Espionage Victory

[Noble Zarkon]

With the release of BUFFY 3.19.004 you may have seen the new Espionage category appearing on the HoF.

Kaitzilla was the first Hall of Famer to use this innovative tactic in G-Major 116 although it was initially developed by Plastic Ducks in SGOTM-16.

The basic idea is to found a city, seed it with some culture, gift it to an AI then run lots of "spread culture" missions until it becomes legendary then either capture it or have it flip back to you.

The new Mod categorises any Culture Victory where a "Spread Culture" mission has been executed in one of the Legendary Cities as Espionage. (Spread culture missions are unlikely to ever be undertaken in a traditional Cultural victory). Please note BTS itself will still flag the game as a Culture win but the submission system will pick it up as Espionage.

G-Minor 205 will be your first chance to try a Gauntlet specifically based around this new Victory condition!

We are currently manually reviewing old games which should be recategorised as Espionage victories, please feel free to point any out you are aware of as this is a time consuming manual process!

Any issues or questions please post here.

EDIT: Please note Espionage victories are not required for QM or EQM ranking however games will count towards other categories.

EDIT2: Note that ANY "Spread Culture" mission in ANY city will trigger the Espionage Victory, this is due to the complexities of extracting the information.

 

[WastinTime]

How fun. A whole new victory category to a 10 year old game.

I thought I did one of these, but it was probably a GotM. I don't think there are many

Standard, Deity, Normal is one.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

It's certainly an opportunity for players to secure some HOF slots. Every time that something new happens, there can be a race for people to participate.

For example, I don't know all of the HOF history, but there seems to be some legacy talk about the Warlords' Beta in the HOF documentation, and the release of Warlords likely made some HOF slots easier to take, which players may have rushed to do, since, apparently, there was great participation during the Warlords' Beta..

When BtS came out, the staff obviously had to introduce the Religious Victory category and the staff also chose to open up the Space Colony category, and I imagine that some players raced to get their names into some of those slots.

It's also a cool idea to run the next Gauntlet with that Victory Condition, to encourage players to educate each other on how to succeed at that Victory Condition and to increase overall participation in chasing after those newly-opened slots.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

When BtS came out, the staff obviously had to introduce the Religious Victory category and the staff also chose to open up the Space Colony category

I don't know if you meant anything by distinguishing between "had to" and "chose to" but the reasons why we introduced Religious and Space Colony are the same as why we introduced Espionage - in each case Firaxis lumped things together where the different mechanics meant the dates were simply not comparable to each other. The AP comes centuries before the UN but Firaxis treat both as Diplomatic, for Space BTS counts when your spaceship arrives not when it was launched as in Vanilla / Warlords. It was a similar dilemma with Espionage assisted Cultural victories, one option was simply to ban them but we hope this new category will bring a bit more fun to what is, as WT points out, a 10 year old game. So I hope you all enjoy filling the new HoF slots that have opened up

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I don't know if you meant anything by distinguishing between "had to" and "chose to"

Since you asked...
I suppose that I was looking at Victory Conditions from the perspective of a player, rather than from the perspective of a HOF developer who has to convert the games' results into meaningful data.

From my perspective, as a player, the method of winning a Religious Victory is fundamentally different from winning a United Nations Victory, even if the Civ 4 code refers to both of them as a Diplomatic Victory. So, from that perspective, it is a totally different Victory Condition that really deserved its own category in the Civ 4 code, even if the developers/designers of Civ 4 decided to re-use an existing Victory Condition category and therefore didn't code in a new Victory Condition, thereby likely causing more work for HOF developers at some point in time.


For Space, though, what we call "Space Colony" really replaced "Space Race," so from my perspective as a player, it's the same Victory Condition--i.e. I choose to go to Space with my Civ and I just happen to get my game categorized differently if I play in a different Civ expansion. I don't actually have an in-game way of choosing which Space variant to play--I have to make that decision before I start the game and pick the relevant Civ 4 expansion, then get whatever Victory Condition is associated with that Civ 4 expansion.

I can understand that a decision was made to separate these two variants of a Space game, and I am not questioning that decision.

Without seeing the history, I'm not sure what all of the relevant factors going into that decision were, but it seems that you are saying that the additional turns required to wait for a Spaceship to arrive on Alpha Centauri (is that where the Spaceship goes?) in BtS after (enough of) the Spaceship Parts have been completed was one of the reasons prompting the distinction.

In practice, it looks as though some Vanilla/Warlords games have the faster times, while some BtS games have the faster times. Changes over time to how Corporations in BtS worked is probably one related factor, as are things such as players, over time, finding ways to more easily get Friendly AI allies in BtS, and more people playing BtS in their veteran years means that they'll be more likely to be using that variant in the games that are their personal bests.

So I hope you all enjoy filling the new HoF slots that have opened up

That's the most important part of this thread!

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Good analysis Dhoomstriker, it's certainly interesting to see how the how extra turns waiting for the Spaceship to arrive have been overtaken by better knowledge and the impact of Corps. I wasn't involved at the time but I think it was a rational decision. Anyway I just found your choice of words interesting but you've given a clear explanation.

Hope to see lots of involvement and interaction in the Espionage Gauntlet.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Another, related point worth noting is that Traditional Cultural Victories will be once again worth targeting.

The HOF is about showcasing the top games of all time, so it once again becomes worth one's time to see about obtaining Cultural Victories using non-Espionage means, with the confidence that a game using Espionage won't be able to overtake one's hard-won new #1 spot for a Cultural Victory.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Oh!

This is very very nice to see.
A brand new victory category for us to play with.

I would like to thank whomever did work to make the victory condition detectable and appear in the HOF table.

**Edit**
Woo, I see Buffy .004 is out now too
I'll be sure to update right away.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Thank you for implementing the Espionage Victory for HoF!

孫子武

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Please note the .004 version still has some bugs but the more testing we get the better!

 

[Seraiel]

When BUFFY .004 will be released as a bug-free version, so when switching is recommended, I think we should write in this thread who takes which slot. It's the same that happened in the beginning time of the HoF, first try to get a game on every slot, so all slots are filled, then start the competition. A HoF with empty slots just looks stupid.

Everybody ok with this?

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Sure, it makes sense to fill all Espionage Victory slots first and only then complete for first place in a particular slot.

I am starting with Small Marathon.

Please announce your slot here to avoid taking the same slot by accident.

孫子武

 

[iggymnrr]

This is a horrible idea. Since the victory is not triggered in game like the rest, this is a modded victory. It does not belong in the HoF. Please remove the category.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

It's exactly the same as the Religious and introduced for exactly the same reasons - both Diplomatic (AP and UN) and Cultural (Traditional and Espionage) have widly divergent paths and times to victory but in game count as the same thing.

 

[iggymnrr]

It's exactly the same as the Religious and introduced for exactly the same reasons - both Diplomatic (AP and UN) and Cultural (Traditional and Espionage) have widly divergent paths and times to victory but in game count as the same thing.

I would disagree strongly with this. Why is culture victory being singled out? How is this mechanic different from stealing 5000 gold via espionage in a space game? Why not create slots for espionage space colony games? For your statement to be correct, what needs to be done is to create a slot for BTS culture victories. The option to use espionage still exists if desired.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Culture victory was "singled out" after players demonstrated a technique using Culture that would make traditional culture obsolete (old records beaten by a 1000 years for example). In all the discussions that ensued over the last few years no one has demonstrated a similar way to use Espionage to dramatically accelerate other victory conditions.

 

[iggymnrr]

Culture victory was "singled out" after players demonstrated a technique using Culture that would make traditional culture obsolete (old records beaten by a 1000 years for example). In all the discussions that ensued over the last few years no one has demonstrated a similar way to use Espionage to dramatically accelerate other victory conditions.

Moot point. I'm not disagreeing that a new slot shouldn't be there. It should be by Civ version not game mechanic. The 1000 year comment is silly. Consider the gauntlet with the ~700 AD space wins. What if corporations were not used? Can people demonstrate that non-corporate methods would always be slower? If so, then a slot is needed for corporate space games. Margin of victory doesn't matter. Singling out specific mechanics is very bad. AP and UN both trigger victories in game. Espionage or corporations do not.

 

[shulec]

Have you played an Espionage Cultural victory iggymnrr?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Moot point. I'm not disagreeing that a new slot shouldn't be there. It should be by Civ version not game mechanic.

Sorry I don't know what you mean by this.

The 1000 year comment is silly. Consider the gauntlet with the ~700 AD space wins. What if corporations were not used? Can people demonstrate that non-corporate methods would always be slower? If so, then a slot is needed for corporate space games. Margin of victory doesn't matter. Singling out specific mechanics is very bad. AP and UN both trigger victories in game. Espionage or corporations do not.

The ~700AD Space Wins still require you to build a Space Ship, you can win by Espionage without building a single Cultural building - that's the difference. If you want to look at games without Corps the drop down list allows you to select Vanilla or Warlords.

I'm sorry you don't agree with the decision but the general consensus was that this was the best option.

 

[WastinTime]

This is a horrible idea. Since the victory is not triggered in game like the rest, this is a modded victory. It does not belong in the HoF. Please remove the category.

Victory is triggered in game. It's a 'culture victory' using virtually no culture aspects of the game.

NobleZarkon described it well...
It is exactly the same as Religious which triggers Diplomatic victory.

If you think about it some more, you'll see it these two are completely, entirely, exactly the same situation.