Isn't spying a bit OP?

[Majickthyse]

Hi All,
I have 6 spies who are constantly employed stealing research from the other empires. They even seem to be able to steal technology that my race would not be able to research itself.

It does give me a warm feeling every time I manage to steal something from my foes, but at the same time it feels a bit overpowered...

[ZumZoom]

Not really, it's just a nice thing for early game. You can't steal more than tier 1-2 techs from pirates, and stealing anything higher than that from other empires is very hard, even with specialized espionage and all the bonuses you can get. Compared to how little it takes to research something by midgame, it becomes pretty tedious to spend any effort micromanaging spies (and they take 1 year to steal a tech), so by that point I just set them to auto.

[Nightskies]

Know that the AI is doing the same thing in the early stages of the game.

[AK_icebear]

I think it should be much harder to steal race unique techs, but otherwise an fine with the feature - so long as it's difficulty is very hard past tech level 2 or 3.

[Sabaithal]

It is kind of overpowered. I really wish there were an initial game setting to disable, or at least limit tech stealing (no higher than tech 2 for example).

[Dervix]

The Clan of Superiority and the Airless Wanderers are 'Race-specific events' related. If you disable those, pirates should only have tech 2 (tech 3 if strong or very strong pirates).

[Scotias]

I stopped using spies to steal tech as it put me way too far ahead. This with the slowest tech speed and no tech trading seems to be the best for a fair game ( maybe allow tech trading so the AI can do so but not use it )

[Richard Brown]

which race is best for spying

[ashbery76]

Unique techs should be unstealable imo.

[Sabaithal]

Originally posted by ashbery76:

Unique techs should be unstealable imo.

Or at least be much, much more difficult to steal.

[von Schweinehund]

It's OP imho, but otherwise some races seem to have too weak research capabilities compared to others to even remotely keep up with them (all things being equal).

+1 to make it more difficult to steal unique techs, if only to keep diversification of the races ships at a high level.

[ashbery76]

The game is lacking unique tech so making the few the game has easy to get with spying seems ridiculous.I would stop it completely.

It also hurts the aspect of making factions different.

[HugsAndSnuggles]

The slower the research speed is, the more OP it gets. Stealing (and everything research-related, really) just doesn't scale with research speed setting at the game start, and pirates make situation noticeably "worse". If stealing a tech would require you to, at least, know the location of some base or a planet of that faction (one that ambassador is eligible for) - that would not be as "bad", but we have what we have.

Still, there are other "offenders": salvaging is a fairly easy way to get tech too, provided you aren't hated by RNG. I guess, the game was designed more with a "tech rush" in mind: to have player research everything before the "gameplay" actually starts, rather than giving enough time to enjoy the lower-level "toys".

[AK_icebear]

Agreed that stealing research (success chance, or % gained) should scale downward as tech research speed is increased in game settings.

[Tanaka]

Agreed spying still needs to be tweaked.

[APhoenixSoaring]

No not at all.

Apart from only being able to steal early game techs usefully and reliably, spies are not able to perform the majority of other mission types with a reliable success rate and are not worth the risk of failure.