We can have rare/large spying events and still require the player to maintain the spying turn after turn in order to get benefit from it. When one starts tech spying, one wouldn't instantly start getting research. You'd have to wait a few (or many) turns until you get lucky and your spy actually infiltrates the enemy labs. Then every turn you'd get +X RP towards the tech in question. You'd still have to keep paying the spying cost each turn though. If you stopped paying to support the spying, you'd stop getting the stolen RPs.Impaler wrote:I belive its better to have spy events be rare and large rather then small and continual, its more "flashy" and "wow" hence more fun. It also makes for a simpler interface and messaging system.
Whether or not you've actually successfully infiltrated the enemy labs, there would also be a chance that your spy would be caught each turn. This chance could be higher or lower after the actual infiltration. Also, after you finish researching a tech for which you have a spy, that spy could attempt to stay infiltrated, and get assigned to some other research project in the enemy empire, potentially giving you another tech to steal. Which tech this is could be random or you might be able to pick it... (perhaps a spying tech determines this).
Perhaps your spy might end up assigned (by the enemy) to do work on a tech you already know, meaning you'd have to accept that, meaning you can't use that spy to steal research until that tech is finished, or you could tell the spy to attempt to transfer to another project that you don't already know, at risk of being caught. Or you could leave the spy on the tech you already know, and use the spy to sabotage enemy research on that tech... perhaps you knowing the tech already gives you a bonus to sabotaging others' research of it.
I suppose there's also spying to steal techs that you don't know that the enemy has already finished reseraching... I'm not sure how that would tie into the above.
Anyway, the original point of this was that you'd get the interesting and rare events ( Spy infiltrates project! Spy caught! Infiltrated project finished! ) but you'd still need to maintain the spying each turn to get the benefit, which IMO is beneficial, as it makes the results a bit less completely random in terms of cost, and make it a bit more transparent and understandable to the player, rather than spying just being a pay X for a Y% chance to steal, otherwise you have a Z% chance to get out safe or 100 - Z% chance that the spy is caught, which is rather unfun and arbitrary seeming, to me. With continuing spy presence on projects and such, there's some more interesting player choice and calculated risks.