Yet Anotther Spy Suggestion

[Jon Snow]

We've seen a large fallout on the idea of soy ranges being taken out and the hard cap of 50 being put in place.

 

This current system seems to favor mass member alliances and the less active than those who log in daily.

 

But what if we treat spies as they truly are? A military weapon.

 

We should limit spies back to an improvement limit where nations are only able to weild what they can build. This also allows larger nations to thoroughly have the protect themselves and alliances to strategize.

 

This would also help bring another factor into the age old question of military vs economy.

 

Let us bring in an "Intelligence Agency" military improvement for cities. Spies would be tied to your war range and wpuld face the similar upkeep in peace time vs upkeep in wartime.

 

A rough example of this would be a cap of 3 intelligence agencies per city that can recruit up to 5 spies each. For a 10 city nation this would mean up to 150 total spies for the nation. We can also set it to where you can recruit 1 spy per improvement per day to avoid build up imbalances.

 

Thoughts and improvements on this please.

[Caecus]

Snow,

 

I like this idea, makes my life less complicated. There are a couple of things that you will need to address though. 

 

1. Spy Recruitment vs. Damage. In the famous words of Sheepy, "you cannot build an army overnight." In spying, the traditional main objective of covert operations is to gather intelligence, destroy ships, and destroy missiles/nukes. With current percentages, It becomes unprofitable to spy missiles if your enemy has more than 4 spies, unprofitable to spy ships if your enemy has more than 2 spies, and unprofitable to spy nuclear weapons if your enemy has more than 9 spies.** If we were to allow each improvement to purchase 1 spy per day over 3 improvement in just one city, you would have enough to make it unprofitable for your enemy to destroy ships. Thus, it can be said that you are getting an army overnight, since offensively, it no longer becomes profitable to attack certain targets. You would have to play with the numbers on the operational costs and percentage success rates. 

 

2. Spy Range. While in my personal opinion I don't mind if there is a spy range or not, there are some who would like to lose the spy range. And this contributes to a very interesting aspect of spies, a unique military unit not bound by war declarations, and contributes to the overall spirit of spies. To treat spies as a traditional, conventional military unit is very abnormal, since spies do not directly cause infrastructure damage like any other unit. Tying spies to war range would severely limit the usefulness of spies, and conventionalize what is a peculiar aspect of the game to a cookie-cutter style of conventional warfare. The best thing you can do is to either increase the ranges of spying to the current ranges, or entirely eliminate the spy range without having higher tier nations be able to destroy everyone. 

 

**This is entirely excluding the fact that you would need substantially larger numbers to conduct the operation. To give a number off the top of my head, if your enemy has 4 spies left, it will take you 53 of your own spies to achieve a 99% success rate of destroying the enemy missile.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Caecus

[MRBOOTY]

The only issue with this was that spies were meant to be an every-day thing that was gradual and not tied to the military. This would work, but it'd essentially be just adding another aspect to war.

[Conroy]

I would prefer the old spy system with no spy range, but would be satisfied if the system was reverted back to when the spy ranges were first implemented and we remove all spy stats.