Best New Civ for Spies?

[Lucid]

I'm excited they overhauled the espionage system as it was fairly bogus in the past.

Which Civ would you recommend if I wanted to play around with the new system? I don't immediately see any Civs other than Catherine that have bonuses to spies.

Am I stuck with France if I want to have more powerful spies?

[Prometheus]

Not new Civ, but France with De Medici. Lots of bonus to espionage there.

[Lucid]

Thanks, ya I saw her abilities and edited my post.

Guess it's France for me! Could be worse I guess. :)

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Note that Victor's promotion that gives units trained in his city a free promotion also applies to spies. With the right planning (and lucky promotions, of course) any civ can excel at espionage.

[Exemplar]

I don't see what was really "overhauled" about it, except a couple promotions. What am I missing.

[epicsimian]

Weirdly Kupe can be very strong with spies. He gets crazy amounts of culture from his Marae unique building. I was playing on emperor and I randomly checked the victory conditions progress at one point and I had 27 civics to the next closest competitors 12. At the same time in the culture tab I was 2nd to last because of how little tourism I had.

On top of that I had been bee lining and had completely skipped all the religious civics which I only mention in that I probably could've had closer to 30 if I had been balancing and picking up cheaper civics.

Granted if you're that far ahead in civics you probably don't need spies but he gets them early and he will get good civics to boost them really early.

I actually regretted taking the pantheon ability to give culture to pastures with him, I thought it would help expand borders on newly settled cities, but Kupe doesn't really need help with that. Granted his new cities won't have a theater district right away but once he gets it they will border expand so fast it's almost laughable, not to mention if they're on the coast. Learn from my rookie mistake and don't choose any pantheon that gives bonus culture for Kupe.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about once you build the theater district's marae building (replaces the amphitheater) all of that cities unimproved tiles give +2 culture and mine mostly gave +2 faith but I think faith is based on the tile's appeal. This and the fact that unimproved woods and jungle give +1 production for Kupe means you'll be working a lot of unimproved tiles and have stupid amounts of culture generation. Plus add this to the new natural disaster mechanic where if you settle near flood plains or volcanoes you could be working unimproved tiles there as well.

Finally, if all that wasn't enough, Kupe has a slight advantage in finding city states first due to being able to move over oceans and 4 movement while embarked so you may get some bonus culture early on from that as well (a bit random though). In the end city state culture just helps you get theater squares earlier since once you have those it will just be a drop in the bucket.

Edit: Another rookie mistake I made was improving bananas with Kupe, don't do it! At best you're trading 1 production for 2 gold, but then you also lose out on the benefits of his marae building from them.

[GreyWolf]

New spy mechanics: enemy spies spawn 4 - 6 battle tanks(!) each couple turns in your territory as a "partisan" action. As a counter action - you can't do sh*t except ask every civilization to stop spying on you.

[Exemplar]

Originally posted by Kamakaziwarlord:

New spy mechanics: enemy spies spawn 4 - 6 battle tanks(!) each couple turns in your territory as a "partisan" action. As a counter action - you can't do sh*t except ask every civilization to stop spying on you.

That's not new. That is "recruit partisans" from vanilla, in a neighborhood district, spawns 2-4, and can be done with multiple spies.

[GreyWolf]

Originally posted by Exemplar:

Originally posted by Kamakaziwarlord:

New spy mechanics: enemy spies spawn 4 - 6 battle tanks(!) each couple turns in your territory as a "partisan" action. As a counter action - you can't do sh*t except ask every civilization to stop spying on you.

That's not new. That is "recruit partisans" from vanilla, in a neighborhood district, spawns 2-4, and can be done with multiple spies.

This should be really depended on the happiness and loyalty of the population and cost some money (arming partisans with weapons costs a lot in real life).

[Exemplar]

Originally posted by Kamakaziwarlord:

Originally posted by Exemplar:

That's not new. That is "recruit partisans" from vanilla, in a neighborhood district, spawns 2-4, and can be done with multiple spies.

This should be really depended on the happiness and loyalty of the population and cost some money (arming partisans with weapons costs a lot in real life).

It can be more of a problem, certainly, than other spy functions if you have an unprotected area. I think that's kind of the point to it. Still, new spy promotions like polygraph and surveillance, and also police state and cryptography policy cards reduce success rates quite a bit.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

I've never seen more than 2 partisans spawn at once. Is this based on map size or game speed? (I'm playing standard size, standard speed.) Or is it based on difficulty level? (I usually play on king.) Or is there something else that causes more than 2 partisans to spawn?