Counterspy Bug ?

[MattPilot]

Alright...... according to the manual, one spy should be able to "expose" (whatever the devs ment by this) another spy in the surrounding plots.

I ran some tests with world builder and put 2 spies, of opposing civs, next to each other. Neither can my spy see the enemy spy, there also ain't no button to press that says "expose".

Also, i put an enemy spy next to a field i was about to sabotage, also no increase in risk (still the usual 40 - 90% chance of success)

So what did the devs mean by "expose" and does it or does it not work?


As of right now, there is no defense against an enemy sabotaging spy in your boarders.

[Shogun Gunner]

Geez...that's a major concern. Nice work MattPilot to test that out with the Worldbuilder. I did not see this bug in the bug report thread -- I would suggest you add it.

I have built spies and never saw any other civilization's spies.... I thought they were just not building them or something. Then again, I've never had my infrastructure tampered with. Has anyone been the victim of AI spy activity?

[Boris Godunov]

Hmm. This should be tested with Hotseat game, too.

[MattPilot]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner


I have built spies and never saw any other civilization's spies.... I thought they were just not building them or something. Then again, I've never had my infrastructure tampered with. Has anyone been the victim of AI spy activity?

Thats another thing - I've never seen the AI build them either. When i give them AI spies via the world builder, and place them deep in my territory (we have a -30 relationship ), all he does is move them to his territory.

[CrispyCritter]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner
Geez...that's a major concern. Nice work MattPilot to test that out with the Worldbuilder. I did not see this bug in the bug report thread -- I would suggest you add it.

I have built spies and never saw any other civilization's spies.... I thought they were just not building them or something. Then again, I've never had my infrastructure tampered with. Has anyone been the victim of AI spy activity?

Yes, the AI actually used it very well on Monarch level. I hadn't looked at spies before but this game convinced me it was worth it!

I was building tanks in all my cities due to war being recently declared on me, and the AI sabotaged my single oil well, wiping out all of my production in all of my cities. I rebuilt the well, and the AI did it again! I think I caught it the third time; I had lots of units around my well by then!

Note the penalty for losing a required resource is excessively harsh; I'd be much happier if I got something for the interrupted production, or the item got put on the queue so I could continue building it later after I got the resource back. It's unrealistic for all partial production to be a complete loss.

[MattPilot]

something else i've just discovered...


When within sight radius of one of your spies (2 tiles), enemy spies become visible on the military advisors map ONLY.

Still haven't found a way to kick them out of your territory yet though.

[oxmonsta]

Originally posted by Shogun Gunner I have built spies and never saw any other civilization's spies.... I thought they were just not building them or something. Then again, I've never had my infrastructure tampered with. Has anyone been the victim of AI spy activity?

Yep, repeatedly, on monarch level. They kept destroying my iron mine (which happened to be on the coast). Must have done it about 20 times. Later when I got the tech to reveal uranium and built a uranium mine they kept going for that (again, it was on the coast - I haven't seen AI spies attack targets inland). The AI was quite proficient at it - they must have hit my uranium mine about 50 times. Often it was every single turn for many turns on end. Sometimes I caught the spy (NB without actually having any of my own) and it would stop for a few turns until another spy showed up.

In fact the AI was probably too proficient at attacking my mines. Assuming that they pay the same costs for spy missions as human players, these continued spy missions must have been a significant drain on their economy. All for the meagre benefit of tying up 4 of my workers to rebuild my mine every turn. (BTW if you are able to rebuild the mine / oil well etc within the same turn it is destroyed you won't lose your production of units that require that particular resource - it pays to keep those workers on hand!)

[MattPilot]

I"ve quite successfully used my spies to cripple an entire civ.

4 spies constantly jumping around from resource to resource will take away all happy faces & health bonus from cities, thus making them useless.

Was fun

It did cost me a fortune though. I've had quite a tech lead so i just set my tech slider down to 50, so i had a cash surplus of some 5-600 gpt which allowed me to sabotage 3 improvements per turn on average.

[Cordelayne]

This is alarming. I'm playing on Noble level, and there is an enemy spy running around blowing up mines almost every turn. I've made a point to make lots of counterspies. So far I've never found the enemy spy, much less got an option to eject her. I just assumed that was something I'd eventually see.

There really is no way to counter an enemy spy????!!!! Bug city!

[Shogun Gunner]

and a pretty large bug if you ask me.

[pauli]

on warlord, i've had enemy spies do a remarkably good job of shutting down my oil production (which i think was a bug, as i still had working off shore platforms... but anyway). also, they appeared to be visible anywhere, via the military advisor, regardless of where my spies were.

[Saldrin]

I posted this problem a few times in the general forum as well as the strat forum a few weeks ago. Nobody responded to my query

I've had enemy spies sabatoge resources while my spy was sitting on top of that tile. It seem regular military units work as counterspies better than spies do. I constantly camp military units on my resources now just to improve the chance of catching that joker sabatoging my resources.

Good tip abut the military advisor, I pretty much gave up on that advisor. At least we now know one thing it can be used for.

[Soren Johnson]

Spies are always invisible no matter what - no units, including enemy spies, can reveal them. However, if you have a spy on or adjacent to a tile that an enemy spy targets for a mission, the chances of catching that enemy spy go up. That is what "exposing" means. I believe the manual is wrong and the Pedia is right in this case...

[xxFlukexx]

Hmmm, interesting. So is the manual also wrong in that normal units help a little bit to counter a spy's success rate? So exactly what does affect a spy's success rate and what are the chances of detecting an enemy spy?

As to the above posters, I never see AI spies on Monarch+. I just put a spy and a few troops on my oil tile or spaceship city if it's my only one. Seems to do the trick.

[Soren Johnson]

yes, troops help catch spies as well...