Revolutions

[Fat_Harry]

Revolutions are starting to drive me nuts. Is there an effective way to defend against them?

I usually have atleast 5+ agents on counter intelligence but it doesnt seem to stop the ai spamming me with revolutions.

After about 3 incited revolutions i start losing colonies. Throw in a couple more and i'm in the red and its game over [:@]

any tips appreciated

[taltamir]

it is likely not "incite rebellion" that is causing it, it is simply really low morale on planets.
check your planets, check your morale...

most likely:
1. you are playing a democracy or republic or a hippy race that hates war... and you get penalties from it.
2. You are at war with an empire of a race which composes a large portion of your population (they hate that) and you get penalties from it.
3. high taxes further burden them.
4. Your reputation is very low and you are playing a race that cares (aka, hippy race)...

Trying playing a dictatorship of a warlike race, or at least a monarchy or republic...
or try to carefully manage your reputation. Destroying pirates (especially their bases) gives you rep, not initiating wars gives you rep, upholding your defense treaties gives you rep (but it is countered somewhat by going to war, so end those ASAP). nuking a planet ruins your rep, attacking someone without declaring war hurts your rep... being declared war on hurts your rep...

[Fishman]

No, the Incite Revolution thing is real. It has nothing to do with rep or morale, although morale will plummet rapidly as the development level of every colony is trashed every time this happens, and there is no useful defense against it: You can only have 10 agents and even if you stick them all on counterintel, it doesn't really help as you will be fighting nearly 200 agents with only 10. This is basically like the scenario of the US carrier group attempting to stop 200 antiship missiles.

Incidentally, pretty much all of them sank. They weren't happy about that.

[taltamir]

i see what you mean then...

you basically cannot be at war with everyone because they outnumber your spies since spies are a set amount of up to 10, and not based on the size and strength of your empire...

I think that counter intelligence should NOT be a spy mission, but a slider... investing in it increases your security (regardless of how many spies you have), but costs money and at very high levels morale as well.

i guess revolutions could also be made harder to incite perhaps?

[Fat_Harry]

At the moment it does seem a little too easy to incite a revolution. The percentage chance for even a low skilled agent is fairly high if you give them a year to carry it out.

In general I think the cost involved in maintaining agents and sending them out on missions is to low considering useful they are.

Maybe there should be a cost on a per mission basis? I know you take a rep hit if you get caught but it's pretty rare that you do. Even then it only affects the empire you did it to, and to be honest when you are at war with them it doesnt really matter.

[Fishman]

ORIGINAL: Fat_Harry

In general I think the cost involved in maintaining agents and sending them out on missions is to low considering useful they are.

Actually, they're not all that useful to YOU. The AI, as an amorphous, Zerg-like mass, is basically entirely immune to anything you can do it, other than this. The failure odds of anything ELSE are really too high to justify regular usage. Even with the other missions, when the AI performs those missions, they are just minor irritants rather than empire-wrecking atrocities. But this ONE single mission stands apart from the others.

Of course, it's still mostly useless to YOU since the AI's government is already random, so changing it randomly has no real effect, and you, alone, are not capable of doing this often enough in most cases to really impact the AI. It's when the AI does it to you that it matters, since there are 19 of them and no matter how big you are, you cannot recruit more than 10 lousy agents. If this cap didn't exist, it would be far less of a problem since you would actually be able to recruit enough agents to actually stop this sort of thing.

ORIGINAL: Fat_Harry

Maybe there should be a cost on a per mission basis? I know you take a rep hit if you get caught but it's pretty rare that you do. Even then it only affects the empire you did it to, and to be honest when you are at war with them it doesnt really matter.

You take a REP hit, not just a relational hit, so your empire's reputation will decline rapidly if you keep getting caught. This is, naturally, more of a problem for you than the AI, which tends to have Nasty reputation anyway from his unsavory habit of shooting at you and spying on everyone.

[Fat_Harry]

You take a REP hit, not just a relational hit, so your empire's reputation will decline rapidly if you keep getting caught. This is, naturally, more of a problem for you than the AI, which tends to have Nasty reputation anyway from his unsavory habit of shooting at you and spying on everyone.

Do you still take a REP hit even if you are only using agents against someone you are at war with?

[Fishman]

Far as I can tell, yes, since the enemy's rep continues to sink with every spy caught, even though I am engaged in Holy War Against the Universe.

[Fat_Harry]

Thats a bit of a pain. I would assumed it would work like ship destruction, whereby you dont seem to take a rep hit when destryong the ships of an enemy you are at war with.