Stardock has been busy this summer enhancing Galactic Civilizations II with lots of new features. Most of those features will be for players who have purchased Twilight of the Arnor. But Dark Avatar users will also see a revamped espionage system as well.

Stardock used the word revamped espionage system and yet there going back to giving us the choice from the old system of esionage vs the new? How can this be changed espionage system, there is nothing new !!!!!!!!!!!!

Running smoothly so far, a few quick notes-

-Yor/Korath (and possibly a few other races I havent met yet) still aren't launching their colony ships on "genius" difficulty, the Yor don't launch any at all and the Korath launch a few but still have 4/5 colony ships in each shipyard.

-I made first contact with the Drath and they immediately offered to trade me a technology I already had. I pressed reject and the game continued normally.

-The AI is noticeably better at keeping up in the tech race.

-New espionage system is a HUGE improvement but I haven't spent enough time with it to tell if it's a permanent fix or if it still needs work.

First thing I've noticed about the new passive spy system is that in order to reach the various intel levels, you must allocate more spies to the race.  The number of spy-weeks seem to match what I found prior, but when I let the races sit with 1 spy in it, they never went beyond Low.  I tossed another spy to a race and in 5 weeks I had Medium.  This would match the 9-10 spy-week change from Low to Medium I found in the past.

My post Espionage Intel Levels will be continually updated as I find more and more information about 2.0's espionage or even espionage in general.

Aye, the good ole MoO tech steal of picking a catagory was nice.

Worry not about having no defense from passive spies, tech stealing IS still done via planetary spies, so the Counter Espionage Center is still your fool-proof method to stop the AI from stealing your techs.

After MANY MANY MANY years (I reached my 100th spy...so you can figure out how long that took lol) in my first 2.0 beta game w/ Advanced on the 2 AI's for most of that time, not 1 tech got stolen by those passive spies.

Yes but how many counter-espionage centers are you going to build? theres always going to be that one planet without the counter-espionage center and that were your enemy will be putting his spies and thats where there goign to be able to steal tech from you?

That is where the 2nd line of defense...spies to nullify theirs are.  At least you have an option to stop them, unlike DL's unknown tech stealing and no option or ability to stop it.  Now...if your the Korth, you're up a moving body of water w/o a wooden device since you don't have the CEC in your tech tree.

I'm trying to find out some strategies, at least everytime I used espionage not only I placed my spies on the closest race but their home planet which usually had the most bonuses? Their home planet which I haven't even explored  on the starmap and yet was able to put spies on them and most people put spies on planets which are class 10 and up. Because lets face it, thats where the meat and patatoe is regarding bonuses to shut down. So now, people are going to wait until they reached advanced level with their passive spies and unload them with other spies just to steal those techs? Would that be a strategy? In my opinion, I just don't see any new strategy we can use with this latest system. In fact all it does is to have extra spies to train which will cost even more to invest in espionage.

I generally shut down farms and economy buildings.  A race's ability to respond w/ spies is directly linked to their economy, so hurt their economy and you hurt their spoy response time.

I think this new method will save money.  Trying to get 147 spy-weeks in on a race prior was hard since you'd loose a few dozen spies in the process.  Now you just place 4 spies on a race and be done with it.  Even if you'd go for advanced with every race in the game, including minors, you'd be plopping down 72 spies.  If you'd try to get Advanced with every major race in the game you'd loose that many, if not more, in the process.

There is everything wrong with this post.

Let's begin.

If you don't want your spies nullified immediately, then don't put them where they'll matter.  Secondly, drop 5-10 spies at a time...if you just drop one, he's dead.  As far as placing them on the homeworld, that's up to personal preference-spying is done on a civ-wide level, so the number of tiles you've spyed on a per-planet basis is irrelevant.

In case you hadn't noticed, at this point in time you can't remove your passive spies.  With up to 9 majors and 8 minors, not even counting the Dread Lords or the occasional Vegans, you're looking at 68 spies down the drain to get to advanced on all of them.  But in general, you shouldn't need more than 27 (9x3; Advanced is largely irrelevant).

So: 1) You can't "unload" your passives to become tech stealers.  2) Your comment about how it makes you have to train extra spies is completely without merit.  For intelligence purposes a maximum of 27 spies per game are necessary; as passives cannot be nullified, you don't have to worry about training new ones to replace them when they get caught.

As for tech stealing in the old system vs. tech stealing in the new system-if anything, the new system saves you money, time, and spies, because not only do you now know who is worth attempting to steal techs from, but you didn't waste half a year getting to advanced on them while replacing a spy every other turn.

Did I miss anything?

Tell me this, is having 1 spy without getting nulified theoretically has the same effet in espionage advancement in terms of less time reaching a level as having 10 spies with the old system?

And lets say with this latest system, I want to hurt their diplomacy and moral? is there a way to do that with spies and does it really have an effect? I never noticed any considerable damage regarding those ...

And if spies won't do it, what will?

You can't hurt their diplomacy unless they have Diplomatic Translators and you don't and you drop a spy on it.

That said, there are a few ways to ensure your diplomacy is higher than other races.  Firstly, build Diplomatic Translators as soon as possible.  Secondly, don't play against the Terrans.  Thirdly, don't trade the AIs any yellow techs (with the exception of Alliances, if you need an alliance with them).  They don't tend to research the yellow techs on their own, so their diplomacy will remain fairly low, relative to yours.

Morale is planet-specific, apart from trade goods, so either you're going to have to find their Ultra Spices/etc and drop a spy on each of them, or you're going to have to drop at least a spy PER PLANET that you want to knock the morale down on.  Given a decent setup of a medium galaxy, we're looking at easily 30+ spies here.

So, let me get this straight.  You're complaining that you can't do something with the new system that you couldn't do with the old system, EITHER?  And this is an argument that the old system was BETTER?

Yes and no.  If you'd been reading Loupdinour's comments, in this thread and the thread he made specifically regarding the espionage system, you'd see that with the passive system, the numbers remain the same (in terms of spy-weeks), with the exception that you can only reach the level of espionage on a civilization, via passive spies, equal to the amount of passive spies you have on them.  So if you want advanced, you'll need four passive spies on them.  And it'll take you somewhere in the vicinity of 40 weeks (IIRC).

So short answer is, yes, 4 passives @ 40 weeks = 40 actives @ 4 weeks.  1 passive @ 10 weeks can't get over the limit imposed, which means it needs to be 2 passives.  So, 2 passives @ 5 weeks = 10 actives @ 1 week (and the passives don't get killed).

No, I always said the latest system dosn't even come close to a revamped espionage system as they have been working on it a little over than a year now.. With all your anwsers to me, I think you just proved it. Lets be realistic ...

This is Galactic Civilizations, not Galactic Espionage.

Have you noticed any of the other things they've done in the past year?  GCII is not all they do with their lives.

I fail to see how the new system is not better than the old.