Espionage

[yanner39]

I know a little about espionage in BTS. I send my spies into enemy territory to run counter-espionage missions. Sometimes, I do it to steal techs, rarely do it to steal the treasury because the AIs' treasury seem to always be empty.

However, is there something I can do against a spy destroying my towns. I know this is a drawback of the so-called "cottage economy", but is there anything that I can do, apart from placing a spy on every town in my empire? I mean, is mass producing spies a feasible alternative and placing them on each of my towns to avoid pillaging? If I run multiple counter-espionage mission against a specific Civ, does it make it harder to pillage my towns, or simply just prevents spies from poisoning my water supply, to inciting unhappiness.

Any info would be great.

 

[Silu]

^ Enemy spies destroying Towns has never been a significant problem to me. If it is, there's probably someone that hates you a lot and you should consider simply wiping that guy out.

Counterespionage missions do help against all spy actions. You can't do many of those at the same time as far as I know. Mass producing defensive spies to place outside cities is just silly from many perspectives (like and maintenance). Unless you have a very long border spies should only be a problem in a small amount of your cities anyway.

 

[Juff]

Figure which civ is performing the spying. Send own spies into their cities, ready to reduce cultural defences to zero before your stack rolls in.

Otherwise, a combination of security bureaux/stationary spies in your affected cities with counter-espionage missions should reduce the frequency a little.

AFAIK, a single spy or bureau in a city provides max benefit as far as increasing EP cost for oppo civs, stacking them adds no further benefit.

 

[Redflag]

It's probably just my imagination, but I've noticed a tendency for the AI to repeatedly target the same improvement of mine for repeated sabotaging. Sometimes I will plant a spy on just that one improvement - not sure how much that really helps.

Another thing you could try is building worthless improvements outside of the BFC of your cities. I don't think the AI is smart enough to only target useful improvements, so maybe you can tempt it with some unused farms or cottages. But this is only worth doing if you have workers with nothing else to do.

 

[Baldyr]

I've yet to test this myself, but I believe that you can use Spies as border guards - against enemy spies. Figure out what the most likely routes (Spy units use roads) into and inside your territory are, and place stationary Spy units on the tiles that you think would be most frequently trafficked by enemy Spies. (It helps if you have some bottlenecks in your infrastructure instead of spammed roads all over the map.) The theory is that once the foreign Spy enters that tile there's a real chance of it being intercepted by your own Spy. So, if a enemy Spy must pass through 1-3 of your own Spies along the route to your strategic resource tile (or any other target), chances are it will be intercepted before it reaches its target.

I can see many scenarios where such border guards would be effective, even if it wouldn't be 100% effective. In some cases it would be more effective to have your defensive Spies along your borders or along bottlenecks in your infrastructure, rather than in your actual cities or on your resources/improvements, since the AI probably is simply using the nearest (land) routes to move them to their objectives. I doubt there will be Spy units landing from submarines or such along your coasts (or even from a lone Caravel) - as long as a land route is available.