Counterspy Is Making Me Crazy

Dreasimy

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 23, 2016
Messages
3
I am having to reassign my dang counterspies to the same location and action over and over. It seems like every turn or so. These ridiculous clicks to tell it to go back to the same city, confirm placement, click the thing I want it to counterspy at (AGAIN). I have to do this all again in 3 turns. Is there no way to let them know yes I want the same dude to spy on my capital at the same damn campus until I say otherwise or for say, 24 turns or something because I'm literally going insane with all these ridiculous clicks. GAH!

Edit: the 3 turn thing is because I was playing this game on quick game speed.
 
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I agree, it's VERY annoying. Why isn't there an option to counterspy for longer than 8 turns? How likely is it someone wants to counterspy for only 8 turns? And even if I want just an 8-turn initial mission, why not give me a simple "repeat mission" button instead of a series of annoying mouseclicks?

I gotta believe Firaxis will fix this. It's not a deal-breaker, but it is irritating.
 
Indeed it is extremely irritating, but I am also sure it will be the first or second thing to be tweaked as it's a very quick thing to fix. Counter-espionage spies should stay on their assignments until further notice, just as they do in V.
 
Indeed it is ludicrous. Ridiculous. How these little lack of quality of life features made it through so many devs is beyond me.

I have gotten it down to a quick 3 clicks now, though. When the game auto-selects the spy to reassign, it amazingly annoyingly opens it up on the 'reassign to city' page. But if you just quickly double click the reassign spy button, it closes the page and opens the city district page instead. Then click the district. If you know where you're clicking you can do it in a second or 2.

But yes, it drives me absolutely crazy. Especially on my last game where Catherine and Hojo were going absolutely ape with the sabotage, I had to have at least 5 spies going on at once. Each one in a different city and ending their mission one turn apart. 5 turns in a row every 8 turns reassigning spies. It's too much.
 
Totally agree with op. This is driving me nutz when of course I am not angry over stupid AI.
 
This is number one priority in fixing from game enjoyment point of view. It is most boring think in Civ6, it actually made me stop using spies at all last game :(
 
It's annoying for sure. I just ignore that panel and click the spy mission button and choose which district to counter spy. So 2 clicks. But I agree that it is annoying.
 
It's even more annoying because whenever it comes up, it defaults to the "assign to a new city" menu, so I have to double check that this was my counter-spy guy, and not a new spy I just built. I mean, it's nice that I start to learn my spy by name, but not sure that's the right mechanism. Also would be nice if I could leave him on counter-spy when I promote him. I had a case where I gave him a promotion (that I didn't even use because he already had the counter-spy promotion), but that turn Kongo stole money from my commercial hub. Maybe he would have missed catching the guy anyways, but I dunno.
 
Completely agree with the OP. Either the orders should be 'do this indefinitely unless instructed otherwise' or the question after a set number of turns should be 'do I continue doing what I am doing: yes/no' and if 'no' - 'awaiting new orders'
 
IMO counterespionage should just cover a region. That would cut down on a lot of the whack-a-mole-but-blindfolded problem while reducing the tedium.
 
IMO counterespionage should just cover a region. That would cut down on a lot of the whack-a-mole-but-blindfolded problem while reducing the tedium.

That's why now in my newest games as much as possible and as long as terrain allows, I try and put all my districts into a clump. Preferably surrounding the city centre. Then I can just pop a spy in the middle district and not worry. Doesn't always work that easy of course.
My last 2 games I completely forgo trying to get any optimal adjacency bonuses, and just put districts as close together as possible. The +1-5 bonus is so unecessary in the current game as you get so much out of them anyway.
 
Keeping several spies on counter-intelligence duty seems like a waste. I don't usually have more than one or two: it's just more productive to go wreak havoc abroad.

Also, this isn't really a solution to this issue, but the Cryptography policy (offensive spy actions gain +1 level, enemy spy actions in your territory -2) is your friend.

In my experience, the AI doesn't rotate targets much and becomes predictable, so you can afford to be reactive: an experienced counter-spy plus the aforementioned policy in the right spot can capture/kill spy after spy, to the point the foreign powers literally run out of agents.
 
I haven't tested it but it looks like the duration of Counter Spy might be set here in UnitOperations.xml:

<Row OperationType="UNITOPERATION_SPY_COUNTERSPY" VisibleInUI="true" HoldCycling="true" CategoryInUI="MOVE" Icon="ICON_UNITOPERATION_SPY_COUNTERSPY" Description="LOC_UNITOPERATION_SPY_COUNTERSPY_DESCRIPTION" InterfaceMode="INTERFACEMODE_SPY_CHOOSE_MISSION" Turns="8"/>

I assume changing that to something like 30 or 40 would make the spy mission last that long. Not sure of course though. Also not sure if you could then break the spy out of that mission if needed. The whole thing is kinda wonky and tedious--should be able to just set them down permanently somewhere and only move them when you want to.
 
Keeping several spies on counter-intelligence duty seems like a waste. I don't usually have more than one or two: it's just more productive to go wreak havoc abroad.

On Emperor there were spies siphoning gold, hitting production, and stealing science boosts. And they would all that in my two largest cities, not just the capital. Losing 10 turns to repair production becomes a problem when multiple AI are using multiple spies concurrently.

I'm at the point where I may skip delegations of any kind if my capitol is off and out of the way. I already hold onto captured spies as they count against the spy limit and have a high GPT unit cost against their owners.

Isau, that's a nice find. I may give that a try. You can cancel spies out of counter-spy missions after they are setup, so I don't think you would lose access to the spy for 40 or whatever turns if you made the change.
 
I'm with you on the annoying need to re-assign every few turns. What's worse is when you have two counterspies in the same city covering the industrial zone and the space port and accidentally re-assign one to double up on one district .

Also where does your counterspy need to be to stop the theft of gold? In the capitol city center, the financial district, or in every financial district in every city?
 
I tend to put them in industrial districts in my spaceport cities as they're be far the most sabotaged. I don't mind AI's stealing tech boosts. Pity they don't seem to help much as AI still get through much of the time.

Couterspies could use a buff and a quality of life change.
 
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