Is spying a bit overpowered?

[Krytor]

In a perfect world the AI would have the same councils and decisions as us. But after reading the explanations between human/ai differences, it's understandable that this isn't the case. I don't find spying OP simply because you cannot effectively attack at all without it. Ambushes/hidden units make sure of that. And spies dissipate over time, you can't just load up the map with spies and expect to have full vision the rest of the game. It's a constant PP cost for areas that you need to have max recon on. So the 'game' here is deciding how much PP to spend and on what areas. And when.

Major Regimes seem to catch your spies rather quickly. And they are much harder to place spies into. Average PP/spy/spy lifetime is much less efficient than minor regime zones.

[aguvenli]

ORIGINAL: Krytor
Major Regimes seem to catch your spies rather quickly. And they are much harder to place spies into. Average PP/spy/spy lifetime is much less efficient than minor regime zones.

Not in my (limited) experience. Playing on Hard, spies I sent to other majors were lost only occasionally, to the point where I had the entire map (units, cities, assets, et al) constantly revealed. The fact that all units were visible through the FoW down to their combat, stats, morale, readiness, etc made war far less tense.

Maybe it was my high fist, or some other modifier that I'm not aware of that made it easy to produce, send and maintain spies. I don't know.

[Krytor]

Oh? Interesting. I generally put anywhere from 6-12 spies per important area and less for areas I don't care about. I've seen Majors kill 3+ spies/turn. Made it hard to fight them.

EDIT: I play on hard currently, beta patch

[Soar_Slitherine]

I have had games where I had a highly skilled (90+ Covert Ops) secret service director, and in that case I only rarely lost spies and could stack however many I wanted. On the other hand, without somebody with any significant Covert Ops skill in the post, spies in majors tend to get wiped out immediately.

(The secretary is probably responsible for making spies stick in the absence of the secret service director, even if the supreme command director is the one sending them - I noticed my secretary has lots of covert ops skill usage rate in my ongoing game where I don't have a secret service council yet, and it certainly doesn't seem to be the responsibility of my supreme command director because that guy has amazing covert ops skill, but all spies I put in majors are lost immediately. In the games where I had great secret service directors, leaving the post vacant for 1 turn in order to change director resulted in entire spy networks with 25+ spies being instantly wiped out.)

[aguvenli]

Ah, now it makes sense. My secret service director did have a high covert ops skill.

Still, my main issue is not that spies are killed too easily. It is the fact that spying reveals too much when it is high. I wouldn't mind seeing aggregated repots on economy, technology, manpower. ordnance and materiel of other regimes. But seeing the actual locations and composition of their units is too much. Fog of war is tactical in nature.

[AgentFransis]

Yeah it's a bit much right now. You should have to invest a lot more PP to get the kind of perfect info we get with just one or two send spy ring cards. Also zone size doesn't seem to matter so it gets extra silly on the barren planets where the AI can have a single huge zone that covers a third of the planet and somehow your five spies or whatever can light up the whole zone.