Spy...clearly not a James Bond

[Silver14]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
The thing is that James Bond is a fantasy spy, bearing no relation to reality, and a seriously unbalancing concept for this game.

Are you sure? I was watching a many James Bond film this past week and I swear the bastard gets caught at least once in every movie.

[johnmcd]

Originally posted by Adagio


You should have told that to the Russians back then, as they apparently thought everything in the James Bond movies were realistic



...or at least so I've been told... and I always believe anything I hear

You sound a lot like one of those Russians.

[Enigma_Nova]

In Soviet Russia, Spies make whine threads about You!

[Possibility]

If a spy sabotages the production of a nuke, it should have a chance of detonating it. It would make a person think twice before building a nuke in a city if enemy spies are lurking about.

[Bill3000]

Or just bring back the ability for spies to plant nukes

[arcady]

Originally posted by Feyd
I don't know if this was intentional, but we are living in a different world than four years ago, and a game that has a feature where you send an explosive device to another nations capitol and detonate it (sacrificing your spy) was probably one of the first features dropped if it was even considered.

Well actually, today we know more than we used to that this horrible idea actually is something that could happen.

If anything, it's a reason to include a form of 'late game barbarian' - a unit that attacks you but is not aligned to any of the AI nations or other players in MP.

Spies would then become vital if only to simply find these 'barbarian units' before they can strike.

It might be a feature fo an expansion, to be able to build an 'Interpol Wonder' that would let you openly cooperate spies between allied nations to find the 'barbarian spies'.


As it is, I agree with others that spies are not much use. By the time I get them, that late in the game I don't need to know as much what units and production are going on in specific cities - it is more important to know the overall nature of the other civ and how fast they can get troops to me or against me. Most of the uses of spies so far to me seem more important in the early game.

On the other hand, stopping production of some items during the space race could be valuable - I will have to consider using spies for this and see if my opinion changes.

But either way, I think 'non-state actors' should be added into the late game as well as their already existing status in the early game.

'nations' that can solidly rely on having to deal with only other nations is something of the past today, and itself did not become a fact until the iron or steel ages.

[arcady]

Originally posted by Strudo


Of course if real life spies were like what people here want, then you wouldn't know they arn't like that. In fact you wouldn't know anything about them at all.

I don't know, if real spies were like James Bond, we'd be reading about them in the 'society pages' and there'd be a channel on my dial right after the Paris Hilton channel (VH1) that covered their latest exploits along with pictures of them in cool hangouts.

Am I the only one who ever wondered how James Bond stayed alive in a world where the entire planet knew him by name...?

That man blew his cover more than a person with hayfever in a hayloft blows their nose...

[Feyd]

Originally posted by arcady
If anything, it's a reason to include a form of 'late game barbarian' - a unit that attacks you but is not aligned to any of the AI nations or other players in MP.

Spies would then become vital if only to simply find these 'barbarian units' before they can strike.

It might be a feature fo an expansion, to be able to build an 'Interpol Wonder' that would let you openly cooperate spies between allied nations to find the 'barbarian spies'.

...

But either way, I think 'non-state actors' should be added into the late game as well as their already existing status in the early game.

'nations' that can solidly rely on having to deal with only other nations is something of the past today, and itself did not become a fact until the iron or steel ages.

This could probably be accomplished by having barbarians found an early (around 4000 bc) city and have their script set to do things that would limit their growth (such as only build military units or run the starting civics).

In a competitive game where the AI/your armies are focused on defending or attacking other civs the barbarian city could fester and grow until it was producing high level "suicide units" which it would send out. This is the only way I see to keeping barbarians in the late game however since as we well know the AI will expand to every nook and cranny of the globe dispelling that fog that the barb AI so relies upon.

[arcady]

I would want to structure 'so-called late game barbarians' differently than early game barbarians.

I would say that as soon as ocean trade routes happen, there is a very small chance that a 'barbarian spy' pops up on any continent with a civ on it, and seek to randomly target cities on that mass and harm them.

The chance of this should start extremely low, and go up as technologies that make trade and travel improve come into play - finally becoming something 'likely to be seen' when airports come into play.

It should also be affected by 'global happiness' - that is, if you can ever get every city on the entire globe to have zero unhappiness the chance for these spies would hit zero, but otherwise the global unhappiness would factor in as a multiple or adder somewhere in the formula.

The chance of a barbarian spy popping up should however, never go above something like 5 or 10% per turn (even those might be too high given how many turns there are), and if the formular wanted to be really complicated, they would be more likely to start in places with high culture than those with low, but even more likely to start in places with low culture or scores that are not annoyed or worse with the high culture civs.

If you based them in a city - that city could be conquered. And the whole idea of a late game barbarian is that it represents non-state actors, civilians who get it into their head that they will use mass scale extra-legal means to get their way.


In the middle game, to get a similar concept, I would like to see rather than spies or barbarian civs, the return of the privateer unit, but as something not a unit you can build but a unit that just randomly pops up and goes after other sea units or single hard bombardments of cities. That, and 'warriors and archers' that pop up in the middle ages and target any non military units they can - in effect bandits that go after workers or pillage squares.

Obviously, if these popped up too often they would just be game lags that got in the way of a fun play experience. But if they were well spread around, and easy to deal with, while not too common, they might be fun.

Especially if there were options in both the middle and late game to 'buy them out' and send them after chosen targets. Making them a nussiance that could become a resource.

[Cort Haus]

It's funny how some people crave game elements, like a random pest unit, suitcase bombs and worse that are disturbingly unfun and unbalancing to me. I hope these people never get to make design decisions for civ.

[Silver14]

Given that only 8 out of 76 people voted that the spy is fine I'd say I hope you don't get to make those decisions either. Clearly something more needs to be added to the spy.

[Hauptman]

Its not exactly top notch But the spy is VERY useful as is. thats why its a banana to me.


Beeing able to see how many of each resource a rival has, or what tech he's learning, and how far away it is, are great tools that i wish i had in previouse civs. Wait til he's 1 turn from finishing that tech then gift or sell it to him... you get the $$ or diplo and he only gains 1 turn. Keep an eye on how much oil he has, then plan your war strategy on that, If he only has one well a boat with a couple units could seriosly cripple his ability to defend himself. or if his cities are teetering on the happiness cap, then sabotage a couple dye's or wines to slow his research and production... Just got to use them to appreciate them is all.


And by the way... A spy in this game is INVISIBLE. there is exactly zero units that see it. Not other spies, not destroyers, not banana plantations, nothing can see them, ever. Spy vs spy is simply, if they keep pillaging an oil well, you can park your own spy on that well and it will reduce thier chance of success, by a lot.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Silver14
Given that only 8 out of 76 people voted that the spy is fine I'd say I hope you don't get to make those decisions either. Clearly something more needs to be added to the spy.

Yet it's clear from this thread that some are using the current spy better than others.

[Arrian]

They don't seem too bad to me. I don't use them a lot, but if I cared to bother, checking health/happiness in a key rival and then blowing up some of his resources to cause unhealthness/unhappiness in his empire sounds like a solid feature.

...

As for late-game barbs, I'd say the best addition would be high-seas pirates (as opposed to a galley here and there).

-Arrian

[Silver14]

Originally posted by Cort Haus


Yet it's clear from this thread that some are using the current spy better than others.

Oh I'm fairly certain everyone is using the spies fairly well. Let’s see - they can steal plans and sabotage improvements. Is that about it? Not very much complication there for 68+% to be too dumb to use them for what they can do in an effective manor.

Personally I find a couple stacks of tanks, artillery and an air force to be a bit faster in the whole resource takedown process.