A reminder: At the end of the game or sooner whichever fits our strategy best, we are going to need a lot of espionage points to raise Swinger's Pad culture to legendary via Spread Culture missions.
Dr. Evil may produce a lot of his own culture which may severely depress the city culture espionage discount to near zero from maximum of -50%. We may want to capture SP to add traditional culture via The Pyramids, working Artists with maybe The Sistine Chapel 2 Cpt bonus and possibly build a state religion temple for 6 Cpt. If we match Dr. Evil's culture, the city culture bonus will start at -25% and get better after giving the city back to Dr. Evil and perform numerous Spread Culture missions. Alternatively we can do without the city culture discount and just pay in more espionage until we get a more favorable city culture discount. The cost will not be that high.
The means of generating Espionage is somewhat limited compared to generating Research:
- Commerce can be converted into either Espionage or Research via the Espionage/Research sliders
- Specialists - only Spy specialists can generate espionage - Scientists generate research - all specialists can generate Representation research
- Great People - only the Great Spy can generate espionage via infiltration or settling - settled Great Scientists generate research - all Great People except Great Spies and Great Generals can bulb technologies - all settled Great People generate research via Representation.
- Research can be built - Espionage can not be built
- A few buildings can directly generate espionage - No buildings can directly generate research - State religion buildings can generate 2 Bpt indirectly via ownership of University of Sankore - No buildings can generate espionage indirectly.
- Both espionage and research can be multiplied by buildings - Great Spy can construct Scotland Yard which multiplies espionage by +100% and the Great Scientist can construct an Academy which multiplies research by +50%.
- Any Great People, except Great Generals, can be used to start Golden Ages which adds a +1 commerce to any commerce plot, thus increasing commerce significantly which benefits either research or espionage depending on the slider settings
- There is a corporation that generates research. There are no corporations that generate espionage.
- The Nationhood civic provides +25% base espionage in all cities - The Free Religion civic provides +10% research in all cities.
- The Representation civic provides +3 Bpt research for every specialist (including all settled great people) - this type of per specialist civics boost does not exist for espionage.
Research can not be converted into culture or espionage. It can be converted into any technology one has the prerequisites for. It can not be used for anything else.
Espionage via Spies and an opponent's city can be converted into culture or "research" via stealing technologies.
A potential trap is thinking all we need is a huge Bpt, suffient military to raze Dr. Evil's Lair, switch slider to 100% to raise SP to legendary and capture it as early as possible for the gold laurels.
I believe we should need to give more thought to how we will be generating Espionage. I have already added to the Grand Strategy that due to our strategy of avoiding Liberalism, we can not aquire Communism nor the Intelligence Agency which is beyond doubt the best espionage building in BtS due to its base 8 Ept and its +50% Ept multiplier. We need to build as many cottages as possible, because our major source of espionage will be commerce converted into espionage via the slider. We will also build Jails 4 Ept +50% Ept, the only espionage multiplier we can build. Do to the comparative lack of espionage multipliers compared to research multipliers and especially no way to switch from building research to building espionage, our espionage rate might be significantly lower than our research rate when we make the switch from research to espionage. We can build wealth to sustain 100% espionage slider, but once there no additional Hpt can increase Ept one iota. This under scores the need to build ample numbers of cottages. We want to be running 100% espionage and get SP to legendary in as few turns as possible. Any turns beyond Flight/Fascism is fat that needs to be cut down to the minimum.
If we create a super commerce city, preferably our new capital, we can run Bureaucracy for +50% Commerce. The espionage will be multiplied by the Jail's +50% and assuming we can justify the expense of a Great Spy, Scotland Yard's +100%. I don't think its possible to know yet whether Scotland Yard is worth building without knowing how long we are likely to have such a commerce city and thus how much base espionage it doubles. Buildings can together generate 2 + 4 + 8 = 14 Ept. We can run 5 Spy specialists 5 * 4 = 20 Ept. There can be at most 20 riverside Towns 20 * 6 = 120 * +50% = 180 Ept. So for a non-Financial leader we can generate a maximum of 180 + 20 + 12 = 212 Ept base. So, 212 Ept is the best the Scotland Yard would add. At about 14-15 turns of use of this theorectical maximum commerce city we surpass the 3000E that a Great Spy infiltration would generate. There are also the turns before the research 100% -> espionage 100% switch when the city generates a theorectical maximum of 20 + 12 = 32 Ept to consider as well. It does seem likely that Scotland Yard will not be better than an Great Spy infiltration. Of course it would be better to capture a city with Scotland Yard already constructed for us. This still leaves open the possibility of using a Great Spy for an infiltration mission.
I still say that building a Courthouse in Capitalist still makes sense to generate +2 Ept. With Bureaucracy, the Courthouse can be built very quickly. We are stuggling to keep Mansa Musa's research visible at 4 Ept from the Palace. We need more espionage so we can keep Gandhi converted to Buddhism. We'll need again more Ept, when Mansa Musa completes several Courthouses of his own.
Final reminder: Build more cottages or other sources of commerce. Build sources of espionage.
Sun Tzu Wu