alain_bkr Reply To alain_bkr
I find Spies too powerful compared to their very low cost, and their persistence after acting (and safe teleport to nearest city !). It is possible to send many spies and reduce a city to size=1 in one turn, and most of the spies will survive. Something like : * cost=150 (diplomat 30 + marine 60 + paratrooper 60 ) * poison chance is divided by 2 after trying poison (/4 for 2 attemps, /8 for 3 poisoning in the same turn ...), and the malus slowly deacrease (sth like base_chance *= 0.5 for each poison, and base_chance += 0.1 each turn, so in 10 turn we are back to normal) * spy stay where they are and do not magically teleport to our nearest city, or at least teleport_home is very unlikely (the bad guys know james bond has done something and try to kill him)
I never knew exactly all the rules and chances related to spies and I never tried to rebalance them when I was working on civ2civ3, but I agree some of them look a bit overpowered, like the possibility to sabotage alone units (damage 50% of the target HP).
When the target is a city, it is always possible to protect it with other spies, because an attacking spy must defeat them one by one before performing an offensive action. Also, in civ2civ3, the culture acumulated by a city gives a bonus to the chances of winning a spy vs spy battle.
There is also a server setting, available to be changed by any player at the start of the game, that allows to reduce the base chance of success of a diplomat/spy action.
1) Increasing the cost seems a good way to rebalance, but it would make diplomats better to perform certain actions due to the lower cost. I'd prefer a balance where both diplomat and spy can cost the same.
2) I think there are already ways to adjust the power of agents without the need to change the freeciv code, specially with the new modability of agent actions in the latests versions.
3) This is one of the things that is now possible to adjust in the ruleset, at least for some actions: whether the spy escape to nearest city or don't.
alain_bkr Reply To bard
Reply To alain_bkr
1) Increasing the cost seems a good way to rebalance, but it would make diplomats better to perform certain actions due to the lower cost. I'd prefer a balance where both diplomat and spy can cost the same.
3) This is one of the things that is now possible to adjust in the ruleset, at least for some actions: whether the spy escape to nearest city or don't.
I read somewhere that 'poison city' is not 'aggressive' , which i suppose do not cause 'diplomatic incident'.
I don't know how difficult it is to change that, but at least i would prefer something like :
alain_bkr)
alain_bkr I just discovered #46239 , i don't know if this could explain the behavior i don't like.
I find Spies too powerful compared to their very low cost, and their persistence after acting (and safe teleport to nearest city !).
It is possible to send many spies and reduce a city to size=1 in one turn, and most of the spies will survive.
Something like :