Spies

[Lazarous]

Well, yesterday in a multiplayer game i had my eyes opened about these units. (one preface - i normally played russia, but ignored spies cause i thought they weren't that great a unit).

Anyone else seen the absolute carnage these units can inflict on an enemy army? you can get them from medieval era on - and 2 of these babies in medieval will cripple almost any invading army (the armies tend to be fairly small and taking over 2 heavy cav or 2 siege units is generally more than enough to turn a close battle into a rout).

These units become real scary later on with the various upgrades they get...a group of 12 or so added to any sized army will turn your nation into the borg, its sick. You send an army against this force and it gets assimilated and thrown right back at you .

Even when you have a noticable scout presence, its not enough. The main problem seems to be that if your units are engaged with anything else (like say a token army) even if a spy is visible - through scouts or if they're using their abilities (non-russian spies) spies have a very low priority for being targetted.

Bribe also may be overpowered in and of itself - it costs 1000 craft. Thats it. You can take over a dozen tanks, artillery and whatnot and the only resource drain this inflicted upon you was about 20 seconds of time as your spies regenerate their craft. Add to that the fact that spies are fairly cheap to get in the quantities needed to be very noticable on battlefields (2-4 in pre-industrial eras, 6+ after).

I personally think these units need to either 1.be assigned a MUCH higher priority in targetting, like...first for all combat units or 2.have bribe actually cost resources.

What do you guys think?

Laz

P.S. using *2* spies i went from having severe trouble beating tougher/toughest AI's to absolutely wiping the floor with them...being able to take over key parts of their early armies sent against you is amazingly powerful.

[Inverse Icarus]

spies are godly. they can do tons of crap. they can give you valuable information on enemy troop location, visualize cities and their defenses, and durig a battle, you can steal units.

try bringing 5 or so along with your main attack battle, get behind the enemy, and bribe his artillery. it's hillarious.

[Red Scorpion]

Had my first 'run-in' with Spies when I moved up from Easiest to Moderate. I was fighting on 3 fronts & the chat stated a spy was trying to bribe my units, on all 3 fronts! Panic set in & I was routed on all but one of my fronts. Now I ensute I have at least 2 of the scout line with each force, sometimes 3 plus I'll get my Civ support teams to build Observation Towers behind each front line, I don't take any chances anymore. They're evil!

Great game concept though. Bit like the priests in AoE/AoK, loved using those, especially when I'd reached my Pop-Cap.

[Vesayen]

I NEVER use spies, but after reading this post, I decided to try using them for once....

I am in the middle of a "tough" conquer the world campaing, im France.

Right now im fighthing greece.... didnt build any military, but got 10 spies.

I positioned them in a line where I had seen the enemy come from and....

Enemy runs, gets stuck on the invisible wall(my spies) and they loose 10 units..... I gain 10 units-I loose 3 in the struggle, but kill the rest of theirs-I repeated this several times....... then used those forces I captured to take out the enemy-LOL!


I might play russians more from now on, Spies are god like!

[Lazarous]

they're a little TOO godlike...i can't really think of any workable counter to them if they're used in the middle of a battle. Alone against troops with scouting they're dead normally, but in the chaos of battle its a different story.

Laz

[Inverse Icarus]

Originally posted by Lazarous
they're a little TOO godlike...i can't really think of any workable counter to them if they're used in the middle of a battle. Alone against troops with scouting they're dead normally, but in the chaos of battle its a different story.

Laz

just bring scouts with your main force. if you need to, target them manually. they die real fast once they're spotted.

[Lazarous]

2 problems with simply bringing along scouts.

1. you *have* to manually target spies if there are any enemy combat units in the near vicinity (in my experience, at least). Manually targetting 5+ spies who are all simultaneously bribing different units is rather hard...not least of which because spies are fairly small and easy to misclick.

2.Lag issues in multiplayer - the bribing time is so short with even a single upgrade to spy power that its very likely that the unit will be turned before the spy is attacked.

actually, heres a third problem - scouts die easily and if the person is spy heavy they may simply target these units first when armies meet.

if scouts had some sort of 'auto-counterintel' AI setting i'd be happy, since then it would be a matter of who planned the best when they designed their army, but as it stands now the defender in a spy war is at a severe disadvantage.

Laz

[jpinard]

I agree with Laz

I agree, spies are too powerful. The computer AI has used them many times to utterly mess up my overwheming force. It gets frustrating, I have 14 cites, he has 1, and I cannot kill him off...

[Leaper]

Hey Lazarous -

You are pointing out what many of us have already come to accept as a 'weak' part of a fantastic game. I have also suggested that targeting priority be increased on spies, because, as is, (and you spy supporters can argue all you want), these spies bribe WAY too fast to stop them from doing unrealistic harm to your army. And I'm not even sure increasing the priority is the answer, but it's got to help.

I have played some pretty good players on MP that use spies like towers. They just sit these girls places and wait. (not saying this will always work, but you get the point).

And this bs about "oh, golly, just bring along scouts" is getting so old. Not all games are played with small groups on small maps where you can micro-manage the targeting. Scouts, as more advanced players are starting to see, are not the answer to this problem.... oh god, there's that word again. And yes, spies ARE a problem.

But don't count your chickens on a fix here. There are so many that voice "just bring along scouts", that I think we're stuck with it.

Peace.

~ Leaper

[GodSpawn]

Yeah, spies are easy to deal with in SP because you can just pause, but MP is a different matter.

I like your higher-priority targeting idea. So, if you have a bunch of scouts with you and they reveal some spies, your other units will automatically change their target to the spies. At least, that's what I understood you to mean.

[Calanor]

*nods* I agree - increased targeting priority vs spies is something I'd like to see in a patch (although I'd like to see similar changes when generals and supply wagons are concerned as well).

[Prothero]

IMHO, the commandos (explorers, sec ops) shoud have something like the autocast feture in Warcraft 3. When they see a spy, if no other action underway and enough "mana" left, they use Counterintelligence to destroy enemy spies on their own.
This is an extreme solution.

[albiedamned]

I don't think that's extreme at all. It makes perfect sense to me. Regular military units attack on their own when enemies come in range (unless on hold fire stance). Why not have scouts attack spies on their own with counterintelligence? The key is to have the scouts near your army - if you've done that, you shouldn't have to do additional micromanagement. Reducing micromanagement is a recurring theme in the game, so it makes sense here too.

BTW, I agree that Spies used in the heat of an ongoing battle are a gameplay problem right now. But I don't think any other aspect of spies are a problem. If you let the enemy plant informers, that's your own fault. Observation posts and towers can prevent that from happening. And if you let the enemy bribe your units when you are not fighting, then again it's your fault because scouts (or observation posts) will solve that problem. There's nothing funnier then a spy coming across the border towards my idle army when I have scouts - they all see her and open fire at once since there are no other targets!

[Vesayen]

Originally posted by Lazarous
they're a little TOO godlike...i can't really think of any workable counter to them if they're used in the middle of a battle. Alone against troops with scouting they're dead normally, but in the chaos of battle its a different story.

Laz

I ALWAYS send 5 or 6 scouts with my army from med-evil on(for sniping)-if you see spies, pause and just take em out with snipers.

Scouts are VERY cheap-no reason not to use alot of em.

[solo]

In addition to allowing scouts to auto-target spies, I think another way of dealing with the problem would be to make it cost some gold for each bribery attempt. Make the first attempt cost 100 gold and successive attempts would cost 10% more gold and so on. Doing this would limit overuse of bribery and would lessen the amount of micro-management of spying and counter-spying, but still retain a realistic role for spies in the game.