espionage

[Caldon]

Good evening,

These thoughts may be too late for this mod but maybe someone can use them for a civ 5 mod or if someone else continues this work after civ 5 comes out.

I have fallen in love with spies and espionage in the game. I build a city or two just to specialize in it with the wonders and spies specialists. I love sending them off to cause havoc in other nations. This last game I actually had my slider set to 20 or 25% since I had a good tech lead and its just so much fun .

Anyways, while I couldn't think of anything specific, I would love to have some kind of "espionage" victory condition. The others sliders (culture and tech) have their versions of a victory and I think this is missing.

Also, a few suggestions for more missions

1) Assassinate military units
2) "trick" another civ to
A - Close borders with a specific civ
B - Stop trading with a specific civ
C - Fake an event to increase dislike to specific civ (one of the "past events)
D - Declare war with a specific civ
E - etc. The main purpose being to cause rifts between nations
Perhaps you have to have spies in both nations and use points from both to balance

3) Ability to promote scout line units into a spy unit but retain military status and promotions, removing the anti-attack ability. Give him spy promotion abilities to affect other military units. Just kinda throwing ideas out on this one. I always thought of the scout as the early "spy" and thought he went to waste after early exploration.

Thanks,
Curt

 

[generalstaff]

1) Assassinate military units

That seems a bit too powerful, and a bit unrealistic (at least land units). Land units represent a large number of soldiers, and one spy to to kill a land unit would have issues in gameplay and realism. However, I am all for a spy being able to sabotage a ship in harber (destroy a naval unit in city) or converting Hidden Nationality units through a bribe.

2) "trick" another civ to
A - Close borders with a specific civ
B - Stop trading with a specific civ
C - Fake an event to increase dislike to specific civ (one of the "past events)
D - Declare war with a specific civ
E - etc. The main purpose being to cause rifts between nations
Perhaps you have to have spies in both nations and use points from both to balance

A few of the tricks seem overpowered, but I think a spy option to damage relations between nations would be interesting; it could not be cause too much damage for too long though for gameplay reasons. Also, such an ability should require a spy in both nations with at least one in one of the capitals.

Although these are good ideas with some work, I doubt we will see them due to the impending release of Civ5.

 

[Caldon]

Speaking of balance...the bribe city option is very very powerful, perhaps too powerful. I literally just stole the entire roman kingdom, somewhere around 8 to 10 cities or so I think, without a single battle and the roman civ is now destroyed. What was funny was that even though it made me the worse enemy (-4 penalty per city) he never attacked me. When I stole his last city his entire army (which was stronger then mine) vanished.

It took a lot of turns (I didn't count) but I had 100% focused on him. Avg about 2 - 3k points to steal the city after all the bonuses were taken into account (spy stationary, same religion, open borders/free trade etc). Monarchy difficulty, huge map, 20+ civs.

The beauty of it (and why I did it that way) was that I did not anger any of his friends or others of my same religion, so I took his entire empire without a single hit to anyone else in the game.

The war where a single fire wasn't shot

 

[Afforess]

Speaking of balance...the bribe city option is very very powerful, perhaps too powerful. I literally just stole the entire roman kingdom, somewhere around 8 to 10 cities or so I think, without a single battle and the roman civ is now destroyed. What was funny was that even though it made me the worse enemy (-4 penalty per city) he never attacked me. When I stole his last city his entire army (which was stronger then mine) vanished.

It took a lot of turns (I didn't count) but I had 100% focused on him. Avg about 2 - 3k points to steal the city after all the bonuses were taken into account (spy stationary, same religion, open borders/free trade etc). Monarchy difficulty, huge map, 20+ civs.

The beauty of it (and why I did it that way) was that I did not anger any of his friends or others of my same religion, so I took his entire empire without a single hit to anyone else in the game.

The war where a single fire wasn't shot

Thanks for the feedback. I may adjust the cost, but not by much; I just need to improve the AI's reaction.

 

[Sonereal]

Support Rebels is absolutely devastating. I'm playing as the Germans on Archipelago and Spain decided it want to place a city on my island (1500 turns into the game).

Anyway, I couldn't have any of that so I bought a spy, sent it in, and boom, Portugal. Now I'm smashing the city with Unhappiness and Unhealthiness and the city-state is suffering big time because they went into Anarchy right away (changing a butch of civics at once? On Eternity? Muwhahaha).

One thing I wonder is if it's possible to make it so that the Rebels that eventually spawn in that city have a diplo bonus to the supporter.

I could bribe the city but I want to see if I can get rebels to destroy it for me.

Thank you Afforess for making Espionage fun. Seriously, I now use it as an arm of my German Empire instead of a gimmick. Any fool can invade some small country but it takes some kind of crazy to build up EPs, build a spy network inside the small nation, and then blow the entire country up in a frenzy of rebellion. The closest I got to that pre-Advanced Espionage was trying to get a single fringe city to rebel through unhappiness.

Edit: It's a nice touch that City Revolts and Anti-War Protests also aid rebellions.