Spies. Are they a tad too powerful? a bit unbalanced?

[canamrock]

The thing I found annoying is that it seems that you cannot send more than one spy of a certain type into the same empire at the same time. That is, I can't put three spies into my enemy's territories to really mess up his military. It also seems that I can never get out enough spies to cover for the ones I lose. I just keep some around for defense, mostly.

That's about it for my problems with espionage. It's almost totally worthless for my opponents to use on me, and it only seems to do minor damage to my opponents most of the time.

[Spectrex]

Originally posted by canamrock
The thing I found annoying is that it seems that you cannot send more than one spy of a certain type into the same empire at the same time. That is, I can't put three spies into my enemy's territories to really mess up his military. It also seems that I can never get out enough spies to cover for the ones I lose. I just keep some around for defense, mostly.

Huh? Sorry but that's wrong, you can insert as many spies of a single type as you want..

[canamrock]

Every time I've tried, it just automatically recalled all but one of them. So basically, I've been restricted to 6 spies, one of each kind. I wish I was wrong, but it won't work that way for me.

[Corentor]

To my relief, I FINALLY managed to stop the enemy spies' habit of constant infiltration and destruction. There is really nothing you can do about it until you start researching some of the higher techs which boost your detection ability of enemy spies.

I had a leader actually live for more than 2 turns for a change.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by Mellian




i always thought spies in Moo2 sucked to much.

-Mellian

Not sure what sucks means in this context.
At impossible, prewarp games, if you have little or no spy traits and especially if you use -spying, the AI steals you blind for quite some time.

[canamrock]

Wasn't the biggest factor of 2, and probably 3 as well, the relative proximity of neighbors? Not the true distance, but the lower time it takes to meet your opponents in the game. I tend to use large maps, and am typically on a good road before I meet more than one or two opponents. By then, my counter-intelligence technology seems to be mostly sufficient to stop the vast majority of incursions.

[Lotharun]

So far, I'm liking spys a lot...one of the better parts of the game. Once I get my game going, I always have a spy in the queue. Still toying with this, but I have 3-5 to counter other spys while I send 2-3 others in to do their thing.

Social spys are the cheapest to build, and I use those for counter spying. I'm not sure if the luck, cloak and dagger numbers have much to stopping other spys, though. If you check your spys, those values will change from spy to spy and type of spy.

[vmxa1]

I think you races Cunning has a lot to do with the spyings sucess.

[Grumbold]

I don't seem to have any luck at all in offensive spying measures. At high tech levesl my leaders do seem to be staying alive though.

I've not had any problems sending multiple spies into an empire before, but then again they're almost always arrested immediately. A couple of times I've had multiple successful science spy insertions for a few turns before they get discovered and killed. Its cost me about thirty spies for every tech stolen though.