Screenshot with a spy and mssions

This is a unit on the map though.

But I don't think we will manually move the unit, probably will assign it with a menu or something.

 

That spy looks like a giant that is attacking the city.

Anyway, looks great. I just hope "siphon" actually means "siphon" this time around and not "duplicate the yield for yourself".

 

""Gain the gold yields of TLACOPAN during the mission's duration. (+80)"

I don't think we'll be seeing much of actual stealing.

 

Well, the way it's phrased it can mean both imho. Either that you gain the yields INSTEAD of them, or both of you gain the yield for some reason.

If both gain the yield then it's just another "conjure stuff out of thin air"-mechanic that makes no sense logically.

 

Might be to not have too many spy missions that make the target civ actually lose something, to avoid frustration.

I think they should change the name to something like "steal trade secrets" or "gain market insight" or something, since economics isn't a zero sum game (of course that all wouldn't make sense if government type is comunism) it kinda makes sense. But "siphon funds" implies that you actually steal money.

 

Yeah, I also think that confirmes a Swedish city state. As a scientific one.
Probably Stockholm, but if that's the case I would have chosen militaristic or industrial for it instead.
Uppsala would also be great to represent early Vikings IMO, either as militaristic or religious.

 

Given Ed Beach's torrid lurve affair with the 16th-17th century, the odds of Sweden appearing in a later DLC are very high.

 

The Great Works theft is so perfect!

In a recent CiV game as Brazil, Rome invaded, razing a city that had a Great Work. After outright destroying Augustus in retaliation, it was clear that it had been lost to the ages. Bloody Romans! XD

 

By the way. On leaked tech tree some techs could be boosted by Great Scientist or Spy only. It looks like tech stealing instead of stealing the whole tech just steals the Eureka boost for it. It looks quite fun to me.

 

The variety of missions definitely reminds me of BE, as does the fact that they all provide positive benefits (unlike Civ IV's health and happiness attacks that were frustrating to the target but relatively unnoticeable for the perpetrator). One crucial difference, however, is that unlike BE it actually matters what city you put your spy in. If you want to steal gold, you need to spy on a city producing lots of gold. If you want to steal a great work, you need to target a cit that has one.

Obviously, I don't want to get too excited based on a single screenshot, but from what I can tell. this espionage system looks like it has the potential to combine the strengths of IV, V and BE while avoiding some of their flaws.

 

Like seemingly everything else in this game.

 

On the one hand, I'm glad spies have a cost. So many attributes of BNW are separate silos that come with resources gratis that whole worlds of critical decision making just don't exist. Tradeoffs are much more interesting than mere sets of optimal choices in different modalities, plus there is the fact that only by making the various resource pools have plentiful methods of exchange between them can you create either an interest in the commitment/ambiguity puzzle ("Flexible Gambling" task) or the mechanical depth to truly various ramp-up strategies.

But this appears to be yet another tool where it's hammers that provide the cost. I can't be sure, but I worry about balance from this - structural worries, the kind of fragility that a patch can't unmake.

 

In Beyond Earth, you target choice only mattered insofar as the level of intrigue in the city. Other than that is was basically pick a target at random. Or if you felt like attempting (and usually failing in my experience) to do the Culper Lodge quest.

I liked the greater variety of operation choices in BE over Civ V, but the system was still not at a good level. I'm glad to see Ed and the Civ VI team have iterated on the previous systems in a good way. At least based on the information we have now.

I'm looking forward to seeing what other actions our spies can perform.

 

The main issue BE had is that the AI just didn't know how to use the system, the whole intrigue system was pointless since the AI can't interact in any meaningful way. It was too easy to keep your cities without any intrigue, so it was something only the human player new how to take advantage from.

 

It sounds like a good way to keep the match balanced, like spies did with Science on Civ V (Civs that are behind on science can steal techs to catch up), since the yeld you get is based on the yeld the city is producing. If one Civ is producing a lot more gold than everyone else, other Civs can use spies to keep up.

 

The AI is actually not _that_ incapable of using the system, it just prioritizes on factors that players would not, such as diplomatic standings and whether Cities are capitals.

And because AIs always seem to get into fights with each other that then means that they just spy each other's capitals, without the player really having much interaction with their spies at all. I've completely removed the Capital + Diplomacy-Modifiers from the script + increased the number of spies and the result is actually a pretty cool system with Intrigue going up and having to be countered in many cities.

The one major problem with the game however is Intrigue. Players "have to" be able to reduce it more than it goes up, because it would be really strange if you could do nothing against the AI working towards taking your city - but at the same time being able to counter intrigue also means that the really cool stuff at the top of the list will never actually be available, unless one makes the AI deliberately ignore the fact that some of their cities have high intrigue.

 

The AI may not have been able to use the system effectively, but changing that wouldn't resolve the underlying issue of target choice not mattering (except for high level attack missions). There was a potentially very interesting "metasystem" of placing agents in high intrigue cities or in cities where opponents wouldn't be likely to prioritize counteragents, but it wasn't built on any sort of base system encouraging you to put agents in cities that it actually made sense to spy on.

 

I think this looks OK but I thought they were going to overhaul the espionage system? I thought this looks just like the old system (which is fine, but was expecting something different)

 

By the "old system" do you mean Civ IV? (If not, the fact that I'm confused is a probably a good sign that it's changed.) It looks most like that in terms of interface and the mechanics of moving spies, but the content of the missions reminds me more of BE, and the focus on the target city's output reminds me of V.

 

Sorry by "old system" I mean Civ V / BE. I thought I had read or heard somewhere that they were going to do something completely different which is why I'm mildly disappointed. But I may have misheard.