Poisoned Water: Espionage Broken?

[MosesPresley]

I have a higher level of espionage points than everyone else in my present game. I have 2 to 3 spies in every city. Yet, I have had several cities with continuously poisoned water for centuries. As soon as the water cleans up another spy nails me. It appears that it doesn't matter how many spies that I have or my espionage ratio compared to the rival civilizations. note: This is on the warlord level of difficulty.

Obviously the game is no history simulator, BUT how often have water supplies been sabotaged and continuously sabotaged throughout history? If the water supply has sabotaged once, the level of difficulty should increase exponentially for any subsequent missions.

[Will9]

Are you playing on Marathon with no Solver's Patch?

[MosesPresley]

No Solver patch, normal speed, huge temperate pangaea map. I have all of the security buildings in most of the affected cities.

Solver's patch solves this? I'll have to consider dl'g it.

I'm kicking AI tail, but this espionage thing is a huge drain on my economy and is causing me to lag in technology. It definitely merits major tweaking.

[Jaybe]

I've had a game with 3 poisoning events on my cities. The cities started at about 15 pop: one went down by 4 but the other 2 went down 1 or less. No Solver-patch involved -- the food bar was near full and I made some terrain adjustments (and re-adjusted after the "crisis" was over).

The game is different. We bought it because it was different. We must expect to there to be some learning curve.

[Wiglaf]

Solver's patch fixes water poisoning on Marathon speeds. Before, the missions were far too powerful. This is a bug that will also be fixed in the next official patch.

Try doing the counterespionage mission in enemy territory to reduce the risk of poisoning. Also, build security bureaus. And if you've got such an annoying enemy on your continent, consider eliminating him.

[Bhruic]

If you're playing on Normal speed, the patch won't change anything for you. I can't really think of anything you can do to stop AI spying that you haven't done. Best case would be to attack the AI doing it (if you can), and give them something else to focus on other than making spies.

Bh

[Wiglaf]

Counterespionage should eliminate this problem, or bankrupt the offending AI.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Bhruic
Best case would be to attack the AI doing it (if you can), and give them something else to focus on other than making spies.

Seems like all civs does this, no matter how much they like me

And attacking them doesn't make it better, actually makes it much worse. In my last game I attacked Korea, took two cities. The turn after taking the first city it was poisoned and the same when I took the second city. As soon as the poison was gone in one of the cities it was poisoned again. It wasn't until I had taken over most of their cities when the cities could get beyond size two

Considering how powerful it is it should IMHO give a reputation hit from all civs who hasn't tried to poison water supply (at least in the modern times). It should also open up for the target civ to declare war on the offending civ without getting a reputation hit

And whenever a city is poisoned it should become more resistant to such attacks (make it more likely that the city will catch the spy)