Diplomats, Spies, & Obtaining Maps

[Bender]

One thing that's always struck me funny about Civ games was the occasional inability for me to obtain enemy maps through mid and late games stages. Obtaining a simple map of an opponent's cities and terrain should be available to diplomats as early as Map Making or Writing - University at the latest.

I propose that Diplomats and Spies be provided with this simple capability. Any thoughts?

[DarkCloud]

Stealing Maps... This should be unnecessary since if you are in contact with the enemy, his traders will give you maps.
How about this:
If you are in peace you can steal maps
If you are allied, maps are auto-exchanged and updated until the breakage of such said alliance.

[Mister Pleasant]

Here's an idea. The mall rat unit - available late in the game w/ global commerce or something (yes, I'm mixing in CTP2 advances). The mall rat infiltrates an enemy mall and buys a map at the Mapsco store. How about this: need computers? Have the mall rat buy some and send them back to the mother country for analysis. Don't get me started on the slacker student unit. Need nuclear physics? Send the slacker student unit to a city with a university and nine years later (4 years undergrad, 5 years grad) you have a group of nuclear scientists and also the advance. How about the philosopher unit (available with postmodernism). Send him or her to a city and he/she will begin to feed post-structuralist garbage into people's heads causing technological (i.e. real) research to be halved. Finally, how about an illegal labor unit? Send it to another civ's city to create discontent among natives, lower production a bit (lower wages=less incentive to produce) - oh and get rid of the malcontents, poor, discriminated against, and marxist reactionaries in the city that built it. Next up, the Nader's Raiders unit . . .

[Optimizer]

Let's get serious...

But Mister Pleasant does have a point in that Mall Rat idea. The maps of a Democracy or Republic should of course be public, and should be distributed to all civs with any relations, with exception for military units.

It should be easier to steal non-military techs from a democracy, too, although a stone-age civ shouldn't be able to reverse-engineer a computer.

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90% of the casualties in a 21st century war are civilians. Join the army!

[Mister Pleasant]

Actually, I've never been thrilled with the spy unit - or using the diplomat in an intelligence capacity. Intelligence always seemed to me to be a non-unit thing. Although I know it won't happen, it would be nice if civ3 used an intelligence system similar to Space Empires III (but not SEIV). One might complain that SEIII was a bit spreadsheet-ish, but it feels more elegant to spend resources to bring about intelligence events rather than walking a unit up to a city. Lets face it, a democracy isn't going to run over a tourist with a tank to prevent them from buying a map of the territory from a gas station. C'est la vie. I think I will add that philosopher unit though . . .