[SPOILERS] Smackdown Game Thread

[SevenSpirits]

Yeah, me too.

One of the things I've heard a lot as arguments against spies (even if you ban their missions) is that they are overpowered because they can see things, and it's bad for the game because they make it impossible to attack. The supporting argument being, the only smart way to attack is as a surprise attack out of the fog, but if they have spies, they can see it and not be surprised.

I have been disgruntled with this argument for quite a long time now and advocated for spies in many of the games I've played in. So far, it hasn't really come up: people still delayed alphabet a long time, and basically the games ended before spies ever did anything significant.

Finally we have a game where we are spying on other players, and other players are spying on us, and if anything it's breaking the terrified stalemate that has developed. We have probed in all directions with spies and found just one weak point. We then concentrated all our knight forces in that one point and razed a city, in an attack that would be been in incredible leap of faith without spies. Meanwhile I've been worrying that RMOG has good enough spy coverage to notice that our knights near them are on vacation, and will take the opportunity to take back our easternmost city.

[suttree]

We have probed in all directions with spies and found just one weak point. We then concentrated all our knight forces in that one point and razed a city, in an attack that would be been in incredible leap of faith without spies.

Do you think this is evidence of poor play (IE they should have been tracking your knight stack with spies of their own) or evidence that spies are workable (IE resources are sufficiently scarce/tactical options are available to mask a gathering stack) ?

[SevenSpirits]

Do you think this is evidence of poor play (IE they should have been tracking your knight stack with spies of their own) or evidence that spies are workable (IE resources are sufficiently scarce/tactical options are available to mask a gathering stack) ?

I see it as evidence that spies are workable.

They could have built more spies, but they would have needed really good coverage of our empire to find the tiles the knights were on the turn before we showed our hand. Since knights move 6 tiles at this point, we didn't even need them to be moved from their previous position, but still unrevealed, for more than one turn. And getting enough spies to have coverage that good is expensive, even if they didn't randomly die every now and then.

We, by comparison, only needed to have good coverage of a fraction of their empire for a single turn, in order to decided to go ahead with the attack.

I believe that spies' impact on removing the fog of war advantage from the defender is much greater than their impact in removing the fog of war advantage from the attacker.

[suttree]

That makes sense. Suppose both sides have resources to maintain an equal number of spies. Both sides can either spread spies uniformly across the border for some number x turns of warning, or concentrate spies for some number y>x in only a section of the border. If the defense is uniform, the attacker has the advantage because he can concentrate his spies and plan an attack with y-x additional turns to concentrate his forces. Even if the defender randomly probes y turns along the border, the attacker still has the advantage because he has the initiative. Pick several lines of attack, roll dice to choose the line to scout, and abort if the defender responds. With sufficient space, the attacker will eventually select a line different than the defender and initiate an attack with at least one additional turn to concentrate his forces.