New strats: Teching via espionage

[King of Town]

The new patch was supposed to help the AI alot, and in my opinion it did. i don't see them nearly as much as I used to randomly sabotaging improvements. They have started sabotaging my production of things in my cities though. Maybe purely by luck, but in both occasions it was military units I was making and then a couple turns later they would invade. It seems like random events cause some of the same effects as espionage ( buildings being destroyed, population lost, improvements pillaged, and even forests laid to waste) so I guess instead of disabling espionage you could just turn off random events and half of your battle would be won. You can use espionage to get free techs and steal money from the treasuries of the people you spy on, just like the ones you get from the goody huts so if you are going to take away espionage and all of it's potential benefits, you probably should take away anything that gives the same things. Almost all of the annoyances/benefits from espionage are already found in the game. You're gonna have to do a lot of modding to get rid of the things that annoy you about espionage totally out of the game because they are found in more than epsionage itself.

 

[alpaca]

KMadCat: No there's no penalty if the other civ has the holy city.

I've been advocating Espionage a lot lately, and I will continue to do so until it's accepted as a very powerful strategy to have in the repertoire at least on the high difficulty settings where you will often be behind the AI in techs anyways (definitely if you play with no TT as I usually do).

Tech stealing is usually cheaper than buying them, often a lot. It costs some hammers, but if you have enough mfg. goods that's an ok price to pay (although it can be a bit annoying at the start).

One particularly overlooked part about Espionage is that it gets cheaper for the cumulative points you spend on it, no matter which civ you spend it on. The cost against a civ solely depends on how much they spent total and how much you spent total, nothing else (direct ratio, or current ratio does not matter according to my experience). I got bonuses from this which were as large as 40% (i.e. the cost went down to 60%).
Together with what KMadCat quoted me on, this can mean that you pick up techs for a third of the beaker cost. In a less optimal situation (i.e. no state religion bonus or large distance) you can still usually pick things up for something like 60% pre-Democracy.
After democracy the AI will often spam Security Bureaus, but you will have the +100% modifier from Jails and Intelligence Agencies to compensate the effect.

Add to that the extremely nice spy specialist who gives +1 beaker and +4 EP for a total of 5 commerce where normal specialists have 3, and the fact that a Scotland Yard will boost EP in your main EP city by 100%, it becomes a very powerful tool.

In fact I'm lately developing a hybrid strategy where I devote my research (potentially SE beakers) to beelining and pick up the other techs through espionage. Obviously this requires more hammers and can adversely affect relations but I feel that this allows me to stay on par with the AI technologically despite focusing a lot on a certain tech, such as Military Tradition, Military Science or Rifling for the rush-enabling potential (which is usually not so easy without tech trading).

Besides, espionage is extra-useful when used with Nationalism which not only allows draft-rushing but also adds 25% espionage (again, compare this to the beaker-equivalent Free Religion which adds a measly 10%)

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

@alpaca: WOW! An extremely comprehensive and intelligent post. I must say that you have helped put espionage into perspective as well as giving tips on how to formulate strategies with espionage. I'm really psyched to try this method out tonight. Does your strat usually involve popping an early Great Spy (say from the Great Wall)? Or is your strat mostly based on the culmination of earned EP?

 

[MrFrodo]

An excellent early strat for warmongering trait leaders, or if you like to start with an early rush like I do, is to build the Great Wall ASAP, and pop an early Great Spy. You can keep up with early Techs this way while you are whipiing out a rush army and recovering from early expansion. 1-2 additional Great Spies up to the middle of the game can help a lot as well.

However, I find it is too difficult to maintain this method once a single tech costs more than the Great Spy attaching to the rival civ. But I've never tried it. By then, I have my economy under control.

Edit: Now I'm going back and reading the Tech Stealing posts, very interesting strategy, but a bit beyond me at the moment

 

[KMadCandy]

One particularly overlooked part about Espionage is that it gets cheaper for the cumulative points you spend on it, no matter which civ you spend it on. The cost against a civ solely depends on how much they spent total and how much you spent total, nothing else (direct ratio, or current ratio does not matter according to my experience). I got bonuses from this which were as large as 40% (i.e. the cost went down to 60%).

In fact I'm lately developing a hybrid strategy where I devote my research (potentially SE beakers) to beelining and pick up the other techs through espionage. Obviously this requires more hammers and can adversely affect relations but I feel that this allows me to stay on par with the AI technologically despite focusing a lot on a certain tech, such as Military Tradition, Military Science or Rifling for the rush-enabling potential (which is usually not so easy without tech trading).

i wondered what the "x% espionage spending" was. thanks for the great explanation! it shows what an oddball i am that of the techs you listed that you do focus on while stealing others, 2 of those are the techs i stole . i'm going for culture so i CBA to research rifling or miltrad myself.

 

[troytheface]

interesting ...someone mentioned Frederick but i have been using Lincoln in a total espionage game (even building only subs). I will have to try the strategies suggested.

 

[alpaca]

@alpaca: WOW! An extremely comprehensive and intelligent post. I must say that you have helped put espionage into perspective as well as giving tips on how to formulate strategies with espionage. I'm really psyched to try this method out tonight. Does your strat usually involve popping an early Great Spy (say from the Great Wall)? Or is your strat mostly based on the culmination of earned EP?

Depends on the difficulty setting. I was playing Emperor for a long time but moved to Immortal with BtS which I'm currently getting used to (somehow the game seems to have gotten easier). On Immortal I can usually not build the Great Wall unless I have stone at my capital. If I can, it's great.
Building Scotland Yard in your capital will double your 4 palace EP and enhance anything else you get.
Since I usually try building my capital up with cottages if possible, that makes it a very powerful combination.

I'm currently beginning to like spiritual a lot when using this strategy; I'm looking at getting a late religion (usually Christianity or Taoism, sometimes Confucianism if I can get the Oracle) which would just serve for espionage bursts from time to time while in between I have a diplomatically acceptable religion (you really need something to boost relations if you can't bribe with techs). I've had no luck getting either Hinduism or Buddhism on Immortal which I tried with Isabella, but that could be feasible on lower difficulties.

KMadCandy: Well other traits to beeline include Liberalism and Economics, but if you look at a gunpowder rush, that's probably the single strongest strategy around at the moment against the AI (even with Cuirassiers which surprised me a bit, but a friend showed me that they can do very well - the two moves are very useful).

In other stuff, I looked at what I call the overspending modifier (pumping a lot of EP in). In mathematical terms it looks like:

M = (2T+P)/(T+2P) = 1 + (T-P)/(T+2P)

The second term is just written a bit differently but makes it easier to see what happens. If you set P=cT with a real parameter c, you get:

M = 1 + (1-c)/(1+2c)

or c = (2-M)/(2M-1)

which is even easier. This easily shows that the modifier tends towards 0.5 for c->infinity. Some figures to get a bit of a feeling for the thing:

M = 0.9 <=> c = 1.375
M = 0.75 <=> c = 2.5
M = 2/3 = 0.67 <=> c = 4

So overspending your opponent by only 37.5% will already give you a discount of 10%.
Keeping in mind that this only seems to look at the total spending, not at what you spend on the opponent in question, it's very easy to get a lot of use out of this over people like Mansa who focus on beakers rather than EP (people like Charlemagne or Wang Kon are a bit harder to impress).

By the way: It looks like there's a supposed culture bonus, too. However that only works if you used the spread culture mission and in that case you don't benefit from it enough.