Sometimes, you've just gotta love a good Spy Battle!

[elwoodps]

Playing on Hard, 43pop on 12 colonies (4 per faction) were cranking-out 51RP per turn.  Money had been somewhat tight since founding the last group of 3 colonies (on 3 consecutive turns).  We'd just cleared 1k+ profit for the first time in this game, when the Spy Battle was announced.  I held my breath as I tapped END TURN button, and here's the situation when the Spy Battle took effect at the start of the next turn:





A +16RP boost, and it's costing me less than $400 profit/turn!!!! 

[tenbsmith]

It's the little things that make you happy. :-)

I agree, I'm usually not in a hurry to end a Spy Battle. +20% maintenance is nothing to laugh at though.

[euphorion]

Well... I'd take the money over the RP anytime.

The current Spy battle costs me 5k/turn (had been generating +6k before - barely recovered from the Spy battle before), went down to +500.
I love how they went directly from Full Alliance to Spy Battle . /sigh.

Anyway, as we are at the topic:
I was struggling with a Spy Battle for several years, until I reads here that EP can be a driving factor for it. Found the "hidden" Faction Stats and saw that Javat was at less than half the EP than Thulun. Fixed it and half a year later Spy Battle was gone I could just upgrade everything to a 3-way-alliance.
Then as described above one went from Alliance to Spy Battle directly and is lasting for a year already again.

As far as I see everything is pretty balanced, EP are +/-2 between all factions, Planets +/-1, Ships +/-5, RP +/-10. Trade isn't shown, but when I had that last Spy Battle I added all TP up manually and they were pretty damn close anyway (+/-10), this shouldn't have changed strongly as the main developments were all done.

Is it just bad luck, or is there some other factor I'm not watching that may cause/prolong it?

[tenbsmith]

Bad luck is definitely a factor, dice play a big part in politics. Hopefully it will end soon.

Your numbers seem fairly well balanced for mid-late game with a bunch of systems. I wonder if the game looks at proportional or absolute balance in stats. Early in the game +/-10 TP could be a big imbalance, later with lots of colonies, not much of a difference.

Putting on my Captain Obvious hat, I guess you're not playing with Rychart and the other tech for ending a Spy Battle is too far down the tree to be of use.

Anywho, you might want to calculate TP and then create a new thread titled something like "How to end a Spy Battle" or "What causes a Spy Battle". Gundamgoth started one like that and Cory weighed in.

[dadacp]

I am definitely going to do what I can to avoid a spy battle after seeing what happened in my current game. I was suffering under a spy battle for many years, until I finally researched the technology needed to end it. I was finally ready to start my diplomacy to end the spy battle, and what happened? The spy battle ended by itself.

My income went from under 2k to over 5k in one turn. It was a different game. I had plenty of cash, and felt like I had just switched to an easier difficulty level.

[tenbsmith]

dadacp, I had the same thing happen recently. Glad to have the negative politics resolve spontaneously, but slightly miffed I didn't get to use my newly unlocked tech.

[Cory Trese]

Jul 27, 2015 11:32:56 GMT -5 tenbsmith said:

dadacp, I had the same thing happen recently. Glad to have the negative politics resolve spontaneously, but slightly miffed I didn't get to use my newly unlocked tech.

Where there was one Spy War, there will be another.