If spies can disguise themselves as settlers or musketeers.etc

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
#1

Imagine a scenario where a professional player puts a farmer on a hunting trip without realizing he is a spy. Or finding out that all ten musketeers under his control are spies for his opponent?
Or you can pretend not to recognize your opponent’s spies and attract enemy cavalry to harass them. Then destroy these cavalry with an ambushed army.
I believe this change will substantially enrich the tactics and scouting means
Some specific settings：

  1. The opponent can control the unit
  2. The spy does not deal damage when attacking our troops
  3. Spies can pretend to collect resources when they disguise themselves as settlers
  4. The opponent can attack the spy by right click on spy.
  5. The opponent cannot delete our spy unit (or make the spy visible when deleting it)
  6. In spy mode, the enemy’s orders are given priority, and in exposed mode, our orders are given priority.
    7.When your own troops are selected, the icon will change to a sword when you mouse over the spy.
    In the past, whether a spy was exposed depended on the manipulator; with the changes, whether a spy was exposed depended on the adversary.
Do you think this change is cool?
  • Cool!
  • Acceptable
  • Boring
  • Ridiculous

0 voters

2 Likes
#2

That would be an interesting idea.
The explorer could still reveal the unit and it could get discovered.
Not gonna lie, that would be an interesting way to use the spy

2 Likes
#3

If you make them disguise as their own units not the opponents since that would be ridiculous and complicated like it could overpop settlers etc but otherwise cool concept since a spy should be able to hide in plain sight, not just invisible or obvious

#4

From a creative standpoint this is awesome and a really nice way to make spies actually realistic and useful for LoS

From an implementation point of view it seems difficult (because of the players control on the unit);

From a remastered game perspective that would actually change the utility of the Spies, since they are an anti-merc unit, and you would need another antimerc unit to exist.

1 Like
#5

Exactly, it would be nearly impossible for this type of game to make the spies be the opponents units, maybe a thing would be a musk that could shoot but did no damage or shot his fellow musks or if you did settlers, make them no pop, no ressource income and not do anything in tc like shoot and also not show up as afk settlers but yeah, it would be incredibly hard to execute.

There could also be a card to make them as good as war priests against other units but still do a lot vs mercs

#6

I like a lot the disguise idea and I would like it to be implemented, but I am not very fond of the opponent can control your spy kind of things.
I remember playing a video game called Warwind when I was little. Some units could disguise themselves as your unit (with your colors, etc.). Sometimes you were like : Wait, I don’t have this unit ! But it was most of the time too late.
I think I would keep the following :
3. Spies can pretent to collect ressources
4. The opponent can order other troops to attack using right click

Your spy could also open gates etc. I think it would be very fun in late game/treaty

1 Like
#7

But to stop it from being an op unit it gotta cost a bit and be like a card and or get in industrial or smtn so it isnt in colonial where every crate gets stolen

#8

It would be ridiculously OP.

#10

7.When your own troops are selected, the icon will change to a sword when you mouse over the spy.
what about this ?

#11

I have no confidence that anything so complicated can be implemented in the game engine.

#12

Is an INTERESTING idea, and for the ones who Think is OP o ridiculous, remember the Divine Power from Loki in Age of Mithology in the first age, not big deal actually, it could be a limit, maybe 1 only o max 5?

Also I have a question, does spies do bonus damage to Daimios and shoguns??