Taking over the world, one agent at a time

BtS Espionage Pros: A huge improvement over the previous espionage system. Passive espionage is wonderful. Does not require obsessive micromanagement.

BtS Espionage Cons: There will be many games in which active missions won't play a big role. The AI sometimes invests too much into espionage, then spending its points on things that do not hurt rivals much.

BtS Espionage Tips: Divert all spending towards one civ if you plan to invade them. Even if you don't want to use Spies, try to get enough Espionage Points to see what civs are researching.

New civilizations are nice to have, of course, but aren’t quite important as some of the other changes to the game. With BtS, the amount of changes is so high that it’s difficult to know what to begin with. So I’ll now talk about espionage, it being one of the earliest announced tings to be overhauled in BtS.

Espionage is something that didn’t work too well initially in Civ4. It felt tacked-on, was only available late in the game, and had rather limited usefulness. In fact, the space race was probably the only thing where espionage was useful at, if you just needed to gain several turns on your enemy. Forget everything you knew about espionage, because it is now completely reworked.

In BtS, espionage is built around Espionage Points (EP). You gain those by using the espionage slider (available as soon as you meet another civilization), assigning Spy specialists or building certain buildings. EP are distributed among civs you know, and you can tweak that distribution. For example, you can allocate all the EP you generate each turn towards one civ. Or you could split your allocation evenly between two, not allocating any towards the rest. It never matters how many total EP you have – all that matters is your EP towards a particular civ.

Effects from espionage are divided into active and passive, and this is probably the best single aspect of the espionage system. Passive effects simulate you gaining more intelligence data on the civilization as you invest into espionage. As soon as you accumulate enough EP for a passive effect to kick in, it does kick in and remains active as long as you have enough EP. One notable passive effect is the ability to see enemy demographics – this includes graphs. If you open the graph screen, you no longer see graphs for all your rivals. You will only see your own graph and graphs of those civs for whom you have enough EP to see that information.

With some further investment, you can also see what your rivals are researching (just like with vassals). This is crucial information – in essence, you have advance warning if a civ is going to get a key military tech. For me, the ability to see rival research has been the main incentive to invest into espionage in the first half of the game. Even if I am not planning to use Spies, I try to accumulate enough EP to have this intelligence on research available to me.

Religion no longer grants line of sight to enemy cities – that is now also achieved by passive espionage. You don’t need a lot of EP to gain visibility on small, underdeveloped fringe cities, but gaining visibility into core cities would require considerable investment. I have developed a habit of allocating 100% of my espionage to the civ I am going to invade shortly before doing so. That way, while I am preparing the attack, I will gain visibility on much of the enemy territory. In the second half of the game, where EP generation is generally higher, you are able to gain visibility on an entire civ by doing so.

The ultimate passive ability is the ability to actually investigate an enemy city – that is, open its city screen. Clearly, that is powerful, as you know what they’re building at any time. However, this intelligence also requires quite some EP to obtain, so you’re unlikely to be able to investigate core enemy cities unless you invest in espionage seriously, such as using the slider and building EP-producing buildings in many cities.

Active espionage is different; it works more like the familiar espionage of previous Civ games. You build Spies (available with Alphabet) and send them wherever you want. Having arrived at a rival city, they can perform missions (although they must remain stationary for one turn before performing any missions). There’s a bunch of active missions, which vary greatly in cost. The cost calculation is also pretty complex. Factors such as trade routes, city size, distance and religion will affect the cost of a mission. Also, the longer your Spy stays stationary, the cheaper the mission becomes. You can choose to simply harm the enemy (ruining health or happiness, for example) or attempt missions that also benefit you directly, such as stealing treasury or, the king of missions, stealing technology.

Spies may be caught while moving in enemy territory (which may or may not reveal their nation of origin). Note that Spies can always move into rival territory and can not be killed by regular means. An extremely important factor is your espionage ratio with the rival civ. If you have 500 EP against a civ and they have 250 EP against you, your missions will be considerably cheaper and your chances of being caught will be lower. Spies may also fail a mission, but in that case, you will not lose the EP, merely the Spy unit. Therefore, there is no random dice roll that essentially makes you lose a number of espionage points.

Espionage feels different in the second half of the game. In the first half, you will not be able to do much unless you specifically invest into EP. Courthouses provide EP, and if you allocate everything towards one civ, you’ll be able to pull off some missions. However, unless you build a fair number of Courthouses or allocate Spy specialists, you’re not going to be able to rely on your agents too much. In the second half of the game, buildings such as Intelligence Agencies and Security Bureaus provide additional EP, and you may be able to gain comprehensive intelligence on a selected civ rather quickly, without using the espionage slider. There is little reason not to build the later EP-producing buildings, however, as most of your cities should be able to produce them rather quickly.

The big question with espionage is not how it works but the strategies for using it and the general usefulness of espionage. In my experience, passive espionage is always useful – it’s just really good investment for your money. If you do not invest in espionage specifically, and only accumulate EP from stuff you’d have otherwise, you’ll be able to do few active missions throughout the game, and they won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. The alternative is pursuing an espionage-heavy strategy, assigning Spy specialists and, most importantly, using the espionage slider. In that case, the best thing to do is probably to steal technology. I’ve come to think of it as an investment into researching two technologies at once. You invest some in one technology (your research slider), and invest some more into another technology (espionage slider) that you will later steal.

Here it’s important to note that leaders have different preferences for espionage. For example, Mansa Musa doesn’t care much about it. Given his habit of researching technologies fast, if you start near him, it may be worth to invest extra in espionage in order to steal some technology. Unfortunately, active espionage is not handled optimally by the AI. The AI’s favorite mission is destroying tile improvements. It doesn’t always succeed, and in my experience, it’s nothing but a small annoyance. Most of the time, you’ll be able to rebuild the improvement in 2-3 turns and therefore destroying it is a questionable investment of EP on the AI’s behalf. However, the AI really enjoys destroying buildings in cities that you capture from it while they are in resistance. It can lead to you losing most, if not all, buildings in some cities, and such defensive espionage is pretty good.

Aggressive espionage strategies probably need to be centered around Great Spies. They are a new GP type in Beyond the Sword, and can be obtained just like other Great People. Great Spies can build the Scotland Yard, which is useful to boost EP production long-term in one city, but the most powerful ability of Great Spies is to infiltrate a rival city, giving you a massive amount of EP towards that civ.

This will probably create a popular gambit with the Great Wall, which now produces Great Spy points. Build the Great Wall and wait for a Great Spy to pop, infiltrate a civ and then you can help yourself to much of their early technology, which should considerably boost your scientific progress. Early Great Spies are really potent, and their power (as well as the likelihood of them appearing) drops later in the game.

Overall, the espionage system in BtS is an astounding improvement over the system featured in vanilla Civ4. Passive espionage effects are particularly interesting. However, unless you decide to use espionage heavily, you may feel that is underused. This may be true in some games and not in others. You can still play without ever building a Spy and practically ignoring the whole concept. In these situations, yes, espionage will feel underused. However, there are definitely situations where an espionage strategy is the way to go.

It is not a perfect system, but it’s much better to have a good system that is sometimes left unused than a system which can just break the game – BtS espionage doesn’t break balance. Besides, the nature of espionage is such that you often don’t know that it’s happening – such as with passive effects, you don’t know when someone has them against you, and you don’t need to actively do much to get those effects against others.

It is my opinion that, of all Civ games, Alpha Centauri is the only one in which the quality of espionage is comparable to that of BtS. SMAC, though, had the disadvantage that you were forced into building Probe Teams (that’s the SMAC version of Spies for you heathens who haven’t played it), otherwise you would get hit by enemy Probes time and again. Given that you will accumulate EP as you play anyway in BtS, you don’t have to go through any annoying micromanagement to protect yourself against espionage.