What is the point in having offensive spy ops if they are completly ineffectual?

i tried to bomb banks a laf player today, who had 1.3 b cash on hand, and i destroyed a grand total of 1.6m cash....


it's ridiculous.

It's been that way for many years.

I'll take this the next step for DL and say the suggestion is that the effectiveness of spy ops should be increased. ;)

DLs next step is genius!

making spies somewhat effective is a novel idea. i support this.

either make them more effective, or remove them.

Plain... and... simple...

new players are going to go in, start producing spies, thinking they can use them for offensive purposes, only to discover they are not useful for this purpose...

Slagpit, are you saying that you think mehul's ruleset from earth2025 is perfect and shouldn't be changed........ i thought this was the bugs and SUGGESTIONS board.

My suggestion is that offensive spy ops should be made more powerful so that they are more than just game window dressing, or they should be completly removed from the game, as they serve no purpose other than to mislead new players.

p.s. i think the attitude of "it's been that way for many years" too any thread on the suggestions board is ridiculous, and stupid.

its kind of nice having some of them be limited by the amount of stuff you have

stir rebellions
demoralise
cause dissention
bioterrorism
sabotage missiles

abd i think bomb airbases works as well as dissention does, isnt as useful in killing but can be good in wars or on suiciders or just generally to hurt someone

are all very powerful, some of the others are a bit useless though

perhaps if you want to leave them not being so powerful split up the ops into risk/reward categories

so that the ones which do more damage have a higher spy loss percentage, and perhaps a lower success rate

4 intel
6 powerful
6 im not sure on

3 of the last 6 are resources that can be hidden on market, food oil and cash can be spent, they can be ones that work better when you have a lot of the resource on hand yourself

espionage is tech stealing if i remember correctly, not sure how powerful it is but i remember it being ok, since theres no way to protect more than 25% of your tech

intelligence centres kills spies? if so perhaps it could be structured as an op for people with not so many spies to equalise the battlefield, killing a percentage of the targets spies but hurting those who kept high spals more so than lower spals like 10 spal

the buildings one could possibly get a buff, but id like to see it have higher chance of failure or losses or both and have the small ops of 2 or 3 buildings destroyed raised a bit but perhaps the large ones lowered a bit, perhaps compromise by making it do not much but kill more csites or do more but less csites

I'd actually like clans to see all spy-ops as unretalliable (specifically those offensive ones). There won't be any need to monitor them for foreign affairs work (one less job). The amount of ops available (50), the cost in terms of growth lost (both spying turns and spending resources to build and maintain), and the new level of threat (offensive spy-ops to help succeed a retal, or prevent weakening the clans ability to retal or whatever else you can think of...) would bring a new tactical play to the alliance server.

There would be reasons to use almost all these ops. Making them more powerful and based on the skill of your own country as enshula and dragonlance suggest would enhance this. I like all those spy-ops available. Just wish there was more reason to use them.

Your clan could team up to slow down a clan from making retals by bombing airbases, banks and demoralising but there's a toss up at how many spies it'll cost or start a counter-spy-attack.

Sabotaging peoples stockpile to try and knock them out of the race could be a lethal part of the game. Alliances would develop nice strong spy/anti-spy strats and teams. The recall pretty much shuts this down, and would become a tactic to evade this.

Spy wars could be a lot of fun when this gets out of hand, but it'll stabilise as we figure out how to use them to help us better gain. Netgainers can simply keep gaining, and spy players won't have to worry about death (yet).

spies here are much weaker than they were on earth2025

this is a recurring complaint

You didn't offer a suggestion dragonlance. You just complained. Your country did a small amount of damage because your country was small. Nearly all of the spy ops are limited by some characteristic of your own country.

Of course the rules aren't perfect, but changing them is not simple. If we changed the rules, most players would continue to ignore the op, warrers would accuse us of trying to make the game better for netgainers, and we'd have less time to put into other parts of the game that need more work.

So if you have a suggestion for a formula, fine, post it. We'll file it away for later use.

thanks for the opportunity to offer suggestions for improving the spy formula

1 the variable multiplier which is used to determine the outcome of an op is skewed too high to failure, my proposal there is just reduce that variable dramatically i would say by a factor of five

you are getting a ton of feedback that spies are too weak and no one is arguing that spies are too strong so make the adjustment until at least a few people think spies are too strong

the other big problem as i see it is spy dr kicks in way too early
start it at twelve ops and slowly increase it to twenty four ops

so you think most ops should succeed, even with a poor relative number of spies?

spy DR does not start at 12 or 20 ops, it's a X^(number of ops) so it 'starts' right away but doesn't really affect anything till about 10-20 ops out

I assumed that was the nature of the formula, and I think that is the right way to do it, however I think that by the time it reaches 20-30 it has grown too large. I am guessing you have chosen a number ~1.05^spy_ops (assuming you are increasing effective spal as the basis of your formula, and not just adding a random fail chance) I feel like that number is too large. In a previous thread I suggested a spy formula and I stand by my number of 1.104^spy_ops

http://forums.earthempires.com/...p;z=suggestion-spies-suck

i do not think spy ops should succeed when the target is stronger
i would not skew the variable in favor of the spying country but i would not keep the current random number generation formula which strongly favors the target

the distribution doesn't strongly favour the target =/ it's equal presuming everything else is equal

there's just a number of factors that affect your strength -- land, # of spies, DR

theres obviously something wrong with the spy formula or whatever. failing an op on a 0 spy country with one that has a 50 spal is retarded, to say the least.

also, im not sure if theres a reason, but why when on a KR can i hit almost every SR on a target at the beggining of the run, but at the end when they are nearly dead, i miss just about every one. regardless of the spal on each country.

maybe because other people have spied them?

if u honestly think that is the case u need to run some practice spy ops

the first day of express with an spal of 20 i lost five times in a row to a guy with no spies

when equal spies meet on this server the spier rarely wins
by the sixth or seventh turn the spier starts losing to countries with ridiculously low spals and 0 spies carry the day on a regular basis

qzjul pls run some tests

all of us who are complaining are not making this stuff up nor are we whiners

You should remove the DR, or at least put a cap on it.

It's just messed up when I, with over 1 mil spies, can't perform ops on a 0 spy country just because I've already done a bunch on them.

I mean GS, BR, and AB are still effective during a kill run, so why should I start failing 29/30 stir rebellion ops, or bomb buildings?

And yeah, like I said in the other thread, they need to be more powerful. I hate doing an AB and destroying hundreds of buildings, then only destroying 17 buildings on a spy op.

the (significantly) higher spy count will almost certainly win the first 1-5 ops

beyond that not necessarily

i'll run some tests at some point sure... or maybe i'll get martian and slag to do them

thanks i think u will be surprised by the results

theres no point to just decreasing spy cost since all that will achieve is average spals move up

in fact it would hurt spy countries since theyd be losing higher proportions of their income in failed ops and having more of their networth as spies making them vulnerable to others

if you really wanted to help dedicated spy countries spy cost should be increased

anyway if you do it too much it would become useful for netgaining as well

i don't know what use a dedicated spy country is other than for spying alliances out before/during war....

your difficulty in imagining the uses of a dedicated spy country stem from always thinking about clan first and individual games as an afterthought and because of the spy dr which limits offensive spy ops after only a few ops

i have many times posted how a spy country can quickly morph into a powerful military force so i wont repeat myself

in a clan war a spy country in a better dr environment could stir rebellions, bomb airbases, commit espionage or greatly reduce troop strength in advance of a gs kill run

So you use your spy country for profit? through stealing food and oil?

Or you just wear down somebody's military so you can attack them?

If your country is built well enough, what is the problem with profiting from harmful/offensive spyops. I've seen you say, on a number of occasions that a country shouldn't be able to profit from country that has put loads of "effort" into making and running a stable, prosperous country. I think its okay to base spy breaking and returns based on the attacker's country setup AS LONG AS you also base it strength of the defender's spy force in proportion to the attacker's spies, even if you really want to scrap the normal SPAL system of rating spy effectiveness and base it on total number of spies.

Also, playing big spy countries used to be a regular occurrence in bigger clans until things like cause dissention were changed to be based far more on attacker's country setup rather than spy force to somehow stop suiciders(or in other words, the little guys who get farmed all set) from getting their own back when unable to retal someone 10x their size.

Said it was a good idea then except that it was a concept taken way too far.

Know this is a bit off subject, but its in the subject of attack returns. Things like missiles are also weighted too much on attacker's country than defender's . If you have teh tech to make a missile and it breaks through the sdi of a defender, no matter how much bigger they are than you, that should be the only weight. None of this idiotic weighting of attacker's military force on cruises or attacker's population on chem's.

The attacker, if much smaller, is already limited in the amount of missiles they can hold at once. And SDI is very powerful. Why limit a missile any more?


If you really want to limit missiles based on attacker you should make different levels of each missile where you can only make higher level missiles if you're over a certain networth or something. Then you would have no reason to complain about your missile doing less damage than one from a larger country.

why do spy op DR's just result in failed ops instead of reduced gains from chosen op like every other form of attacking does?

i mean really all that does is cater to people who choose to run little to no spies. im not sure if your on the bus but i know slag condones multi tapping under the basis that you deserve to be multi tapped if you dont have more then sufficient defense to defend your acres so why should the same not be said about spy ops?

if someone chooses to run 0 spies (like someone who chooses to run 0 defense) then they should fall victim to every single spy op made on them from an attacker who has spies, at least with a min of 1 spal. an ss/gs/br/ab does not fail because the country is in DR when they have 0 military defending that attack, so why do spies get special privilege.

i assure you i have failed many, many spy ops on a country with 0 spies when ive had 4-50+ spals. and not just once or the first one, sometimes 2 or 3 in a row.

Personally ive always been against SPAL and wanted to use total spies instead but thats another issue

Ive also bounced ops on people with 0 spies as several other people here in the thread posts which is a bit ridicilous altho i dont agree with most of the things posted here I do believe that the spy dr could be raised a little bit ie if its 5 today it could be raised to 7 or even 10 also in earth2025 networth seemed to play a role when doing spy ops i dont know if thats still the case tho

we all have to remember here that the basic spy formula from earth2025 was very hard to figure out and afaik no one ever did since it consisted of so many things like SPAL, total spies, networth and god knows what else and i dont think that spies work that much different today compared to what it did in e2025.

Ivan
Survival of the Fittest