Couple of blips about spies

[beautifulbob]

Playing as Bismark, cruising to a Culture Victory. Just waiting out the last 10k in a couple of cities. I decided to pump out spies to play around with, as I had never used them before.

First I was suprised that even when a spy was detected, it had no effect on my defensive pact. And as my buddy Saladin was the tech leader, points leader, and by far the military leader, everyone was too frightened of him to attack me. They just kept on getting more and more annoyed .

I found it rather funny to watch some coal blow up, then watch the worker come over, spend his time building a mine, and then blow it up the first turn again. However, it seems no matter how stealthy the spy is, she just can't seem to get close enough to the CalTrans worker and give him a permanant vacation.

Overall I found spies to be not really worth the hammers and especially the gold it costs to blow things up. Gathering info on the space race is about the only time I would use them. Every game I am close enough to sweat what the AI is doing, I don't have the extra gold to toss around.

500 hams for the Yard, another 80 per spy, then a chariot full of gold for every attempt.

Am I missing some great use? Steal plans, sabotage prodution, and sab. improvement, and general info gathering.

Is there some great secret use? I'd love to see assasinations of workers and Great People. Not that the AI would leave any lying around, but the threat would be nice.

[MattPilot]

I've used spies to great effect trying to destroy a civs economy. I jumped around from resource to resource just blowing it up one after the other. When i opened up one of the city views of my enemy, i noticed it was crumbling. It had Health problems + lots of angry citizens.

Of course this only works well when your opponent has cities that are around size 7 or bigger... depending on difficult level.

[MattPilot]

btw... i once had a -20 modifier to my diplo screen because of spy activity. They still didn't declare war though - i guess it was because i was three times as powerful as them

[Quillan]

Not a secret, really, but you can use them to give you that "edge" in certain circumstances. Suppose you're in a space race with another civilization, and it's really close. Send over your spies and sabotage all his aluminum mines. Without it, he'll be producing spaceship components at half speed. It might mean the difference between you finishing first or first loser in the race. You can use them to deny your military opponent his access to oil/iron/copper or any other resource when you aren't able to get military units there to pillage yet. Sometimes I use them to decide what tech to research next, based on what my competitors are doing.

[Enigma_Nova]

A Useful unit, but perhaps not worth the production and gold cost when you could use those resources for your own spaceship.

[cal_01]

Hmm. From my own observations, the amount of gold you have in reserve (over the amount needed to carry out the operation) seems to affect the success of the spy operation too.

I was in a Space Race against Ceasar once, and if I had an overwhelming amount of gold, all of my sabotage attempts would succeed. However, if I had just enough gold, it wouldn't really work.

[Crossfire]

I was losing the space race in one game to Cate. I put 4 spies over there and destroyed her infrastructure, including coal and aluminum. She had unhappy cities and then I started sabotaging her SS parts building. I won easily when I would have lost the race without spies.