The Espionage Victory for Enthusiasts

[elitetroops]

You've nailed exactly why EV 100% always has the potential to be faster than traditional Culture on any game speed.
Every game has free, passive EPs. Even if you only produce 1000 culture from your EPs, you can still shave 1 turn off the fastest possible Culture game.

Good point there. But actually, by "any random city" I meant any city, not one of your legendary cities. It is my understanding that if you do one spread culture mission anywhere, then even the pure cultural win will be counted as EV. This provides a loophole to fill all those empty slots without learning anything about espionage victory at all. But as you said, any games like that can be beaten by an espionage game. And spamming the espionage tables with traditional culture victories won't necessarily make you the most admired player on the board...

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

You've nailed exactly why EV 100% always has the potential to be faster than traditional Culture on any game speed.
Every game has free, passive EPs. Even if you only produce 1000 culture from your EPs, you can still shave 1 turn off the fastest possible Culture game.

Yes, and if one focuses and optimizes on Quick speed Espionage Assisted Cultural Victories, they can be done faster than Quick speed Traditional Cultural Victories. The difference just won't be as dramatic as on Normal, Epic and especially Marathon speeds.

One huge difference between Espionage Assisted Cultural Victories and Traditional Cultural Victories is switching the Commerce slider to Espionage can be done far sooner (as early as Alphabet) than switching the Commerce slider to Culture (which can't be done efficiently before Liberalism) in Traditional Cultural games.

Another difference is the multiplication factor of base Espionage versus the multiplication factor of Free Speech, Hermitage and Cathedrals in Traditional Culture. The Jail, Castle, Nationhood and Scotland Yard are about the only effective multipliers of Espionage. Researching to Communism for the last Espionage multiplier, the Intelligence Agency, or the free Great Spy is just not practical. The game could be won before Communism is reached. Traditional Culture has a Culture multiplier of at least 3.5, assuming Free Speech, three Cathedrals and no Hermitage. Espionage has a multiplier of at best 2.0 without Scotland Yard, which includes Jail, Castle and Nationhood.

The Inject Culture Mission has many discounts and a few penalties which can be easily manipulated to a factor of roughly 5.5x, meaning 1 Espionage can generate 5.5 Culture. Traditional Cultural Victory has no discounts in the same sense as Espionage Usage, so this is a huge advantage for the Espionage Assisted Cultural Victory over the Traditional Cultural Victory.

The final huge difference is every city in the Empire puts its Espionage output into a common pool that is divided amoung all opponents, but usually allocated to just one for all three LC cities. In the Cultural Victory, all culture except from Great Aritists is generated from each LC city for itself. Other than through the generation of Great Artists, non-LC cities can not add culture to the LC cities.

 

[elitetroops]

The Inject Culture Mission has many discounts and a few penalties which can be easily manipulated to a factor of roughly 5.5x, meaning 1 Espionage can generate 5.5 Culture. Traditional Cultural Victory has no discounts in the same sense as Espionage Usage, so this is a huge advantage for the Espionage Assisted Cultural Victory over the Traditional Cultural Victory.

The final huge difference is every city in the Empire puts its Espionage output into a common pool that is divided amoung all opponents, but usually allocated to just one for all three LC cities. In the Cultural Victory, all culture except from Great Aritists is generated from each LC city for itself. Other than through the generation of Great Artists, non-LC cities can not add culture to the LC cities.

But we should not forget that you can also produce a lot of culture passively with buildings/wonders, which you can't do with espionage. I looked at the 500AD save of some HoF culture game, think it was Seraiel's, and if I put the espionage slider to 100%, the 3 cities were still producing 200-400 culture/turn.

I know Kaitzilla's post way back in that gauntlet thread, where he first describes the mechanics, talks about getting a new city from 0 to 50000 culture in one turn with GA bomb + spies. But is there any reason why it would be better to start with a fresh city? Even in a pure espionage game you still probably want Parthenon, and probably also MoM. If you're going all the way to jails you'll probably build Taj. Shouldn't all that culture also be put to use? And since you grab Aesthetics early for Parth, why not also put 150 hammers (with ivory) into SoZ for another large chunk of culture? And if you have MoM, Parth and SoZ in one city, would it be worth it to get one or a few cathedrals there? And if you do get a couple of cathedrals, should you put up Sistine there as well? And maybe even Hermitage later?

To me it seems the fastest should always be some kind of hybrid, where you generate culture with buildings throughout the game and use espionage for the final surge. The question is how to divide your resources, since you also need to conquer a large empire. On lower difficulties I'm sure you can conquer the world and simultaneously get up all the GA wonders and a few cathedrals. On higher difficulties there are more tough choices to make.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

But we should not forget that you can also produce a lot of culture passively with buildings/wonders, which you can't do with espionage. I looked at the 500AD save of some HoF culture game, think it was Seraiel's, and if I put the espionage slider to 100%, the 3 cities were still producing 200-400 culture/turn.

I know Kaitzilla's post way back in that gauntlet thread, where he first describes the mechanics, talks about getting a new city from 0 to 50000 culture in one turn with GA bomb + spies. But is there any reason why it would be better to start with a fresh city? Even in a pure espionage game you still probably want Parthenon, and probably also MoM. If you're going all the way to jails you'll probably build Taj. Shouldn't all that culture also be put to use? And since you grab Aesthetics early for Parth, why not also put 150 hammers (with ivory) into SoZ for another large chunk of culture? And if you have MoM, Parth and SoZ in one city, would it be worth it to get one or a few cathedrals there? And if you do get a couple of cathedrals, should you put up Sistine there as well? And maybe even Hermitage later?

To me it seems the fastest should always be some kind of hybrid, where you generate culture with buildings throughout the game and use espionage for the final surge. The question is how to divide your resources, since you also need to conquer a large empire. On lower difficulties I'm sure you can conquer the world and simultaneously get up all the GA wonders and a few cathedrals. On higher difficulties there are more tough choices to make.

Excellent point!

There are clearly many more buildings, including National and World Wonders that generate static Culture than static Espionage. Indeed, those that generate static Espionage include Courthouse, Jail, Intelligence Agency, and Security Bureau.

In active generation via specialists, Culture also wins over Espionage, when one assumes Caste System is being used for Culture. Otherwise, Culture is limited to four Artist specialists (2 for Theatre; 2 for Tower) and seven in Globe Theatre city. Espionage is always limited to seven Spy Specialists (1 for Courthouse; 2 each for Jail, Intelligence Agency and Security Bureau) plus 2 for The Kremlin. Note that The Sistine Chapel adds 2 Culture for every type of specialist, even settled great people. So Culture has the advantage in specialists as well, if one assumes Caste System is used.

 

[WastinTime]

But is there any reason why it would be better to start with a fresh city? Even in a pure espionage game you still probably want Parthenon, and probably also MoM. If you're going all the way to jails you'll probably build Taj. Shouldn't all that culture also be put to use?

Yea, that's what I do. Like I wrote earlier, I had over 2000 culture. I could have skipped one artist bomb.

 

[elitetroops]

Okay, tried one. Emperor/Large/Epic with Roosevelt. I went for some kind of hybrid, with some more elements from traditional culture, then espionage. The result was that the game was all over the place and every area failed miserably. The "traditional culture" part of the game was really bad, only 2 cathedrals in one city, didn't really get around to producing any culture at all in the other cities. The espionage part was even worse. Missed TGW, never got Scotland Yard, only 2 GSpies generated over the course of the game.

The original plan was to make capital legendary the "normal" way. Towards the end I realized there was no way I could get enough culture there in time, so I ended up relocating my Palace to gift away my capital as well. By then capital had produced 20 000 culture on it's own and got another 6000 from a last minute Great Artist.

Despite all this, the game still quite comfortably beats previous Emperor/Epic cultural games. Espionage assisted culture is really powerful. But also not very easy to pull off efficiently, at least not on the first try...

 

[elitetroops]

Some things I learned during last game:

1. You can't spread culture the same turn you gift the city. When it's gifted, it claims all surrounding inner tile rings until end of turn and spreading culture is not available as a valid espionage mission. I was quite confused when this first happened, but don't worry if it happens to you. The next turn you get back the surrounding tiles and can use the spread culture mission.

2. I think relocating your capital and gifting away the old one should always be worth it. Your capital usually has the most passively generated culture, because of palace and usually being the first city with a library. Then there's also Great Wall and possibly some other wonders built with bureau bonus. In addition, your spies teleport to the capital after a successful mission. If you don't have enough spies to make all 3 cities legendary at once, which you probably don't, then after you're done with the second city, finish Palace in another city close to capital (probably the spot you'd otherwise use as 3rd gift city) and give away your capital. This saves you at least one turn of spy movement.

If you do gift your capital, beware that it will probably give some tiles back to the other cities you gifted earlier, which might make a difference for you when you capture them back. It also gives them tiles to work to build more defenders, so better grab the other 2 legendary cities back quickly after gifting the capital. In my game I gifted the capital, declared and took back both other cities on the same turn. Next turn old capital was made legendary with spies and recaptured.

3. The AI does not look for the fastest possible way to get a garrison to the city. I had quite a nice layout in my game:

Spoiler :

The whole western world is Jewish (and I captured the Jewish shrine in my first war ), in the east Victoria and De Gaulle are Buddhist. I gave Vicky a bridge city in the middle of the jungle that was within 9 tiles from both the legendary cities I planned to give her and one of her cities in the east. I did this quite early to make sure this would work, so that I could adjust my plans if there was something about city gifting mechanics I didn't understand. By the time I gifted her the first gift city, she had 3 units in the bridge city, but she still sent garrisons from her core, which meant it took 12 turns for the first (and only) sword to arrive to that city. Same for the second gift city, she sent a longbow from her core, which only made it to my border in the north before I declared to take the cities back.

4. I never got any trade route bonus for my espionage missions despite having open borders and not being in Mercantilism. How does that work?

5. The bonus for Espionage Point Spending is really for how much you've spent over the course of the game. I thought it was for how much EP you currently have gathered on all the other AI, and that it would decrease as you spend EP on spread culture missions. It didn't decrease. This is one reason why I played it safe and ended up with >4000 unused EP in the end.

6. Stone is important. My capitol was on PH marble, but I lacked stone. Not only do you need it for TGW, but walls and castles as well. I only found out after trading maps that there was unclaimed stone on a large island in the south, and didn't even realize immediately that I should grab it for walls and castles. When I finally did, I sent a settler, but it was one turn late, as Freddy got a settler in place that would have grabbed it had I not settled one turn eariler with stone in 2nd ring. This delayed hooking it up a lot and most of my important cities had castles already by the time it was up. (The southern island also had 4 unpopped huts, which I guarded until I got an Optics trade, but no Astro .)

7. Lib->Constitution was a prime example of not thinking clearly and just doing stuff the way I'm used to doing them. Would have been so much cheaper and faster to tech constitution instead of going all the way to lib...

 

[Seraiel]

@ 4. I believe you need to simply have a trade-connection towards a certain city to get the TR-bonus. I usually simply close the borders with all other civs and then the cities search their trade-routes automatically... I didn't understand the difficulties with this that other players like Kaitzilla and you experience, if you only have open borders with the one civ that owns the L-cities and if those cities are connected via a trade-network towards your own cities, then you normally also should have a Traderoute. With completely closed borders towards all other civs, the only thing that could prevent such a trade connection should be if the one civ that you gifted the L-cities to has more cities than you have trade-routes, because then the more valuable traderoutes would get chosen, and those are unlikely to be the ones towards the size 1 cities that are directly besides your capital ^^ .

@ 6. I personally found Stone not be really important, at least not on Deity, because the risk of not getting the GW if expanding towards a 2nd city is incredible. I did achieve that already, but the benefit is minor, and in the 10/10 starts that I played last week, I didn't even get the GW in 10/10 tries and that with staying at 1 city, so the GW itself already is a gamble on Deity.

Regarding your hybrid approach I also thought that the only viable way to play such a game imo. is to run the Espionage-slider from the beginning until Lib and try to build Cathedrals in all 3 L-cities 'til that time. Cathedrals are basically so expensive that they need to be in all 3 cities to be efficient and the great amount of culture gets generated in the final phase of a traditional culture game, so if running 100% espionage from the beginning 'til Lib, then one doesn't lose much , but once the Cathedrals are in place, one needs to run 100% or having built them is simply non-sense.

It's interesting what you wrote about gifting away the capital, because it's not intuitive but ofc. logical, so probably imo. good .

 

[elitetroops]

Thank you for clearing up the trade route part! Should have closed borders then.

About the hybrid approach I tried, it really was completely useless. As I said, my capital had generated 20 000 passively before I gave it away, but I was also left with 4000 in the end, which could have made up for that 20 000 at a 5:1 ratio (would have had more EP left if I had understood to close borders with other civs). I also had enough spies in capital after the game was over to run a ton more espionage missions if needed. In other words, the cathedrals, Sistine and Hermitage did not improve my victory date at all. That's quite a lot of hammers that could have been put to better use.

The problem with the hybrid approach is that in normal culture games, you get to choose the most suitable location for your 3 legendary cities. In an espionage game they have to be close to your capital, so it's hard to find 3 spots that would be well suited for building cathedrals and generating culture on their own. Of course, if you move the capital a couple of times, the legendary cities could be located anywhere.

Not sure if running the espionage slider all the way from Alpha is the best on lower difficulties, though. Especially if you want Constitution. The AI is so painfully slow at teching. Not sure what you want lib for. If you get 5:1 ratio on your EP, +25% in your entire empire should be better than +100% in your 3 legendary cities.

For my next attempt I'll go with Wang Kon on Emperor/Large/Marathon, fractal map. My plan is to expand a lot more, probably start with axes/chariots and later use Hwachas to grab a ton of land. This time I'll build TGW and focus more on espionage. No buildings shall be built only for the purpose of generating culture. I won't care about lib. I'm not very experienced with marathon, but we'll see how it goes.

 

[WastinTime]

I moved my palace in my game for exactly the reasons u described

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Okay, tried one. Emperor/Large/Epic with Roosevelt.

That game has been accepted now but I recommend you, and everyone else, update to 004b which has eliminated some bugs from the original 004 release.

 

[elitetroops]

That game has been accepted now but I recommend you, and everyone else, update to 004b which has eliminated some bugs from the original 004 release.

Ah, thanks, so there it is. I was looking for it, but the link from HOF Rules/FAQ takes you further down the page to the BUFFY download section, which doesn't mention 004b.

I already started a new game in that old version (004a?), hope it's still okay to submit it if I finish it. Will switch to 004b after that.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Thanks, you're using .004 - a was never released in the wild!!

I'll see if I can get those pages updated this week.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Well done, elitetroops!

Wow, sounds like you had a really fun game!

I don't believe I have ever moved my capital intentionally, although I certainly have considered it when my capital was on the edge of my empire.

 

[WastinTime]

That game has been accepted now but I recommend you, and everyone else, update to 004b which has eliminated some bugs from the original 004 release.

With the delay of 005. If someone wanted to play an espionage game now, do you have to play 004b? I see there are some 003 in the HoF.
Also, do you get QM/EQM points for these games even tho it wouldn't count for say, Machiavelli

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Yes you need to use 004b and they will count for EQM. Some older games were "grand fathered" in after manual checks.