Need some help with Espionage and Star Bases

Hey Sly,

you can either steal a tech from the AI by invading a planet, or dropping a spy on him. The invading planet tactic works fairly well....

As for your second question - Mil SB don't have that function ever. But, if your Mil SB got attacked and suffered HP's, then you can send a constructor to it and it'll add +20HP to the base again. But if you want your ships repaired, there are 4 options left:

Spend one racial point to the +20% repair bonus. Or built 'Micro repair bots'. Send them to the nearest planet in orbit. Upgrade them, either to another design, or to the exact same - which will be way more cheap. Just complete the upgrade and your ship will have full HP again.

Cheers

The manual isn't in full synch with the latest version of the game; it looks like the Repair System module was scrapped for some reason.

There's a free .NET app called Galactopedia that makes it easy to root around in all the XML files for the tech trees. In the default tree and a few others I tried, there's no sign of Repair System.

Hey guys thanks for the responses.

Now when I drop spies on enemy planets do I need to drop them on research buildings?

No

One problem with this particular method is that your spies will be eradicated very soon. You could move them around each turn, but sometimes even that doesn't help. And over time, the costs for reproducing spies just doesn't justify their costs anymore.

Spies have a much better use in planetary-invasive aid, or getting an intelligence level on your enemy....

Spies help in planatary invasion!?

Damn I played this game religiously with DA but since my absence apparently ToA changed lots of things.

Thanks for all the help guys. This has been an eye opener.

Yea, there's a ton of new stuff in TA.  I think it's a much better game, but DA still has a few things on it.  Some people don't like TA and only play DA.  I'm not one of them.

One wierd thing about the starbase repair module, it's there in the .xml files and appears in the tech tree, but it doesn't show up in the module list even if you mod it into the game with no requires.  Looks like it was supposed to work, but doesn't because they never got around to fixing it.  Too bad, that would have been a useful addition.

What I ment is following:

Drop one spy on a farm - one turn before you invade. This will probably reduce your enemy's population. Or drop on moral structures & combine this with "Informational Warfare" - helps a lot. You can, of course, combine these 2 methods.

btw, works in DA, too, of course.

I still think that tactic/exploit should have alignment effects, even for civs with a formal alignment (applied Xeno Ethics). Sending hordes of troops to exterminate civilians is bad enough; sending spies to wreck and/or poison the local food system, well, that's just really evil...

I'd have built some military bases just to have those Repair System modules working in important spots that were far from my systems. Seems like they'd be a real help with things like clearning out enemy hulls before sending in troops or defending a beachhead system against a strong opponent.

You *can* combine these two tactics, but under almost no conceivable circumstances should you do so. A morale/IW attack works better the when attacking a higher population, reducing the population to 8 billion before attempting it pretty much negates the purpose of using it.