Espionage and Religion

[DarkFyre99]

In my current game, I started right next door to the Holy Roman Empire, who founded Buddhism in a marvelous, food-rich capital. Needless to say, I rushed my Buddhist neighbor (never let it be said that the Holkan is completely useless), took his capital and razed his newly founded city, and I now have an excellent Wall-Street city. Built the shrine with a farmed Great Prophet, and spread my religion throughout my empire, and my neighbors as well.

As I'm still spreading my religion to the more isolated cities, I've begun to notice a few things. I'm close to the limit for city visibility with one neighbor, and close to the investigate city limit with another. When I spread my religion to the former, I have visibility on that city when I didn't before, and when I spread it to the latter, I can now see his city management screen.

Pre-BTS, owning the holy city of your state religion automatically gave you city visibility. That ability was lost with BTS, but it now seems that it lowers the passive espionage cost for that city only.

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

[Strategos]

Hmm, that's interesting. I haven't noticed this yet, but I'll definitely be looking for it now. I have noticed in my last game that I had complete city visibility with a vassal but only some of his cities actually showed me what they're currently building. That seemed odd to me at the time. I'll have to check that out.

 

[UncleJJ]

Espionage does get a bonus from your state religion. I noticed that spy missions get a 40% discount on the EP cost in a foreign city that has my state religion when he was in Free Religion. That went a good way to offset the 50% distance penalty I had. So if you want to save EP points use missionaries ahead of your spies. I'm not sure if it also affects the % chance of a spy's success but will test it it sometime soon.

I guess you are getting a similar discount on the passive Espionage efffects.