Espionage & Assymetrical Warfare

[Enigma_Nova]

Your Lawyer idea could work...
if you cut the penalty to the civ that builds the lawyers and rename them to 'Imposters'.
It's entirely possible to have a few imposter leaders show up and take over... with a little financial backing.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Where's my banana!? I wanted to select banana in vote options!

[Shogun Gunner]

That would suggest you had another idea to put forward.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I guess i would go with have spy units, but only able to infiltrate cities and one shot deals, but if they establish themseleves you can do stuff in the city, but each attempt increases the chance of being found out, even if successful and done carefully. I'd make an exception of just knowning what the data of the city is. Passive info like that isn't really going to increase likelyhood of being found out. Really though instead of kicking the spy out it should be an option to make them into a double agent somehow.
The units would be invisable except by enemy units right next to them. They could be expelled like in civ2 when at peace. Or perhaps captured and working against you.
I don't think they should be able to attack or bribe units to switch sides, but perhaps if a unit is nearby bribe them to ignore the unit if peacetime.

[Shogun Gunner]

So, not a banana vote, but a vote for the Spy Unit and other assymetrical warfare options. (option 1).

I also like that option, I would welcome more functions in the espionage arena. However, if that moved to far ahead of other cIV features, the spy stuff would be too prominent in the strategy. Tracking agents, double agents, etc. could be overly complex to track.

I tend to think of the spy unit, not as a single person/agent, but a presence (cell?) in place. The cell can be infiltrated and destroyed (spy expelled) or it can wreak havoc (whatever happend to poision water supply?).

Balancing the capabilities and features of new ideas for cIV will be challenging. Remember, it has to work with a substandard AI logic programming interface.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Actuallly i really hate the spy unit, but with reguards to what can be resonably done that's what i'd want.

Really i think it should be far more abstract.

[Admiral PJ]

I think Communication Warfare (Electronic) should be included.. you could have a Radar Jammer truck that makes all units invisible in its square, Anti Radar missiles can track down these trucks and destroy them.. launched from Jets or similar launch vehicles.
This 'assymetrical' warfare works with everything electric.. EMP bombs can damage electrical systems - millitary and civilian. ECM blocks communications and ECCM tries to defend against ECM attack to allow full communications.
I suppose in Civ a unit which is being Jammed, has its Rank experience value reduced by 1.. so elites become veteran.

Spy units are good but they need far more abilities, and they should have stealth values.. so its better to hide in rough terrain and cities (Any good Espionage Manual will tell you this)

Your spies could recruit double-agents which are much harder for enemies to spot and cause more damage.. mainly they're good for gainining intelligence and facts about your enemy.

My Civ3 Mod 7 Ages of man has Spies and doubleagents in now.. though its limited what can be done in civ 3.

I've got Pirates in my mod which have hidden nationality and can enslave any unit to make colonists or slaves.. They are quite powerful early on.. you have to watch all borders , they are useful cannon targets tho.. give you easy pickings to gain experience.
You need to make Hidden nationals cause diplomatic incidents as spies used to.. though theres only a small chance their real identity will be found out, depending on the quality of Counter Intelligence defence.

Partisans are good if done more realistically.. normally from conquered cities. Special Forces would also be a good addition, these have Hidden Nationality capabilites and could capture enemy leaders/generals or take out single buildings in a city.

It would be great to have Private Corportations that using Globalisation could spy on enemy countries.. such as companies like Microsoft or banks like Barclays(british) which can have spies planted in them to monitor economic etc activity in a civ (even enemy civs to a small extent).

[Admiral PJ]

Could Spies be used to cause Civ 2 like Civil wars.. or other General Civ Spy effects like Scandal - Fake some evidence to show the Leader is a criminal or lier to his people , and make the government of an enemy go into anarchy.
Spies should be able to make partisans in cities that used to belong to them too.

I think to stop having 100's of spies to manage.. you should just need 1 per city.. and it does just stay in an enemy city until its caught.. once there you don't have to do much.

I don't like the way you have to spend all your budget right now just to see what another civs cities are doing. You should get to see what a cities doing for at least 20 turns if you spy on it, and see millitary units close to it.

[Kuciwalker]

Anyway, as I've mentioned in the other thread, unit functions need to be as few and simple as possible - just like any other part of the interface. Espionage doesn't belong as part of the unit system, any more than building or diplomacy does.

[ScipioX]

Spies would probably be more realistic if they were abstracted. They should still be subject to capture and such upon entering enemy territory, but that should be abstracted too. Maybe like MOO3 tried? Or more like the SMAC options?
I really like the idea of Bandit, Partisan/Guerilla, and Special Forces type units. They would normally be invisible, and have Barbarian/Pirate flags when found. Instead of attacking units directly, they would go on missions, ambushing units (a free round of combat, where the defender doesn't get to shoot back) and attacking cities (destroying improvements, stealing money, and sabotaging production). They could retreat before combat and would be hard to destroy in rough terrain or with air attacks.

[realpolitic]

Civ should encourage all aspects of warfare that can be done without damaging gameplay. Spies were almost too powerful. The average cost per improvement increases with technology, so spies could easily be worth 10-20x their cost, after reusing them a few times. Ctp2 does a great job with assymetric warfare. There is a limit of 10 cities in tyrany, 20 cities in monarchy,republic theocracy so sending out slavers and building supercities with slaves and then expanding to the maximum # of cities ASAP and
wating for the next form of government to come up.

[trolluscaius]

i like spy but i love 'franchise' of CTP2(i don't know the english for)

[dexters]

Spy units just means more clicking. It's totally unecessary.

Firaxis did the right thing by taking them out. The quality and depth of Espionage missions have no correlation with whether you have a spy unit or not.

These are two different issues and I think its a bit misleading to put both of them in one poll. I've never liked the spy units, and the abstracted spy system, just like the abstracted research, commerce and industrial system works great.

I certainly don't see very many requests for science units. I suspect nostalgia for Civ2 plays a large part for the apparent popularity of spy units. But I do think reintroducing them would be a step backwards and does not simply or streamline the game at all.

[MiketheYounger]

Keep the spies and the lawyers and the other rougues

A compromise would be to give the player his choice: sliders or units

Agent provocateur is the term we are all thinking of for special agents who enter foreign cities in order to cause labour troubles.

Mining the roads and railroads is a neat idea: sort of like pillaging the tile improvement, only the effect takes place after a unit travels over the mine

From an historical point of view, during every war of conquest that has taken place between 1954 and 2003 the aggressor nations preceded their invasions with the use of insurgents and special ops troops in the target country causing mayhem and chaos.

I like the ability in CIV3 to obtain low level intelligence of foreign cities from the diplomacy screen. OTGH, if a player wants higher level intelligence capability, then he should be prepared to sweat a few bullets in order to get an actual spy unit in place.

As far as the CTPII lawyer goes, more than once the AI has planted one next to one of my cities, and filed injunctions against that city annoying me to no end. This started me thinking on the possibilities of using 3 or 4 of them against another human

[Shogun Gunner]

After re-reading the entire thread, I have modified my original position to be equally open to units or abstraction. There have been good suggestions on both sides.

I think we all have agreed that Civ2 and Civ3 both provided some interesting ideas regarding espionage, but there were some problems with these implementations. We all hope this addressed in cIV. I have not read any specifics -officially or by rumor- of the direction the software develoment has taken on this particular subject. Has anyone heard anything?