Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Skasski

Maybe the problem is not that stealing research is too easy, but that other missions are too hard? Completely shutting down the intelligence game just because a race does not have bonuses could dull down the game. The problem could be the following:

Stealing research provides a direct bonus to your empire, many other missions (eg Sabotage) only provide a malus to one other empire and thus an indirect bonus to all others including your own. Of course this depends on the number of empires in the galxy: in a galaxy with two empires sabotage missions have a different effect on the distribution of power than in a galaxy with 20 empires. Of course the same is true for stealing research, but here your empire always gets the full advantage and all others a disadvantage.

Then again, it might also be both. Perhaps stealing research is too rewarding while other missions are too hard.

On a different "Steal Research" topic: I wonder how changing the mission to- or even adding a new "Steal Research Clues: acquire informations that initiate crash research" would affect the game.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Evan85

Hmm... In my spy heavy games I found that sending my agents on 78% missions every year results in quicky running out of operatives.

I think your guy is just really lucky. Unless you of course save-load a lot for missions. Anyways, I recently tried to tech-race the cat-guys with Ketaros. In the early game, even yearly steals gave me an edge. Kitties were better, but I surpassed other civilizations.

In the mid-game, I had two agents remaining with 40%+ espionage. They could relably steal techs in 3 months, but they still weren't enough to keep up with the Zenox. As I see, the increasing research-costs of high level techs mitigate the effect of corporate espionage well enough.


All and all, I think nefring espionage would render this asset meaningless for races that has no bonuses on it. Map-stealing is good, but it only saves a few explorers.



I'd also love to see some numbers on how much chance a regular Empire has to raise a 20%+ espionage agent in it's first 20-30 years. Without excessive saving and loading, I usually just lose all of them, even when targetting the dumbest people with the easiest missions.

quote:

ORIGINAL: spiralaxis

Tanaka: What difficulty, mods, patch version? My experience echoes that above: anything under 83% borders on a suicide mission in my experience. I believe smarter/+spying races are much more dangerous. What's the intelligence of your race?

quote:

ORIGINAL: tjhkkr

No, I am having the exact opposite problem, even under 1.9.5.7...
I am loosing agents like nothing flat... I used 5 agents, all with 90% or better chance... all five of them were lost...
And I was stealing a map... a map should be easy... just sneak aboard an Empire's freighter and get the map...
I am thinking intelligence gathering could use some strengthening...

quote:

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

My experience is the same as Tanaka's and (to a degree) tjhkkr's. A high stakes crapshoot, as I put it elsewhere.

I have been playing Kiadian's (so no racial spy bonus...) recently and with a spy with +20 espionage I will steal something like 1500k worth of tech. (I play 999k tech games, so that's more than a complete level 1 tech each steal, and about 75%+ of a level 2 tech.) By the time that spy reaches 50+ espionage they are stealing well in excess of 2000k a mission.

Where my experience correlates with tj's is that my spies are more likely to be killed/captured than to fail or be detected whilst stealing.

My recommendation is that spies should steal less per mission and be less likely to be killed, but also be much more likely to fail or to be detected.

My other suggestion is to open the spying mechanic (along with the diplomacy mechanic...) up to modders.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Nanaki

I noticed that all of your 'steal tech' missions are against pirates. I have noticed that pirates are a lot easier targets in terms of intelligence missions than empires for some reason. Infact, now I consider legendary pirates a blessing because they tend to have an obnoxious amount of technology and no espionage defenses whatsoever.