Spying is one of the most important areas of the game to master. It is probably one of the hardest areas to master as well.
If you are able to infiltrate a spy into the enemy's empire, you instantly get a completely up to date listing of everything they have researched so far in the game.
Again, as in G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle. If you know what they have, that is the first step in preparing to meet it in space combat.
This advantage may not sound like much, but it is – especially when you don't have to pay much to get it.
Speaking of not paying much to get it, the cost is fixed for the entire game. Early in the game it will take a lot more of your production (in percentage terms) to train and insert one spy than it will at the end of the game.
Spy spending is done on the basis of a percentage of galactic resources. Each click on the slider bar is 4% of the bar and the infiltration bar for each race goes from 0% to 10% of galactic resources. It is not possible in the game to try to spend more than 10% of the combined resources of all your planets to try and insert spies into a single enemy empire.
It is, however, possible that you spend the whole 10% for each enemy race you have met. You are potentially able to spend more than 50% of your entire resource base to try to insert spies if you want to, but it is highly suggested that you do not do this.
Note: There is a defensive spying bar that ranges from 0% to 20% of total planetary resources. Spending in this bar adds double the percent spent to your defensive spying rolls. If you spend 10% of your resources here you gain a + 20 to your defensive spying rolls that turn.
Each of these bars has the potential to seriously seriously drag down your economy, so think very hard about how much you spend on them.
Some pros find that it is the best idea to pretty much always put one and only one click into the spy bars of each race that you have relations with at all times. Usually, this will allow you to get spies inserted often enough to stay relatively current on all of the races and even if you know 5 races the total spying expenses would only be 2% of your total resource base.
To explain why this is, it would be a good idea to learn a little bit more about how the spying system works.
Essentially, it works like this:
Instead of spies, it helps to think of your agents more as hackers, because that is what they really are. They are agents your government sponsors that try to steal technology "over the wire". Everything they do is done by computers.
The things they can do are:
- Hide - They will crack someone's name/password in the enemy empire and just use that information to look around inside their systems and get a general idea of what is going on. They won't attempt to do anything that might get them caught. As long as they don't they are unlikely to actually get caught.
- Sabotage - They will try to gain access to the remote mainframes of enemy factories and defensive locations and they will try to hit the "self destruct" button remotely across the galactic internet. Sometimes they will succeed and the results will be the complete destruction of some of the enemy's facilities. By doing this, they are very much more likely to be caught and to have their access removed, ending the spy's access to the enemy's network.
- Espionage - They will try to hack into the enemy's research network and download the schematics for the enemy's technological advancements. The enemy has different research networks for each research type, and they don't have much time once they get in so you have to make a split second call about which research network to infiltrate and the hacker will just try to take anything they can get their hands on as part of that network. They will always get something you don't have, but there is no telling what that will be until the schematic is analyzed on the inside. Essentially, you show them blueprints of what technologies not to get, and they just get the first thing they see that is completely unlike that stuff you showed them. If even they do this, it is highly likely that they will get caught and have their access removed.
If you tell your hackers to try to do #2 or #3 once they get in, they will attempt to cover their tracks as best they can on the way out, by deleting or altering logs, but sometimes they will be traced before they can do so, if they are it is quite easy to tell, for the enemy empire, where the spy originated.
On the other hand, spies can have "critical successes" as well. Sometimes the spy will not only be able to completely cover their tracks, but instead of deleting the logs the hacker will alter them so that it looks like another race did the act and then essentially let themselves get caught, ensuring that the "tracks" are found and that the relationship between the two foreign empires involved are directly harmed.
As with everything else in this game, the results are governed by random rolls and associated modifiers. More specifically, the spying roll formula is:
- Random Roll 1 to 100 minus your Computers research technology level plus their Computers research technology level.
In the above equation, you want the number to be as low as possible, preferably below zero. To consistently succeed you want to have as large of a lead in Computers compared to the enemy as possible. If you are able to get technology level 40 in computers while your enemy is only at technology level 20, you get + 20 to all your spying rolls. The same thing applies if you can get to tech level 60 when they are only at tech level 40. The relative difference is the only thing that matters.
It goes backwards as well, if they have higher than you, it is going to be very hard for you to have any measurable success at all in terms of spying. If getting a number below zero is what you hope for, you can't hope for too much if your lowest roll possible is a 1 and then there is an addition to the roll rather than a subtraction.
The chart that determines the results of this roll is the following
| Roll | Discover Status | Success | Access Removed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 or less | No | Yes and Possible Frame | No |
| 1 to 30 | No | Yes | No |
| 31 to 50 | Yes | Yes | No |
| 51 to 70 | No | No | No |
| 71 to 99 | Yes | No | Yes |
| 100+ | Yes | No | All Spies Fail |
When reading the chart, you will notice that a successful mission can only happen if the result on the roll is 50 or less (the only two entries with a "Yes" in the Success column are the two highest on the chart).
The rolls of 71 or higher always result in the access being removed and rolls of 70 or below never do.
Note: The access column under "access removed" for 100+ is "All Spies Fail". This doesn't mean all of their accesses get removed, just that the one caught is removed and no spies get any success that year (if you have multiple infiltrated at the same time).
If any spies score a "yes" under success during the year (that game turn) they get to make a second roll on the following chart:
- Roll
- 0 to 84: Got something, but it wasn't useful or the self destruct sequence was successfully aborted. Tracks covered successfully.
- 85 to 99: Succeeded. Either tech was stolen successfully or the self destruct of the facilities completed, rendering them useless. Tracks covered successfully.
- 100+: Successful mission and successful framing effort. Enemy relations worsened between chosen empires.
This roll is governed by a roll of 1 to 100 plus your computer tech level. Basically, this means that any success at all is much more likely to result in a successful mission more and more often as the game goes along. If you make it to level 99 computer technology, every single time you get south of 0 on the first roll you will get a successful frame on the second roll. If you get any roll south of 50 on the first roll and you have at least level 84 in computers, you can't possibly fail to have a successful mission on the second roll.
These numbers aren't easy to get to, by any stretch, but I want to clearly point out the difference between these two separate rolls. The first roll is always opposed. If the enemy has higher tech than you then you are quite likely to fail and you fail more every time they widen the gap, and vice versa. The second chart, however, always gets better as the game goes on. There is nothing opposed about it, you just experience greater and greater success percentages as the game goes along.
Spying at the end of the game, with the way these charts are designed, is always more successful than spying early on.
This coincides perfectly well with the percentage of resources required to insert a spy in the first place.
Specifically, the cost to insert an agent is the same all the time, and it gets easier and easier to pay as the game goes along. As the relative cost to spy goes down, the relative chance of success goes up.
This brings you back around to why it is useful to always have 1 tick in the spy bar for each race all the time and never to change it.
At the beginning of the game, that one tick won't buy you a whole lot, but even if you succeed you probably won't get anything of note anyway, so its not worth spending a whole lot to insert more spies at this stage of the game anyway. If you get one spy in and hide it, the chances are likely that they will stay undetected for long periods of time, and this will give you up to date news on all of the enemy's technological advancements, which is the only thing you can really hope to gain with the spy at this stage of the game anyway.
At the end of the game, that same 0.4% of galactic spending will often buy you a chance of multiple inserts per turn and more than likely it will buy you lots of successes per turn if you do succeed and you are significantly ahead of the enemy in Computers research.
At no point in the game is it really worth spending huge amounts on spying, because if it will be successful at all it is likely to be successful at a very low cost to you anyway.
Not only that, but you slow down your own Computers research by spending huge portions of galactic resources on spying. It is better to spend the same 10% of galactic resources on learning the highest level Computers technology that you have available and then you are better off both technologically AND in terms of spying, even though you only have a spending of 0.4% on the spy bar.
Essentially speaking, all spending above 0.4% of resources per race is pretty much a waste at all stages of the game and does nothing but harm you pretty much ever. It makes you worse off technologically and in producing warships and missile defenses and, generally speaking, the gain of adding more is negligible regardless what stage you are at in the game.
Note: Pro Tip Material - If you are the type and patient, you can mostly guarantee yourself spying success by saving the game and then passing the turn with spies in the enemy empire and then reloading the game if your spies don't succeed. This is all kinds of cheating and doesn't prove in any way that you are a good player, but the option is available if you really want to have a spying success right at that moment.
Once you understand how the whole system works, it helps to get a little better understanding of how it plays into galactic politics.
One thing you generally want to be aware of is that a failure is always really really bad. Maybe not end of the game threatening bad, but often times it is really end of the game threatening bad. If you are hanging on by a thread anyway, spying can be the biggest curse in the world or the biggest blessing in the world.
By curse, it means that it can quickly turn good situations into hopeless ones and bad situations into worse ones. It is really easy to get your allies to turn on you by spying on them. The only really safe thing to do is to spy on those races you are already at war with because it probably can't make them hate you any more than they already do.
The last thing you want is to be in a galactic 3 on 3 and then to find yourself kicked off of your team and flying solo against a 3 way alliance and another 2 way alliance.
Such is what can really happen if you spy on your friends.
AIs will very often take this very personally and you should really consider how important a relationship with a given AI civilization is with you. Losing a trade treaty and not being in the "cool kids club" anymore in terms of having your planetary production juiced at the same level as all of the AI races are, is the least of your concerns.
By Blessing, it mean that spying can save the unsavable game if you are really really really lucky. If there is one technology that you really really need in order to stay in the game and the computer has it, there might be no downside to trying to do what you can to get it, especially if it is not in your tech tree and they owner of it won't give you a chance to trade *anything* for it.
Note: If you need a tech just to stay in the game, no tech is too high of price to pay in exchange for it, it doesn't matter how bad of a deal it is for you, that is made up by how important it is to you. If you are being hit with death weapons bio toxin antidote can be like this and if someone just declared war on you and you don't have Class V Planetary Shields it might be worth it to trade anything to get that as well. Putting all your hopes into spying is generally the absolutely last resort option.
These concerns are why it is difficult to play the Darloks. You don't want to be in a war because you have no production or technological advantages of note, so usually you won't have a group that is just made to spy on as with your enemy du jour. You are probably also behind every AI civilization that really matters and you don't want to be on their bad sides on a fail.
Some more pro tips:
Don't hope for too much in terms of framing success. The framing angle is often more fun than anything else. When you frame a computer it often won't have the effect on their relationships that you are hoping for. Their alliances often wont break up because of it. Often it will, but most of the time it probably won't.
The computers tend to have very high relations with their allies because of how the diplomacy structure works. If two empires are both at war with the same empire, they are likely to pretty instantly reach the highest friendliness level possible on the chart due to the "enemy of my enemy" clause. Most of the time, a spying fail will result in a huge worsening of relations, but if that doesn't drop you into into the red, say, because you are at the highest levels of ally, then as long as you keep pounding the enemy you will probably jump right back to the highest levels of friendliness again.
The drop in relations is worse every time it happens, but getting these frames often enough to fracture an alliance is often really hard to do when it really matters.
Even if the alliance splits, they will probably still both be tag teaming you, because they probably still hate you anyway. The best you could hope is that they divert enough resources to the other enemy that the pressure on you is lessened enough that you can get by.
One of the best parts of framing is that you are guaranteed a "critical success" in terms of the original mission. There is no chance that your spy will be caught if a frame is successful and their access will always remain intact after a frame. Even without a harming of relations this is still very good news.
Another thing, they might cancel trade treaties with each other if you frame them often enough, and getting foreign civilizations to quit trading with each other while still trading with you is very very good. Even if the alliance remains intact, you could benefit this way.