How the hell does one plant a spy in Civilization III?
The help file says: Plant a spy and you can do nifty things. It never once says HOW!
ARGH!
You must:
- Have an embassy in the country.
Then I think you also need to have:
- The Espionage advance.
- Built the “Intelligence Agency”.
Then you click (right-click) on the intelligence agency label of the city that’s built the agency. (I think it’s a pentagon).
Then you’ll get an option to spy on anyone you’re at peace with. For a cost.
Often these spies get caught, and reduce how friendly your relations are. The only time I ever felt spies were useful was to stop someone from completing a space ship when I was completely unaware of their progress.
(I think this is the site I got the download for the patch. http://www.civfanatics.com/) These fansites are great for long discussions about the pros and cons of all this sort of thing.
You know, Jonathan, I’ve tried exactly what the OP suggested and not ONCE has a spy been of any use to me. Even in friggin’ chieftain mode when I was busy dominating everything and was trying out spying just to see what I could do. I got a spy into every civilization and it didn’t do jack for me.
The good news, though, is that it appears (though I have only played briefly on deity, as I didn’t really see the point of giving myself a headache) that in almost all difficulty levels the AI doesn’t really do much in the way of spying. Otherwise all those massive “wars of aggression” I had waiting eight spaces from the enemy’s port cities would have been caught LONG before I launched them full-scale (I think, anyway. If they saw 1/5th of the military production I was doing they would have known something was up). As it is I’ve never had production sabotaged by anything but barbarians in 3500 BC.
As for the chances that a spy will get caught … in a democracy (as in, if you try to plant one in a country that is in democracy) they’re probably gonna get caught. Otherwise, you’re generally set. I managed to get one into all but I think two civs in my current game (regent, Chinese, still in a republic).