out what can cause a -diplomatic spying modifier? Is it if a spy is caught while wandering around, while a spy is caught on a mission, or both? I know it won't always appear, but can either cause it? If the only risk to letting a spy sit in place for five turns is losing him, I'll do it to drop the cost down, but if I'm risking a -1 modifier for that, I'm not sure if I'll always do it.

 

[BARBEERIAN]

Here's my National Park / Spy city. Pretty much played the entire game around city, waiting for the techs to develop it properly. Beelined Sci.Method and spammed Forest Preserves, and they spread like wildfire around the city (it already had 10'ish forests to start with so it went really fast). Next I went for Democracy, and Communism to get all those great spy buildings, then hit up Biology for the park. +16 free specialsts in Sparta from the Park! I'll go back and convert a few Preserves into lumbermills (the ones on rivers) since I can only assign 9-spies anyway and this'll be one badass spy center.

Now to go backfill all the techs I'm missing from some severe beelining with some dirt cheap spy operations =)

 

[NaZdReG]

I know this is a seperate idea.. but how strong can forest preserves be?? if you have a commerce city and you leave a few spaces (plains are good since they dont support a cottage) put a forest preserve or 2 up with a space in the middle.. how often can that forest be chopped?.. or if you can set it up for multiple forest spawns... like the old civ 3 chopping sprees

food for thought

NaZ

edit: nevermind.. its like 40+ turns on monarch even with 3+ forest reserves around the chopped square. maybe someone wants to mess in the world builder for faster speeds this could be exploitable. 5 workers chop in 1 turn. if it regrows in less than 10 on normal thats quite a production boost. especially if you are able to do it in 3-4 spots (on each side of the fat cross) every 10 turns.

 

[futurehermit]

I tried this out a little bit in one of my games. I chopped out the GW while going for obsolete's strat. My first GSp went in AC's capital. I stole a pile of techs from him. My 2nd GSp went in Monty's capital. I started to steal a pile of more expensive techs from him--like construction!!!

I must say I was impressed :shock: I gave up the game because it didn't pan out the way I wanted, but it was no fault of the tactic of stealing techs. I think it is a great idea.

 

[NaZdReG]

yeah it can be a little disgusting. not to mention the immunity from barb events is pretty cool.

NaZ

 

[Phrederick]

yeah it can be a little disgusting. not to mention the immunity from barb events is pretty cool.

Explain that one, I haven't heard of it.

Also, stealing techs in insanely useful. I grabbed techs up to Civil Service and Paper, allowing me to win the Liberalism race. I think I got Currency, Civil Service, Feudalism, Engineering, and Paper. I didn't get a GSpy for a while because I had to conquer the GW, but when it came, it was awesome. Of course now I have -3 against my biggest neighbor (Napolean of the Germans) with Aggressive AI, but we share a religion and I've got a pretty big military and will be the first to Riflemen I think.

 

[Melon Head]

Phrederick, the immunity from barbs is a property of the Great Wall, not the spy strategy (just nice synergy, as you can now use those hammers on spies instead of military units).

Another nice feature from adding spying is that itm akes picking a diplomatic block much nicer. You can trade with civs that have the same religion as you do, and spy on your enemies. Usually I run into trouble if I have to trade for a really important tech from my enemies, which poisons relationships in my diplomatic bloc; a problem usually intensified by free religion and removing all of my previous shared religion. This time, i think the spies will take the place of trading.

 

[futurehermit]

i just had a game where i infiltrated with a GSpy off the GW. i was stealing all ancient techs plus some classical ones like construction, calendar, etc. and even some medeival ones like feudalism

if you beeline (or steal!) col you can run a spy specialist in your GW city to hurry another GSpy to basically turn a financial (preferably) AI into a part of your science infrastructure

the SWEET thing about this approach is no WFYABTA!!! just steal all the techs you skip and don't trade any around = guaranteed tech leader

 

[kniteowl]

I heard that, that strategy was overpowered and they were planning to change it in the patch. Probably either getting GW to require 3 walls before construction or removing the GSpy Points and replacing it GE points, or possibly changing the infiltrate option to be more like a GM, you get so many EP points dependent on City size and Distance from Capital. so you don't get 4000 in the early game which is crazy overpowered.

 

[NaZdReG]

players have spoken out that it is too strong. though it requires deviation and risk. still the payoff is consistent and incredibly cool to see. especially when your target pops the oracle its like whee more for me.

even still, the best you can hope for is tech pairty. while it helps you catch up it still takes quite a bit of effort to get ahead of the ai on monarch and above.

even still.. was playing a game to check out capharacts and fell back to the wall to catch up to the dutch who were running away with the game. prioritized other techs (had the stable quest come up) and just stole all his goodies.. he became my vassal after I stole his capitol

NaZ

 

[Phrederick]

players have spoken out that it is too strong. though it requires deviation and risk. still the payoff is consistent and incredibly cool to see. especially when your target pops the oracle its like whee more for me.

After only one game using an early GSpy, I'd say it's too overpowered. Perhaps if unsuccesful spy missions still cost the points it would be more balanced; I don't know, but it seems like the human can easily abuse espionage right now.