The AI has a very nasty habit of sending large numbers of spies into my territory when we are at peace. These spies camp outside my cities (can't bribe cities or units since I'm democracy), clogging up my transport network and making it difficult to move my units since they exert a ZOC. I can't attack them without declaring war, which I don't want to do. The only solution is to bribe them, and this costs a lot of money, though it is still affordable. I could always seal up my borders with units, yes, but that would itself take a very long time to do as well, and spies can easily sneak through any gaps since they ignore ZOC.
Frankly, this is incredibly annoying. I recall that in Civ 2 this behaviour was prevented by using a unit to move into the spy's tile, as if attacking it, but if one was at peace an option would pop up that would allow you to expel the spy and force its return to its own territory without declaring war. Can such an option be brought into Freeciv? This use of spies is, as I see it, basically an exploit that allows the AI to irritate me without much consequence. There should be a way for me to mitigate this. Alternatively, if inserting the above option is not possible, perhaps spies could be changed to not exert any ZOC? It's illogical anyway that one or just a few secret agents can somehow entirely deny whole military units freedom of movement without using overt acts of sabotage.
Hope you can provide a reply. Thanks!
27.125.156.105 12:54, September 25, 2014 (UTC)
- In development version (that will become freeciv-2.6) non-military units have already been stripped of their ZoC creating property in most of the rulesets shipping with freeciv. And as the freeciv engine now supports this, it's just matter of changing the ruleset even if you are using ruleset where it's not already the case.
- Even with the ZoC solution existing, units expelling option sounds like something we want to consider too. --Cazfi (talk) 22:59, September 25, 2014 (UTC)
- I like the idea of allowing the player to expel a unit in stead of attacking. I filed patch #5306 so I won't forget it. Sveinung84 (talk) 12:30, September 29, 2014 (UTC)