MrCynical
Deity
It has occurred to me that, while there is an excellent article on the maths behind the costs of espionage missions in BtS here, there still isn't one on effective strategies for using those missions. I'm therefore going to try and write one:
Espionage can be broken down into two basic aspects; passive and active missions.
Passive Missions
These are the simplest element of espionage - if you have enough espionage points against a given civ, you automatically receive a certain level of information about them, without any active intervention by your spies. The four possible levels of information are:
Demographics
The most basic level of information shows you the civ's demographics in the information panel. Not particularly important except to see their power graph, but also requires very few espionage points.
Research
This one shows in the score panel what the civ is researching, and how long they'll take to research. Requires rather more espionage points, but can be very useful, for instance to tell you another civ is a turn ahead in getting to a religion or Liberalism. That can give enough warning to scrounge some gold for heavy deficit research, or even to burn a GP on a lightbulb that would normally be unfavourable. Also handy to give you an idea how long a military tech advantage will last. If you see a civ you're planning on attacking is only a few turns from Rifling, it's time to move fast.
City Visibility
This level gives you line of sight to known enemy cities, analogous to having a spy standing in each one. This is calculated by city rather than by civ, so you'll seee for example the cities that have your state religion first. I'm dubious about the value of this one - as already mentioned, the effects can be duplicated by having a spy in the city, though this is vulnerable to getting caught. Of some use for tracking AI military.
Investigate City
The most expensive level of passive mission gives you access to the city screens of the rival civ. Generally requires heavy investment in espionage, or takes until the late phases of the game, but is well worth it. In a wonder race you can see exactly how long you've got to build it. You already have a view of virtually all the civ's military, and can now see their capacity for building more. You can track down the locations where spaceship components are being built instantly, and destroy them. Personally I find this passive mission one of the most powerful aspects of espionage, and particularly in the later stages it is worth focusing enough espionage on your main rival(s) to get this, even if you have to push up the espionage slider.
Active Missions
These are the missions which require a spy unit to carry them out. They're generally more localised in effect than the passive missions, but if targeted carefully can still have a huge impact.
Steal Treasury
One of the cheapest in terms of espionage points, this steals a (usually small) percentage of the other civ's gold. Unlike for most missions, it does matter where this is carried out, as the amount you steal is related to the size of the city relative to the civ's total population. As a means of acquiring gold, this is not very efficient - the EP to gold conversion rate is simply too low. Conceivably depriving the other civ of the gold could be worth it, but AIs rarely run that close to 0. Not one of the more useful missions.
Spread Culture
This mission does not function remotely as the documentation would suggest. While it claims to add a chunk of your culture to their city equal to 5% of their current culture, this culture is not recognised in all circumstances. For future epionage missions the culture increase does have a small effect (~2-2.5% reduction in espionage costs in the city). If stealing multiple expensive techs from a single civ, this can be worth running in a vulnerable city to reduce net espionage costs.
The culture also applies when a city changes hands - when the city comes out of revolt, it will have the specified amount of your culture in it, resulting in immediate border expansions as appropriate.
What it does not do is have any effect on culture flipping cities or shifting an enemy cultural border. The added culture is not recognised here, so there is no effect on the ratio of your culture to theirs, their cultural borders, or the odds of the city flipping. This may be a bug.
Support City Revolt
Now we get to a useful mission. This pushes the targeted city into a revolt (identical to the slave revolt random event) for a single turn. Crucially this completely eliminates the city's defense bonus for that turn. It can therefore be used as an alternative to catapults when they either haven't been invented yet, or are taking too long to remove the city defense bonus. If you focus all your EPs on one civ, even the palace alone can give enough for one or two revolts pre-catapults. It can also be used to slow a city working on a wonder or spaceship component down, as it will produce nothing on the turn of revolt. One small difference from normal revolt is that it does not affect cultural borders.
Forment Unhappiness
Increases the number of
faces in a city by 8 for 8 turns (does not scale with game speed). Could be used to slow down a crucial city, or on a larger scale to slow down a civ's research by generating angry citizens. Obviously most effective on fast game speeds, and against cities at the happiness cap. You cannot carry out multiple missions of this in the same city at the same time - no pushing unhappiness up until all citizens stop working.
Poison Water
The health analogue of forment unhappiness - generates 8
for 8 turns in a city. Generally this is the less useful of the pair, as since unhealthy citizens still work it isn't as effective at slowing a city's production. Particularly on the slower speeds, the granary provides enough of a buffer that they probably won't lose population. Against a city with no granary, and that has just grown, you might be able to reduce it in size significantly though, so this mission is not completely useless. Also in the later stages cities tend to run nearer the health cap than the happiness cap, making this the more effective of the pair.
Steal Tech
Probably the most powerful of the active missions, to the extent that it is possible to steal the majority of the tech tree – known as the Espionage Economy (EE). If you can get the spy's -50% to costs for being stationary in the enemy city, the conversion rate for espionage to science is quite favourable. You can carry out this mission in any city, so pick one that’s nearby, shares a religion with you, and has a lot of your culture for cheapest techs and best success rate. The aforementioned Spread culture mission can also be used to reduce costs in a specific city.
Influence Civics
Simply allows you to switch one of the other civ’s civics. You can only switch their civics to ones which you are currently using. This can be handy to open up a civ to your religions or corporations if they are staying in Theocracy or Mercantilism/State Property. It may also be the case that civics which are good for your civ are weak for others. E.g. if you’re playing a peaceful builder game pacifism may be fine for you, but a neighbour with a huge military will suffer if switched to it. Similarly a neighbour with a lot of corporation branches will have trouble if switched from Free Market to Enviromentalism. If you have Cristo Redentor, it might even be worth switching to a less favourable civic for one turn to drag an opponent into a weak civic.
Again, this mission can be carried out in any city, so pick the cheapest one. Most civs will not stick with the civics you force on them, but they have to run it for at least 5 turns unless they have Cristo Redentor, giving a decent window for missionaries/executives. Non-spiritual civs will also have to waste turns in anarchy switching their civics back.
Influence Religion
Works in basically the same way as influence civics except that it switches the other civ to your state religion (you must have one for this to work – you can’t force them into no state religion). Can be useful for a quick boost to diplomatic relations – opening up trading options and war allies. Again, the civ is unlikely to stick with the new religion for long unless they were likely to switch of their own accord but this wastes time for them with anarchy.
Sabotage Building
This mission is crippled by a bug. It seems to be impossible to carry out this mission in any city that does not have a monument – it simply is not listed as available. In those cities with monuments any building can be sabotaged. Due to the very cheap cost of this mission relative to the hammer values of the building it is very powerful where possible. For example, you could destroy the bank in the shrine/corporation HQ city, or the power plant in a city working on a spaceship component. Unfortunately the vast majority of cities are impervious to this, so what should be a very powerful mission is rarely an option.
Sabotage Production
Destroys all hammers put towards the current project in the city. Could in theory be used to slow a wonder or spaceship component, but is a very expensive way of doing it if they have invested a lot of hammers. Unfortunately there is no way to destroy some hammers – it’s all or nothing, which makes this extremely expensive if they are very close to completion. In practice I find other active missions such as Forment Unhappiness and Incite Revolt to be more cost effective delaying tactics.
Sabotage Project
Destroys an already constructed spaceship component. Despite the name, it only applies to spaceship components – other projects such as SDI or Apollo cannot be destroyed. This is the most expensive mission, but can be critical in a very close space race. Counter intuitively this mission does not have to be carried out in either the capital, or the cities where the components were constructed. As for the other cases, pick the city with lowest costs and highest success odds.
Counter Espionage
If you carry out this mission in another civ, it will triple the cost of all their espionage missions against you for a short period. Quite cheap, but many AI civs make so little use of espionage that it is unnecessary.
Sabotage Improvement
The one mission which is not carried out in cities, this destroys a tile improvement. Most useful for cutting off enemy resources (even in the modern age, it takes a lot of workers to replace an oil well immediately, and the AI will generally take several turns to reconnect it). Destroying towns is also of some use as it cannot be immediately repaired. However the mission only reduces the town to a village (and then another mission will reduce it to a hamlet, and so one), which makes it quite expensive. A final option is destroying the mines/watermills/workshops around an enemy city to slow a wonder. Other tile improvements tend to be repaired too fast to be worth the espionage cost.
General Strategies
Defending against enemy spies
While AI spies rarely manage to be more than an annoyance, you have a number of options for defending against them. The first is to maintain a high total output of espionage points relative to them. This will significantly increase their espionage costs when carrying out missions against you. The relevant values are the total amounts of epionage produced by your civ and theirs over the coure of the game. Unfortunately the ratios shown in the scoreboard tooltips are the current ratios, which may be wildly different from the totals if you are carrying out active missions. The espionage graph shows the real relative espionage totals.
The counter espionage active mission will also increase their costs, but requires you to know who is sending the spies.
Your own spies can also provide a defense. If one of your own spies is present in a city or tile other spies have much less chance of success than otherwise. The Security Bureau has the same effect. Multiple spies do not stack, and don’t stack with the bureau. One spy or the security bureau is the best defense you can have. Well worth doing if a city is getting attacked multiple times, or is working on something particularly important
Another option is to avoid cities which are very vulnerable – if you have one city stuck on a different continent, and with other civs' state religion present, the civs on the other continent will be able to carry out very cheap missions in it. At least put one of your own spies in it, or even get rid of the city completely.
Vulnerable Cities
The AI has an irritating habit of wedging cities on any scrap of land it can, regardless of how good it is. While a stray foreign city on your continent can be annoying, you can take advantage of it with espionage. Most active missions have the same effect wherever they are carried out. Their costs will be much lower in a city close to your capital, and far from theirs, that shares your culture and religion, and is unlikely to be big enough to have a security bureau.
The Espionage Economy
As mentioned earlier, this takes the approach of producing espionage rather than science, and stealing rather than researching techs. Particularly if you leave spies stationary for 5 turns to get the maximum bonus before stealing a tech, this can work out cheaper than direct research. It’s also always an options, even if you’re in a position where AIs refuse to trade with you, or you have nothing to trade for tech. Obviously it’s necessary to prioritise the buildings; Courthouse, Jail, Intelligence Agency and Security Bureau. Either running a high espionage slider and building cottages, or using spy specialists, is viable to produce enough espionage. If you want a mixture of science and espionage, then spy specialists under Representation are more efficient than towns. If you want pure espionage, the slider and towns are more effective. With a strong food corporation it becomes rather arbitrary, since you can then run the max of 7 spy specialists on top of most cottaged cities.
On the disadvantage side is that, with the exception of the courthouse, these buildings appear quite late. The earliest modifier building is the jail, which appears long after the library. You’re also limited to a maximum of seven spy specialists per city, as opposed to an unlimited number of scientists. This is somewhat balanced by the buildings producing a certain amount of EPs regardless of the tiles around the city.
Other snags are that you obviously cannot be first to a tech with this approach, a serious handicap to getting religions, Liberalism and free great people. Generating a mixture of science and espionage is possible, but relatively inefficient due to the greater number of modifier buildings required. You can’t get into a tech lead either, which hinders wonder construction, and makes it harder to go to war with technological superiority.
The final problem is diplomacy. No matter what, (and especially if you have spies standing around for 5 turns to minimise costs) you are going to have failures at stealing tech. While this doesn’t cost EPs, there is a chance each time this happens that the AI will discover which civ the spy came from. Each time this happens, you’ll get a -1 to relations with that civ, and that adds up over the course of the game, making it very hard to stay on good terms with the most advanced of the AI.
There are a number of games shown in the strategy forum which show the espionage economy in action.
The Great Wall
As it is available very early, and generates 2GPP towards great spies, building the Great Wall can guarantee a very early great spy (especially if you’re playing a Philosophical leader). This great spy can be infiltrated into another civ to provide enough espionage to steal several cheap early techs (though you’ll still need to get to Alphabet on your own).
Other options would be to merge the great spy into the city, or to build Scotland yard for the 100% bonus to EPs. Depending on how much you intend to make use of tech stealing over the course of the game (and how advanced your neighbours are) this may be a better option.
Focused Espionage
By default the game distributes the espionage points generated by your civ equally against all the others. This is almost invariably a mistake. Far better is to focus on the one civ you’re aiming to steal tech from, or incite revolts in, or whatever. It is also far easier to reach the threshold for the passive missions to give information if you focus on a single civ, and some civs are always going to be more relevant than others.
In Conclusion
Even if you don't go for a full blown espionage economy, it is still worth putting some effort into the espionage aspect of the game. It is one of the best sources for (peaceful) delaying tactics, and an occasional tech steal can be a great help if the AI is uncooperative in trading (or if you've turned it off...). The passive information is invaluable whatever your approach to the game - conquering the AI or outbuilding them, it helps to know exactly what you're up against.
Espionage can be broken down into two basic aspects; passive and active missions.
Passive Missions
These are the simplest element of espionage - if you have enough espionage points against a given civ, you automatically receive a certain level of information about them, without any active intervention by your spies. The four possible levels of information are:
Demographics
The most basic level of information shows you the civ's demographics in the information panel. Not particularly important except to see their power graph, but also requires very few espionage points.
Research
This one shows in the score panel what the civ is researching, and how long they'll take to research. Requires rather more espionage points, but can be very useful, for instance to tell you another civ is a turn ahead in getting to a religion or Liberalism. That can give enough warning to scrounge some gold for heavy deficit research, or even to burn a GP on a lightbulb that would normally be unfavourable. Also handy to give you an idea how long a military tech advantage will last. If you see a civ you're planning on attacking is only a few turns from Rifling, it's time to move fast.
City Visibility
This level gives you line of sight to known enemy cities, analogous to having a spy standing in each one. This is calculated by city rather than by civ, so you'll seee for example the cities that have your state religion first. I'm dubious about the value of this one - as already mentioned, the effects can be duplicated by having a spy in the city, though this is vulnerable to getting caught. Of some use for tracking AI military.
Investigate City
The most expensive level of passive mission gives you access to the city screens of the rival civ. Generally requires heavy investment in espionage, or takes until the late phases of the game, but is well worth it. In a wonder race you can see exactly how long you've got to build it. You already have a view of virtually all the civ's military, and can now see their capacity for building more. You can track down the locations where spaceship components are being built instantly, and destroy them. Personally I find this passive mission one of the most powerful aspects of espionage, and particularly in the later stages it is worth focusing enough espionage on your main rival(s) to get this, even if you have to push up the espionage slider.
Active Missions
These are the missions which require a spy unit to carry them out. They're generally more localised in effect than the passive missions, but if targeted carefully can still have a huge impact.
Steal Treasury
One of the cheapest in terms of espionage points, this steals a (usually small) percentage of the other civ's gold. Unlike for most missions, it does matter where this is carried out, as the amount you steal is related to the size of the city relative to the civ's total population. As a means of acquiring gold, this is not very efficient - the EP to gold conversion rate is simply too low. Conceivably depriving the other civ of the gold could be worth it, but AIs rarely run that close to 0. Not one of the more useful missions.
Spread Culture
This mission does not function remotely as the documentation would suggest. While it claims to add a chunk of your culture to their city equal to 5% of their current culture, this culture is not recognised in all circumstances. For future epionage missions the culture increase does have a small effect (~2-2.5% reduction in espionage costs in the city). If stealing multiple expensive techs from a single civ, this can be worth running in a vulnerable city to reduce net espionage costs.
The culture also applies when a city changes hands - when the city comes out of revolt, it will have the specified amount of your culture in it, resulting in immediate border expansions as appropriate.
What it does not do is have any effect on culture flipping cities or shifting an enemy cultural border. The added culture is not recognised here, so there is no effect on the ratio of your culture to theirs, their cultural borders, or the odds of the city flipping. This may be a bug.
Support City Revolt
Now we get to a useful mission. This pushes the targeted city into a revolt (identical to the slave revolt random event) for a single turn. Crucially this completely eliminates the city's defense bonus for that turn. It can therefore be used as an alternative to catapults when they either haven't been invented yet, or are taking too long to remove the city defense bonus. If you focus all your EPs on one civ, even the palace alone can give enough for one or two revolts pre-catapults. It can also be used to slow a city working on a wonder or spaceship component down, as it will produce nothing on the turn of revolt. One small difference from normal revolt is that it does not affect cultural borders.
Forment Unhappiness
Increases the number of
faces in a city by 8 for 8 turns (does not scale with game speed). Could be used to slow down a crucial city, or on a larger scale to slow down a civ's research by generating angry citizens. Obviously most effective on fast game speeds, and against cities at the happiness cap. You cannot carry out multiple missions of this in the same city at the same time - no pushing unhappiness up until all citizens stop working.Poison Water
The health analogue of forment unhappiness - generates 8
for 8 turns in a city. Generally this is the less useful of the pair, as since unhealthy citizens still work it isn't as effective at slowing a city's production. Particularly on the slower speeds, the granary provides enough of a buffer that they probably won't lose population. Against a city with no granary, and that has just grown, you might be able to reduce it in size significantly though, so this mission is not completely useless. Also in the later stages cities tend to run nearer the health cap than the happiness cap, making this the more effective of the pair.Steal Tech
Probably the most powerful of the active missions, to the extent that it is possible to steal the majority of the tech tree – known as the Espionage Economy (EE). If you can get the spy's -50% to costs for being stationary in the enemy city, the conversion rate for espionage to science is quite favourable. You can carry out this mission in any city, so pick one that’s nearby, shares a religion with you, and has a lot of your culture for cheapest techs and best success rate. The aforementioned Spread culture mission can also be used to reduce costs in a specific city.
Influence Civics
Simply allows you to switch one of the other civ’s civics. You can only switch their civics to ones which you are currently using. This can be handy to open up a civ to your religions or corporations if they are staying in Theocracy or Mercantilism/State Property. It may also be the case that civics which are good for your civ are weak for others. E.g. if you’re playing a peaceful builder game pacifism may be fine for you, but a neighbour with a huge military will suffer if switched to it. Similarly a neighbour with a lot of corporation branches will have trouble if switched from Free Market to Enviromentalism. If you have Cristo Redentor, it might even be worth switching to a less favourable civic for one turn to drag an opponent into a weak civic.
Again, this mission can be carried out in any city, so pick the cheapest one. Most civs will not stick with the civics you force on them, but they have to run it for at least 5 turns unless they have Cristo Redentor, giving a decent window for missionaries/executives. Non-spiritual civs will also have to waste turns in anarchy switching their civics back.
Influence Religion
Works in basically the same way as influence civics except that it switches the other civ to your state religion (you must have one for this to work – you can’t force them into no state religion). Can be useful for a quick boost to diplomatic relations – opening up trading options and war allies. Again, the civ is unlikely to stick with the new religion for long unless they were likely to switch of their own accord but this wastes time for them with anarchy.
Sabotage Building
This mission is crippled by a bug. It seems to be impossible to carry out this mission in any city that does not have a monument – it simply is not listed as available. In those cities with monuments any building can be sabotaged. Due to the very cheap cost of this mission relative to the hammer values of the building it is very powerful where possible. For example, you could destroy the bank in the shrine/corporation HQ city, or the power plant in a city working on a spaceship component. Unfortunately the vast majority of cities are impervious to this, so what should be a very powerful mission is rarely an option.
Sabotage Production
Destroys all hammers put towards the current project in the city. Could in theory be used to slow a wonder or spaceship component, but is a very expensive way of doing it if they have invested a lot of hammers. Unfortunately there is no way to destroy some hammers – it’s all or nothing, which makes this extremely expensive if they are very close to completion. In practice I find other active missions such as Forment Unhappiness and Incite Revolt to be more cost effective delaying tactics.
Sabotage Project
Destroys an already constructed spaceship component. Despite the name, it only applies to spaceship components – other projects such as SDI or Apollo cannot be destroyed. This is the most expensive mission, but can be critical in a very close space race. Counter intuitively this mission does not have to be carried out in either the capital, or the cities where the components were constructed. As for the other cases, pick the city with lowest costs and highest success odds.
Counter Espionage
If you carry out this mission in another civ, it will triple the cost of all their espionage missions against you for a short period. Quite cheap, but many AI civs make so little use of espionage that it is unnecessary.
Sabotage Improvement
The one mission which is not carried out in cities, this destroys a tile improvement. Most useful for cutting off enemy resources (even in the modern age, it takes a lot of workers to replace an oil well immediately, and the AI will generally take several turns to reconnect it). Destroying towns is also of some use as it cannot be immediately repaired. However the mission only reduces the town to a village (and then another mission will reduce it to a hamlet, and so one), which makes it quite expensive. A final option is destroying the mines/watermills/workshops around an enemy city to slow a wonder. Other tile improvements tend to be repaired too fast to be worth the espionage cost.
General Strategies
Defending against enemy spies
While AI spies rarely manage to be more than an annoyance, you have a number of options for defending against them. The first is to maintain a high total output of espionage points relative to them. This will significantly increase their espionage costs when carrying out missions against you. The relevant values are the total amounts of epionage produced by your civ and theirs over the coure of the game. Unfortunately the ratios shown in the scoreboard tooltips are the current ratios, which may be wildly different from the totals if you are carrying out active missions. The espionage graph shows the real relative espionage totals.
The counter espionage active mission will also increase their costs, but requires you to know who is sending the spies.
Your own spies can also provide a defense. If one of your own spies is present in a city or tile other spies have much less chance of success than otherwise. The Security Bureau has the same effect. Multiple spies do not stack, and don’t stack with the bureau. One spy or the security bureau is the best defense you can have. Well worth doing if a city is getting attacked multiple times, or is working on something particularly important
Another option is to avoid cities which are very vulnerable – if you have one city stuck on a different continent, and with other civs' state religion present, the civs on the other continent will be able to carry out very cheap missions in it. At least put one of your own spies in it, or even get rid of the city completely.
Vulnerable Cities
The AI has an irritating habit of wedging cities on any scrap of land it can, regardless of how good it is. While a stray foreign city on your continent can be annoying, you can take advantage of it with espionage. Most active missions have the same effect wherever they are carried out. Their costs will be much lower in a city close to your capital, and far from theirs, that shares your culture and religion, and is unlikely to be big enough to have a security bureau.
The Espionage Economy
As mentioned earlier, this takes the approach of producing espionage rather than science, and stealing rather than researching techs. Particularly if you leave spies stationary for 5 turns to get the maximum bonus before stealing a tech, this can work out cheaper than direct research. It’s also always an options, even if you’re in a position where AIs refuse to trade with you, or you have nothing to trade for tech. Obviously it’s necessary to prioritise the buildings; Courthouse, Jail, Intelligence Agency and Security Bureau. Either running a high espionage slider and building cottages, or using spy specialists, is viable to produce enough espionage. If you want a mixture of science and espionage, then spy specialists under Representation are more efficient than towns. If you want pure espionage, the slider and towns are more effective. With a strong food corporation it becomes rather arbitrary, since you can then run the max of 7 spy specialists on top of most cottaged cities.
On the disadvantage side is that, with the exception of the courthouse, these buildings appear quite late. The earliest modifier building is the jail, which appears long after the library. You’re also limited to a maximum of seven spy specialists per city, as opposed to an unlimited number of scientists. This is somewhat balanced by the buildings producing a certain amount of EPs regardless of the tiles around the city.
Other snags are that you obviously cannot be first to a tech with this approach, a serious handicap to getting religions, Liberalism and free great people. Generating a mixture of science and espionage is possible, but relatively inefficient due to the greater number of modifier buildings required. You can’t get into a tech lead either, which hinders wonder construction, and makes it harder to go to war with technological superiority.
The final problem is diplomacy. No matter what, (and especially if you have spies standing around for 5 turns to minimise costs) you are going to have failures at stealing tech. While this doesn’t cost EPs, there is a chance each time this happens that the AI will discover which civ the spy came from. Each time this happens, you’ll get a -1 to relations with that civ, and that adds up over the course of the game, making it very hard to stay on good terms with the most advanced of the AI.
There are a number of games shown in the strategy forum which show the espionage economy in action.
The Great Wall
As it is available very early, and generates 2GPP towards great spies, building the Great Wall can guarantee a very early great spy (especially if you’re playing a Philosophical leader). This great spy can be infiltrated into another civ to provide enough espionage to steal several cheap early techs (though you’ll still need to get to Alphabet on your own).
Other options would be to merge the great spy into the city, or to build Scotland yard for the 100% bonus to EPs. Depending on how much you intend to make use of tech stealing over the course of the game (and how advanced your neighbours are) this may be a better option.
Focused Espionage
By default the game distributes the espionage points generated by your civ equally against all the others. This is almost invariably a mistake. Far better is to focus on the one civ you’re aiming to steal tech from, or incite revolts in, or whatever. It is also far easier to reach the threshold for the passive missions to give information if you focus on a single civ, and some civs are always going to be more relevant than others.
In Conclusion
Even if you don't go for a full blown espionage economy, it is still worth putting some effort into the espionage aspect of the game. It is one of the best sources for (peaceful) delaying tactics, and an occasional tech steal can be a great help if the AI is uncooperative in trading (or if you've turned it off...). The passive information is invaluable whatever your approach to the game - conquering the AI or outbuilding them, it helps to know exactly what you're up against.
base costing tech by 15000*0.15=2250 
to 
convertion rate, so it makes sense to switch to an EE when you control a holy city. Tech lead has better trading and free GP potential, so to get best of the two worlds, a hybrid EE&manual research economy seems optimal.
AI + 102 
