The Game is Broken...(Spy System)

[ShakaRocks]

In my current game I had a spy siphon off 1000 gold and then 900 gold from my treasury.
I had about 800 gold when this happened, and these were the ramifications:

• Economy crashed causing massive issues across all my cities
• Units were disbanded
• My only spy that was built was disbanded

Mind you I am playing on Warlord difficulty. This is just insane and I refuse to play the game until this issue is fixed. Firaxis need to simplify the spying system and put sensible measures that properly balance risk to reward. It makes no sense that spies can "siphon" off more gold than your gold output and your treasury combined. I am very disappointed that such an egregious issue was allowed to go through for launch because I would of never brought this game with a game day issue like this.

 

[Promethian]

Oh wow. I thought the commercial spy mission just blocked gold output from the city for the duration of the mission. This puts a new perspective on France.

 

[dexters]

Build a spy and put him on counterintelligence in your capital? They seem to target capital cities from what I've seen. 2 successful missions with a conterspy seems really weird, unless you aren't running a counterspy in your capital.

The only balancing issue I would have here is they siphoned amount; but IIRC, the one time I had the siphon happen, it seemed to simply block my gold income from going up, rather than reducing my treasury.

So were you running a deficit and it just made your deficit even worse? Need more details.

 

[killmeplease]

its not broken its fun

 

[Zenstrive]

Huh, I only got AI destroyed my industrial buildings and stolen my tech boosts
I tried stealing their gold, but the spy got caught, tried to escape, but killed

 

[stealth_nsk]

It's quite fun system to play. In my King game as Teddy other civs stolen some amount of eurekas, but I've stolen more

 

[westyofoz]

I got robbed four times for about a 1000g a pop. Once i got a spy up and running doing counterspying in the commercial district of the capital, I cleaned them up. Civs offer nice rewards to regain a captured spy.
I gave up spying in other Civs, Next game I focused on their xp by counterspying and then sent them out when they had some experience. It worked. I have never been a fan of espionage in Civ but the system is growing on me once now I made progress in working it out.

 

[Stilgar08]

Don't give up because of one incident. Restart a game and adapt!

 

[ShakaRocks]

Build a spy and put him on counterintelligence in your capital? They seem to target capital cities from what I've seen. 2 successful missions with a conterspy seems really weird, unless you aren't running a counterspy in your capital.

The only balancing issue I would have here is they siphoned amount; but IIRC, the one time I had the siphon happen, it seemed to simply block my gold income from going up, rather than reducing my treasury.

So were you running a deficit and it just made your deficit even worse? Need more details.

That is exactly what I did and the game disbanded the spy.!
I was't running a deficit I had about 800 gold in my treasury and it reduced it to zero and then it started disbanding all my units and sending my city into unhappiness.
I'll try uploading my save file if that helps.

 

[kampori]

It really is as simple as putting a spy in the district they targeted. In my current game I had every Civ target my capital's economy. 700-900 gold each spy stolen. Luckily I am making 600 gold per turn, so I don't feel bad for it. More annoying is when they sabotage your industrial district, forcing you to rebuild each building.

It also makes placing your districts around your city centre very valuable- pop a spy in the centre and all surrounding districts are protected. Useful for Japan definitely, with bunched districts

 

[ShakaRocks]

I got robbed four times for about a 1000g a pop. Once i got a spy up and running doing counterspying in the commercial district of the capital, I cleaned them up. Civs offer nice rewards to regain a captured spy.
I gave up spying in other Civs, Next game I focused on their xp by counterspying and then sent them out when they had some experience. It worked. I have never been a fan of espionage in Civ but the system is growing on me once now I made progress in working it out.

But did those missions result in your units getting disbanded and empire unhappiness?
My issue is that my spy unit that was running counter espionage was disbanded and left me defenseless.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I dunno I just finished up my first Deity Stand/Stand game and I hardly used anything like spies or what not. I did notice that I killed 3 or 4 spies but never heard of anyone begging for forgiveness but the whole world denounced me long ago almost every game so far After surviving early wars that looked doomed it wasn't hard to build up a mounted army and start in on taking over the world. I guess Brazil and England had a long war all game ... by the time I got to Brazil who was 6th on my kill list they didn't have many troops and I moped them up with a large force of Artillery and Infantry. Over to England who didn't have many units either. The last 20 turns I swear I seen more rebels all over my map compared to Brazil and England's troops.

Anyone else that plays like me and doesn't worry about amenities see swarms of Rebels compared to AI Troops on Deity and Immortal?

 

[ShakaRocks]

It really is as simple as putting a spy in the district they targeted. In my current game I had every Civ target my capital's economy. 700-900 gold each spy stolen. Luckily I am making 600 gold per turn, so I don't feel bad for it. More annoying is when they sabotage your industrial district, forcing you to rebuild each building.

It also makes placing your districts around your city centre very valuable- pop a spy in the centre and all surrounding districts are protected. Useful for Japan definitely, with bunched districts

The first thing I did was put a spy in my district and it was disbanded. But I like your rec on putting districts in city centre.

 

[dexters]

I put my spy in my capital, not district. It should cover all the districts around your capital city, because it's better to counterspy in your capital then counterspy in commercial district while they hit up your industrial.

 

[kampori]

The first thing I did was put a spy in my district and it was disbanded. But I like your rec on putting districts in city centre.

Yeh that is unfortunate. I remember one time in Beyond Earth. I was winning quite drastically. Had a huge empire and a massive army. In 2 turns it all came tumbling down. Can't remember exactly what happened. I think a spy destroyed my economy, stole or shut down my money. Went from like +1000 gold a turn to -1000, within 1 turn my entire army was disbanded, my people went from ecstatic happiness to miserable. It was completely unrecoverable. Since then I hated spies & BE.
Luckily haven't had too much trouble with them in Civ 6.
Only a bit in my last game, as Japan en route for science victory. Whenever I was part way into a space project every Civ would go after my industrial sectors.

 

[kampori]

I put my spy in my capital, not district. It should cover all the districts around your capital city, because it's better to counterspy in your capital then counterspy in commercial district while they hit up your industrial.

Pretty sure spies only protect your current district and any adjacent. Your city centre counts as a district. It doesn't cover every single district in your city. That's what the tooltip says anyway. Hence why I said putting districts surrounding your centre is useful for protection

 

[Menzies]

In my current game I had a spy siphon off 1000 gold and then 900 gold from my treasury.
I had about 800 gold when this happened, and these were the ramifications:

• Economy crashed causing massive issues across all my cities
• Units were disbanded
• My only spy that was built was disbanded

Mind you I am playing on Warlord difficulty. This is just insane and I refuse to play the game until this issue is fixed. Firaxis need to simplify the spying system and put sensible measures that properly balance risk to reward. It makes no sense that spies can "siphon" off more gold than your gold output and your treasury combined. I am very disappointed that such an egregious issue was allowed to go through for launch because I would of never brought this game with a game day issue like this.

That sounds awesome actually!

Maybe you should actually defend your commercial district?

The spies are really useful right now. Managed to turn around a losing spacerace with them, though the AI not prioritising repairs is partially to blame. Managed to break the spaceports of both of my main rivals.

 

[Danzo_87]

can we put 2 spies to counterspy in 1 city?because there will be times where you will have districts on opposite end of your city due to getting good adjacency bonus

 

[ShakaRocks]

That sounds awesome actually!

Maybe you should actually defend your commercial district?

The spies are really useful right now. Managed to turn around a losing spacerace with them, though the AI not prioritising repairs is partially to blame. Managed to break the spaceports of both of my main rivals.

Yeh that is unfortunate. I remember one time in Beyond Earth. I was winning quite drastically. Had a huge empire and a massive army. In 2 turns it all came tumbling down. Can't remember exactly what happened. I think a spy destroyed my economy, stole or shut down my money. Went from like +1000 gold a turn to -1000, within 1 turn my entire army was disbanded, my people went from ecstatic happiness to miserable. It was completely unrecoverable. Since then I hated spies & BE.
Luckily haven't had too much trouble with them in Civ 6.
Only a bit in my last game, as Japan en route for science victory. Whenever I was part way into a space project every Civ would go after my industrial sectors.

Yea it looks like it may be a left over from that. Interestingly enough that never happened to me in BE. Maybe it was a one time thing for me.

 

[TruthfulCake]

Once in a game I put two spies in one city, one protecting the city center and its surrounding district, and the other protecting the industrial district, which was right next to my commercial one. It caught enemy spies siphoning funds every other turn, and I'm glad I did it before I got bankrupt, because they had been siphoning more than 1000+ gold before I acted.

Getting your counterspy disbanded is just bad luck. But you should probably have avoided the bankruptcy in the first place by building up a healthy treasury. The money doesn't go down IIRC, it just stops piling up even with a good PT.