How espionage should not work for Galciv 3.

Espionage should be about information.  Information is key.  If you have a game that creates enough variability and critical intelligence moments, this will be very good. 

If you can discover caches or resources, or ancient tech ruins, or a pirate base.  If its a resource cache, you must race to secure the location before your opponent does.  If you have esponiage, now you know its their too.  (assuming you roll a success on discovering it too or something).  This is how espionage should be.

I never considered espionage to be so limited. Maybe that is because I have lived through WWII, the Korean conflict, the Vietnam troubles, the cold war, etc. etc. I always did have a picture of espionage as a non military way of confounding an enemy. Lately, your view of espionage being purely information gathering is natural with  what we have seen of it lately, but compared to the early and mid 1900s, things have been relatively peaceful. So I would have to contend that this is all a case of "in the eye of the beholder", and a matter of the world environment each of us has grown up in.

So, it is natural for me to think that having spies blow up enemy's support structures is a natural additional activity for spies, and that I think that having a way to do this to enemies in addition to getting classified information about the other races in a game is a wonderful idea.

I think you're technically correct, but in the spirit of espionage, I believe it lies more at heart with intelligence first.  And I mean actual useful information too.   Not how many the labor statistics for an enemy planet.  I need to know where enemy fleets were 2 or 3 turns ago at least, and what direction they were headed.  Things like that

Espionage is always about information gathering first. Not only is it the least risky operation in terms of exposing agents to harm or being caught, but you need it do anything else.

You can't plan sabotage, assassination, propaganda, or any other type of black ops without extensive information collection first. On top of that, information also has immediate value to military planners.

How about a mechanics similar to the Total War's assassins?

Spies could be trained, sent it to an alien world and assigned a certain task, that can range from - say - gathering intelligence to assassinating a key enemy diplomat/politician (up to the civ leader itself!) or admiral (thus lowering the enemy diplomatic/military skills) to sabotaging a structure.

Depending on the skill level of the spy and of the enemy counter-espionage and the difficulty of the task, the attempt can be successful, thus increasing the agent's skills, a miss (but the spy escapes), or a failure (the agent is caught by the enemy counterparts, resulting in the loss of the spy and a diplomatic penalty with the target civilization)

I think this would give a lot of interesting options to choose from!

Agents should definitely be able to be placed according to a goal, not just a mechanism where Spy = Stopped Work.

An agent saboteur should, eventually, be able to disable an entire planetary facility, but the change should be gradual. The facilities in GC aren't one building where a spy could walk in, flip a switch, and shut the place down. On the other hand, the spy could spread discord among the workers causing a decrease in productivity, that might lead to strikes and/or riots. The spy could penetrate computer security and cause problems by delaying or rerouting shipments or hamper financial transactions. Adept social and political maneuvers could paint the facility in bad light in the eyes of the populace, and those who govern them, causing the powers that be to heavily restrict or stop the operations of the facility.

An intelligence agent could provide operational knowledge of an enemy's facilities, giving the agent's home civilization a boost in research or productivity. Cultural and economic knowledge could be gathered, giving the home civilization an edge in diplomatic negotiations.

I think it would be interesting for each spy to have a set of skills that make him or her more valuable in one form of espionage over another. In fact, agents should have attributes like gender and race. Sending a male spy into a matriarchal society would affect the tasks the spy was able to perform. A Terran spy might have difficulty blending in with the Drengin populace while an Altarian would have a much easier time blending in with the Terrans. The possible races of spies could include all of the minor races as well.

I'll stop rambling now.

That's a good idea, it's part of the reason the Krynn are such good spies - it'd b nice for the advantage to be included in gameplay beyond a nebulous, impersonal bonus to ability; maybe every time they culture flip a planet they gain a spy or two of that race?

I think what we should see in a game's espionage mechanics is a list of actions, including 1) information gathering, 2) sabotage, 3) assassination, and so on. Let the player choose which ones to use when (and, of course, let the player beware).

There should espionage and covert actions instead, as has been stated previously espionage is about information gathering, covert actions is more sabotage. Putting funding towards a full fledged insurancy that could potentially cripple an entire planet sounds awesome.

OK. Interesting how common usage can skew the meaning of a word. According to Wiktionary, you are correct about how espionage is defined. So what would you call the activities of an agency that combined espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, assassinations, and other covert and counter covert actions?

I just don't want to bicker over terms and terminology. If any of it goes in let us have all of it.

The thing is you don't combine those agencies, each one's goals and purposes are incompatible with eachother, as odd as that sounds.

Espionage is soley for gathering of the information while remaining undiscovered, thus allowing the agents to move feeely about.

Counter espionage is just that, dedicated, to uncovering and capturing enemy spies and covert ops, but is non combat.

Covert operations generaly cover assainations and sabotage. Since the effects are immidiate, once they are used they lose any long term benefit and the agents have to be extracted.

Now historcally these generally were combined, for example the OSS, but in todays world they are generally seperate most of the time CIA is espionage, FBI is generally counter espionage, along with the department of homeland security(counter covert ops) As for our covert ops (assinations and such are general done by the SEALs and DELTA forces, SAS would be another example.

 There is of course inter angency cooperation but each tends to focus on its own areas of experties.

As I said, I don't want to bicker about terms and such. I just want a name for what a combined mechanic in a game might be called.

Shadow Operations sounds cool, even if it is used almost everywhere.

It'd be called "Espionage" simply because that's how most other games use the term.

But even in the game, the first and most important goal of your spies is information gathering and counter espionage. Stuff like sabotage, research theft, and assassination are extras to spice it up.

I just looked "covert" up in Wiktionary, and it says, in part,

"

1. (now rare)Hidden, covered over; overgrown, sheltered.
2. (figuratively)Secret, surreptitious, concealed.

"

Under "espionage" it says:

"The act or process of learning secret information through clandestine means."

Under "clandestine" it says"

"

• (done in secret):covert, furtive, hush-hush, secret, secretive, undercover

"

Quite a round robin of definitions, but the impression I get is that "clandestine means" is the overall cover term.

Maybe we could put them all under "clandestine arts", partly to distinguish it from other games, with a goodly chunk of the tech tree, spies, spy training, different spy career paths, spy commands, and more. If not in the base release, perhaps in one of the followup releases.

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That works. "Covert Ops" would work too.