After my first game looking into espionage, here are a few tidbits to know:

-Each spy allocated to a race will allow you to get to another level of intel after the number of spy-weeks are completed.  This means if you want medium, you must have at least 2 spies in, high 3 spies, advanced 4 spies.  Sitting with 1 spy on a race for 1,000 turns will still only net you Low intel.

-When an AI is destroyed, any passive spies you placed on them are lost.  Monday a dev can chime in if this is on purpose or if it's a bug.

-Passive spies cannot steal tech, only active spies can.  I sat for YEARS with 4 passive spies on 2 AI's and not 1 tech got stolen.

Is there a 1.99c update? Where do you download it?

Download via Impuse. Ensure beta versions is checked

where do you checK?

Upper left corner where preferences are. Show prerelease versions.

But still some problems might occur. I had to reinstall Impulse to get beta.

I have been playing the original campaign and run into a bug on Darkness Rising where the level will not end. The victory movie for that level plays but I go straight back into that level just for the movie to play again when I hit end.

Edit: After restarting the and loading my save game the mission finishes but the next mission is Apocalypse (something like mission number 14) when it should be Siege (mission number 6?)

Edit2: restarting the campaign and then cheating my way I managed to get onto the proper mission but no idea what caused the problem.

Had v1.96 twilight going well so installed 1.99rc.  After startup it repeatedly crashed when asked to open new game.  Have uninstalled and reinstalled twice.  No change.  Still can't get it to run.  Any ideas.

The cheat at that hotkey (improve selected planet) was remapped to Ctrl+Shift+N. It was so difficult finding an available key for the shortcut to set a planetary governor. We, quite literally, have every key of the alphabet mapped to something.

Finding the ctrl+P thing was helpful, thanks to whoever first mentioned it.

Problem is right now you can only use ctrl+p if you go straight to the planet surface from the main galaxy screen. If you enter the planet screen from the colonies list ctrl+p does nothing. In addition if you go into the planet screen from the main screen and use the ctrl+p, then you hit next or previous in the upper right to go to another planet, when you hit ctrl+p again it still pops up the one from the initial planet and not any you have navigated to using the upper-right nav buttons.

Thank you for the revised cheat, I often play as a xenophobe and like to use only my home system, I would thus make all my system habitable. I thought I was going to loose that option.

After some quick playing around: the graphics are even better: big applause for that. 

Very dissappointing though is the spy update, which was proclaimed to be a major update. The new thing: you can place spies on a civ in general. But think about the following:

- is it not even more expensive (and less effective) with spies now that you need spies both for civs and planets!?

- I do not like the fact that you can scroll around and see all planets and their tiles of a civ even before you have placed any spy on any planet. This is illogical and it also makes it much less interesting to place civ spies in the game since you can learn so much just by pretending to put a planet spy. Info should be gold worth and difficult to get! A basic logic approach is missing here. 

- I did not really see any new spy techs (in addition to e.g. the krynn race techs), meaning that you would be able to research better spies and make them more efficient. For me this is a given thing to include if you want to have spies in the game at all.

- It does not seem like spying affects your diplomatic relations with the civ you are spying on! But this would be a wonderful way to make the game less predictable: make it more useful to spy on someone but include a risk that you might screw up your relationship (or have a war upon you) if the spy is found out.

- There is no thrill ( = uncertainty with potential for major impacts) in the way spies are handled now. It should be possible to put spies that can be found out or stay hidden if they are good. As it is today you just place your spy on a tile and wait for it to be cancelled. What's the added value of that? Even this updated spy system does not seem to really fit in the gamer: it still feels like a slightly undeveloped add-on branch which does not really affect the outcome of the game. You just can't play a spy strategy and win the game. Imagine how much more fun the game would be if you could actually place spies that could DO something against your enemy, like killing off population, blowing up a starbase or make tiles permanently unusable on a planet ... 

A. no, not really. You can now use active agents tactically, rather than strategically. Basically, the passive agents are the CIA HQ analysts, that do the number crunching "We know they have this many people, and we know what the tax structure looks like, so we can work out that they're spending this much on their military, this much in social projects, and we have this much unaccounted for so it must be in classified research projects . . "

Since this means you can *get* to advanced knowledge without losing 30 agents to playing "Spy vs Spy", when you finally decide to actually steal tech, you can just take your agents and drop them into a network where the have an actual chance of getting info, rather than throwing them out in the middle of no where with a "This person is definitely *not* a psilon agent" id card.

B. I disagree. Knowing where to place an agent is information one gets from the Drengin department of tourism  . . . "The slave labs of altos IV are some of the highest producing labs in Drengin space, and with nearly 40% of the slaves surviving to fight in the arena, one of the safest as well!"

C. I comfortable with this level of interaction - I just kinda assume that my spy are doing all sorts of dastardly things.

D. My spies all have cyanide tablets - don't you read the novels!

E. I'm not against having a more formidable intelligence agency - but right now spying is a tactical/strategic scapel. How far down the road of using it as a blunt instrument do you want it to go?

Jonnan

In my latest MVL league game I was using spies to hinder the Alterians from winning a tech victory before I won my ascension victory.  They would have won 3 weeks prior to me if I didn't do something.  Alas I didn't have many spies by that end of the game on hand and they cost too much for me as that point.  I was able to cut them back to 1 week before me befor eI pulled out a troop ship to destroy their highest tech planet.

In this instance, spies COULD have won the game for me if I had the numbers on hand that I normally do.  I was being lax near the end of the game, not thinking anyone was getting near a win.

I've also used spies to destroy the dregin economy and end their military production.  I put them into -500bc and kept them there for quite some time.

If you like to play the 'cold war' strategy, then they are fine as is.

As for the diplomacy thing.  In Galciv, spies are anonomous, so no diplomatic hits are seen.  There are two different special events that I think are directly linked to intel levels.  One was that you didn't know their ettique and the other was an assassination attempt.

I have been playing on the Milky way map and the races are not getting the actual map/texture or whatever it’s called for their home world and I know that I got them before because I was playing a game on that map.

Two (Possible) Bugs:

1: I'm not getting something about the new planetary governor, and I'm not finding it in the manual. How exactly do you add a new governor list? I can access the governor, but all I have is 'none' and the two checkboxes, various fiddling around has failed to activate any way to save a queue or add a governor.

2: Has the economic formula been tweaked harder? I've switched the Psilons from the Terran to the Altarian tech tree (I always tend toward good anyway and wanted to see these neat 'creative' techs I'd heard about), and the economic strain has increased immensely - I don't seem to be getting nearly the return on high population planets I was before. I would assume that I'm playing the tech tree badly, but everyone else seems to be expanding as slowly, or *more* slowly, as I am - Generally at this point in the game I'm running full out with a low tax rate, and I'm fighting to keep my tax rate <45%, and getting *killed*  on my output levels.

Thanks - Jonnan