Isn't the Siphon Funds mission massively OP?

[Felis Renidens]

I like that mission as a way to train my spies before moving to sabotage\ stealing great works. I hate when they steal my great works or sabotage my production. A defensive spy sometimes help. In some games my spies do as they please. In some they are useless. One of the unknowns of the games.

 

[Victoria]

I always use a defensive spy and Quatermaster is a great promotion to encourage this. 1 Defensive spy and the rest being money grabbers until they get experience.
Last night I even got one to incite rebels .... finally!... the Ai does build the odd neighbourhood now.

 

[Tiger Genocide]

Defensive spies are mandatory in this game. Without them, you might as well plan a way to lose the game by a hair, or plan to reload an auto save.

I like the spy system and how they took nice parts of beyond earth spy system, but it needs to be tuned down a bit. Like someone said, it's siphon funds, not rob Fort Knox.

For a tip, put a defensive one in your capital city making sure you covering your commercial hub and campus districts. They highly prefer to target your capital city over others.

 

[agonistes]

I like that mission as a way to train my spies before moving to sabotage\ stealing great works. I hate when they steal my great works or sabotage my production. A defensive spy sometimes help. In some games my spies do as they please. In some they are useless. One of the unknowns of the games.

Freakin' Joho tried to steal a greatwork from St. Pete's. Obviously I denounced him straightaway, but still, what a complete d---. We had DOF'd. Luckily, my Soviet KGB killed the thief before he could escape. Hadn't even made a spy yet.

First time I'd seen someone go for a greatwork. Its always been gold or production before. Better be more careful with my city planning now.

It seems to me, at least in week 1 of the game being out, that the gold mission wasn't per turn. I'm fairly certain I took a X gold hit all in one turn from a spy.

edit: If its per turn, how are you supposed to keep tract of that? If you're making 2k gold a turn, its coming from quite a few different sources, including foreign trade. If you have 50 trade routes and 50 cities, 22 civs in the game, lots of deals, well, the number ebbs and flows every turn. I'm sure it doesn't say on the info panel: " - 32.4 from spies." Or does it? Should I be doing the math every 10 turns to check? Is the math even accurate? With so much missing info, I wouldn't be surprised if not every debit was listed anyways.

edit 2: Anyone have a good way to predict which cities will be targeted? I've only been hit by spies 4 times I think, capturing two. 2x it was my capital, 1x it was another city's commercial zone, and another time it was a random city's industrial zone. Again, with 50 cities, its going to be pretty hard to catch them if its random.

 

[Felis Renidens]

Sometimes if I see that the AI is after my art I'd store it in wonders (I play on low difficulty and can usually build them). I also use cryptography policy as early as I can (especially with Potola Palace extra diplo slot) And a defensive spy. In some games the AI does not bother spying, in some the AI does.

 

[agonistes]

Sometimes if I see that the AI is after my art I'd store it in wonders (I play on low difficulty and can usually build them). I also use cryptography policy as early as I can (especially with Potola Palace extra diplo slot) And a defensive spy. In some games the AI does not bother spying, in some the AI does.

What about the bank with the art slots? Think that is immune to spies trying to steal art? I mean, if they go to that particular merchant hub, they are doing the gold stealing mission, right? Art should be safe.

I should store my Cistine Chapel and David there.

 

[Felis Renidens]

I think it's safe too. You don't rob a bank for the artwork. If you can theme a museum that's another thing.

 

[agonistes]

I think it's safe too. You don't rob a bank for the artwork. If you can theme a museum that's another thing.

Actually I think that's probably the only point to robbing a bank these days.

edit: or maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

 

[Felis Renidens]

Actually I think that's probably the only point to robbing a bank these days.

edit: or maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

I think it's best to keep silent on such subjects.

 

[cazaderonus]

Spying is such an uninteresting mecanic in CiVI that i usually dont bother much with it. Meaning i build spies when i have nothing more usefull to do and usually end up with an anti-spy policy cards to make sure i dont get hurt by AI spies.

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

It depends on whose hog you're siphoning.

 

[kamex]

Having your districts clumped for adjacency is always good for spy defense also so I tend to play this way now.

Agreed. At most, one spy can cover 7 districts (but not all districts have actionable missions against them). Mostly, you want to cover Industrial, Theater and Spaceport. Bonus points for Commercial and Neighborhoods. Because of this, Japan (and maybe Germany) has a sort of indirect buff to espionage defense.

 

[Pythakoreas]

Even if the gold per turn changes every turn if a spy was to drain GPT an attentive player might figure out what's going on.
One spy being able to pull off stealing a significant percentage of a nation's GDP and successfully bringing the amount back home is unrealistic and absurd. A fraud on this scale is something incredibly more dramatic than blowing up a "Fort Knox".

An entire country going bankrupt over it shouldn't even exist. Another similarly annoying thing is the Industrial Zone hit. The repair times can be REALLY crippling if you're short on production or desperate on it. That's not even realistic either. Putting out an entire industrial sector of a city to force repairs is what countries dream of when at war. What usually happens is bombing by aircraft or artillery not having a bunch of spies running around and using explosives.