Awesome, that's a much needed tweak to AI. Is that the extent of the changes though? One of the major complaints was being crippled with agents, and another was the exorbitant cost that fielding agents required. Decreasing the cost of agents (or making it dependent on the number of agent's you currently have available/in the field) would solve that well enough.

Sweet can't wait to test it out.

Not quite what I was hoping for, but a perfectly good solution I think.

Jonnan

Starstriker, the cost of agents now becomes much more reasonable because you don't have to risk losing them just to gather intelligence.  You no longer have to constantly replace your agents as they get nullified every few turns.

Fixed pics.

Exactly...costs should stay reasonable for those playing a passive espionage game. It's only when you're trying to use the spys in an agressive manner do their cost start hurting.

That's not to say we wont need further help balancing, but we think this is step in the right direction.

This spying system sounds better than what it was, but it still doesn't make me go "Yay, spying!". It's just a feature in game that I must give some consideration but it's still not "fun".

I don't know how to make spying fun, but this doesn't sound like it...

Btw, if passive agents can't be nullified, how does one prevents enemies from spying you?

I do have a question, though.  Once you reach the highest espionage level with a civilization, does it remain for the rest of the game, even if you reassign all your spies elsewhere?

Oh, and how does technology theft figure into all of this?

To be honest i expected a lot more from the improved espionage promised in 2.0. It seems just a bit streamlined but it will remain as much interesting as it was before........

Thanks for the workaround

What i had hoped to see in the spying section was what you have included and the inclusion of a system that upon placing spies on a planet you could choose whether to nulify the building or actively try and tech steal from the base tech of the building you placed the agent on. IE if you placed an agent on a factory you got 'X' percentage chance of stealing a production tech etc...

That said i am happy to see the new version you are releasing so thanks

Yeah, I know people we're hoping for an overhaul, but we really needed to keep things simple for backporting purposes (plus there's only so much you can do with a 4 year old codebase before massive pain ensues).

The main issues that we're trying to address here are...
1. Gaining intelligence levels by spys that can be nullified is a PITA.
2. Spys get too costly (mostly becuse of the tug-of-war caused by 1).
3. You should be able to spy on minor races.

There were TONS of cool ideas that were thrown around the forums concerning Espionage, and they've all been filtered into our massive 'GCII possibilities', but at this point it needs to be very straightforward (but gameplay and coding wise) to be considered for an update.

N.P we still love you . Any update to the espionage system is happily welcomed!

Oh and god bless you for point 3!

There was no way to stop this in DL, so in respect to passive intel, we are back to DL's methods.

Seconded...er now it's like...thirded or so?  In DL once you hit advanced and stopped spending on a race, you'd get random tech steals.  In DA/TA it seemed on when you'd have a spy on a race and hit that high did you get a tech steal.  How will 2.0 work in this resepct?

And a whole new question I think, I see a Place button for the passive agents, can you remove them to place elsewhere, or are they gone forever in intel gaining/maintaning?