Spies – better and nastier

Dark Avatar comes with an improvement on GalCiv2’s espionage system. The GalCiv2 system was fairly simple and intuitive – you assigned some of your economic output to go towards espionage versus select civilizations, which eventually rewarded you with various information on these civilizations. Dark Avatar’s additions make espionage somewhat more involved, while preserving the system’s intuitiveness and ease of understanding.

Now, you assign money to one espionage pool. That rewards you with Agents – of course, the more money you give to espionage, the more agents you’ll get. An Agent can be placed on any foreign planet, in one of the planet’s improvements (most improvements are eligible). That disables the improvement, and sending agents to foreign planets eventually accumulates overall information on the civ, like it was done with spending only in GalCiv2. A civ can use one of its agents to remove any foreign agent. As you can see, the system is fairly simple, yet rich in possibilities.

Some of the most straightforward uses of spies are shutting down enemy economy by putting Agents on high output improvements. An Agent on a Manufacturing Capital will severely hurt the planet’s production. Of course, you can also make more subtle use of agents - such as disabling influence-producing improvements for a planet you’re trying to culture flip. And no, you can’t disable Orbital Fleet Managers for easier conquest, which is probably just as well.

Counter-espionage buildings are also available in case you want some good defense against Agents without having to spend on getting your own. There’s also a fun Mega Event associated with espionage, which puts agents on most planets in the galaxy, crippling everyone until the agents can be dealt with.

Me being me, though, I have to also mention a downside to the whole espionage system. It’s fairly intensive on micromanagement. Given that a competent AI will try to remove your agents as you place them, it takes a fair amount of micromanagement to keep placing the Agents if you’re getting them often. Likewise, it can be a bit annoying to find the best place to put your Agents. For example, you know that you want to shut down a civ’s most productive planet.

In the Planet list screen, you can go to Foreign planets and sort them by, say, Military production. Still, this is far from perfect. The list will show you all foreign planets, not just those of the civ you want. Moreover, there’s no way to plant an agent from that screen – after you’ve found the planet in the list, you need to double-click it to center the view on it, then click the Place Agent mode button, then click the planet to finally get to the Agent placement screen. It’s not horrible, but it doesn’t feel very user-friendly, either.