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Hydro
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Winfield, IL, USA
Jun 1999
time: 05:26
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I’ve seen a lot of comments on spies in MOO3, most of them negative. To date I’ve only really played the Trilarians who are cursed with a Slow spy rating. Luckily they have a great Citizenship rating so their society is relatively tolerant of a higher Oppresometer setting w/o massive unrest.
I learned some lessons fast. First, leaders last less than 5 to 10 turns if you are in the Senate. This is distressing since it means they are much less valuable as a strategic asset. In the rare occasions that I have several leaders I will keep truly awful leaders so they will get killed instead of my good ones. So far that brilliant strategy hasn’t worked, but you never know. In response I build political spies from the start, even when I don’t think I can afford it, to protect leaders I might get. It also makes me really want to be isolated on the galactic fringe where I don’t have any contact, and will therefore not be a target. The New Orions are the worst – they spy constantly.
After my defensive screen of spies are done it is my experience that, besides leaders dying like flies, the nasty damage by spies is manageable. Sure it is annoying to have building X blown up, but they get rebuilt and are therefore eminently replaceable. Moreover, if you have spent the resources to have two of each spy type as a defensive screen and a middle to high Opressometer I haven’t seen too many successes.
The only exception to this statement is the extreme irritation and seemingly high success rate of social spies causing unrest. To this end, I will get my screen of a few political spies up, then get at least 3 social spies. Then I fill in the rest with two each and go into replacement mode when they retire or die off.
To date I’ve only had one instance where I used spies offensively. In this game I did not have point defense – a serious problem. My allies and trade/research partners did, but refused to trade with me (regardless of what or how I asked). So, over 40 turns I build 10 scientific spies and sent them off. It was glorious! Six or so died outright, but the rest caused havoc (even with my Slow rating – my good spy biology improvements must have helped). The scientific disruption and destruction of my racial Saruian enemy was satisfying, but more satisfying was the acquisition of Point Defense by the fifth year. All my spies died in short order, but it was worth every AU invested.
One interesting note – while I was causing havoc almost all spy activity against me stopped. This might suggest that mixing it up with your enemies is a good distraction, particularly if they’ve stripped their spy defense to harass you.
My conclusion is that the only fix that is needed to spies is to reduce the chance or severity of spies killing off leaders. Other posters have suggested having the leaders ‘recover’ for a while (eg – being hurt but not dead) and to sometimes dies. This seems like a good fix to me. As it stands leaders are almost useless unless I am in the boonies, so a fix here would be appreciated.
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06-03-2003 22:01
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