Espionage!

[Theben]

To be honest I thought that a game called Pax Imperia had one of the best espionage subgames in it. You would allocate x amounts of money to espionage (& counter-espionage) and whenever you felt like it you'd send them on various missions, including sabotage, tech stealing, assassination, scientific sabotage, spaceship sabotage and/or subversion, subvert your planetary governors or cabinet members, or just plain fact-finding.

I also think that the units should give way to a espionage screen, probably a sub-screen in diplomacy. I also had plenty of others ideas which can be found in the diplomacy section o' de list v. 2, particularly regarding minimizing sabotage damage.

[EnochF]

Suggestion:

In the late game, or let's say with the discovery of Espionage, you should be immediately apprised when one of your enemy's cities has angry citizens. You should also be immediately apprised when one of your enemy's cities goes into revolt. This applies only to other civs with whom you've established an embassy.

Once you get the message box informing you that an enemy city has angry citizens, you should have the option to spend X amount of gold to encourage dissidents. You can spend 2X gold to frame another civ or to avoid an international incident. This basically pushes the city into revolt for that turn.

The important thing here is: Other civs can do the exact same thing to you. And they will, unless you build a lot of temples and cathedrals and happiness improvements, and make sure your military units aren't spread across the globe, etc.

Keeping in mind that cities in Revolt are a lot cheaper to "buy," this could be a powerful spy tool. (I assume that the gold cost for buying cities will be increased dramatically in Civ III.)

[ajbera]

However, I don't think you should be able to "bribe" a city into revolting and joining your civilization. That's a bit too unrealistic.

Rather, when apprised that an opponent's city has unhappy citizens, you should be able to finance the dissidents to orchestrate a revolution. After the city revolts, it either a) forms an independent, minor nation, or b) asks another civilization (possibly yours) if it can join. It should not automatically become yours, though.

[Cyberbugs]

I like the screen where your first choose what action you want your spy to take, for example to steal a technology. (The percentual chance of success for each action should be displayed) Then you may choose whether to try to steal a specific tech, and what the chance of sucess for that would be, or just steal any tech. After making that decision, you could also have the option of whether or not to try to frame another civilization for the action, and also showing the percentual chance of that.