Espionage thoughts

[SPQR300]

I hope espionage will be useful,for example in times like when there is a peacemonger(like India) is on another continent. I hope with espionage the player will be able to stop them from insane teching. And generally espionage should be a nice gameplay element to stop inreachable civilizations from getting an insade tech lead, which you cant make up for. I hope with good espionage-managent, spy actions will make much more damage to the enemy, then they overall cost for you. In vanilla, spies are hardly useful, because in most cases it costs more resources for you, then the action takes from the enemy.
other thoughts:
-spies and nuclear warfare should be connected somehow, like in the cold war. Both systems are crippled in vanilla. For example spies could turn SDI off, disable enemy nukes(to cripple a retaliation strike). This could be like a quasi "espionage victory", because with MASS spending on esp, (and thus preventing him to retaliate) you could nuke the opponent to the medieval ages. And from then on victory would be much easier. Doing this should be quite hard, there should be some-kind of espionage cold war minigame, and winning the "cold-war" should not be easier then winning for example a cultural victory. Or maybe they could completely rework the way nuclear weapons work. No SDI and such BS, but you could prevent nuclear strikes with espionage.
-spies could alter diplomatic relations, plant conflict between your opponents, so it would be easier to make a full-scale world war

any thoughts on these?

 

[B.Rob.]

I agree with the peacemongering thing. One thing that I think should be added too:

You should be able to use your espionage as a means of controlling barbarians, for example . . . using the espionage % to, in a way, command barbarians to attack a certain civ. It would have interesting effects on starting the game as well. Whoever is persuading the barbs into war against another civ, would have to give up tech % to incite this attack. And the people being attacked would have to focus on unit production rather than improvements, or workers, or . . . whatever.

Also, I think that they should bring back a tradeable item being contact with . . . whatever civ. That was a great thing, because it inspired more need to search the map, because it was a type of early currency.