That agent bonus is just like the technology or racial bonus, the more the better, exactly. Non-linear there is what player need to have at least one spy sent to opponent to do some action, while on defense its not required, and 0 spies will still do some work (just without bonus provided for their quantity).
And no, you didnt offended me at all, how come?

Initially I did make a post about some "problem" indicating maybe a problem with the patch.
Though it was more of a core game mechanic thing, a confusion on my part.

I assume you're on the team developing this patch, in that case you, Alex and Rocco are doing a good thing.
Thumbs up!

There is always can be some problem with patch or original game not covered properly yet. Just sadly description is rarely enough to fix them, and save is needed not to prove a claim or so, just without it its often really hard to reproduce a problem. In any case beside intentional lie (and its not our case definitely) - telling about a problem is a really good thing, thanks for it.

I was told what the way i write could be seen as non-friendly or so, shall ask for excuse, as it non-intended, and merely due to my lack of needed language skills. Real thanks from us for your interest to game and patch.

Maybe a bit clinical or analytical, but maybe I deserved it, seeing as I stated wrongly it was a bug with the game.
You have good vocabulary.

If your bonus is 24 (+20 and +4 for 2 spies) EDIT: and defender's bonus is 0, then you get about 0.0946 chance to steal, so can expect 1 tech steal every 10.5 turns on average. If actual results are way off, then it can be a bug. E.g. in your case the chance of not stealing for 30 turns is about 0.05, at this point I would start suspecting a bug.

I may have exaggerated, but it was at least 20 turns, can't remember exactly now.
I will make a new game with the same race picks and attempt to spy on the first AI I encounter. I can make a few tests like that, but for now bed time is long overdue for me.

I'll check it out tomorrow.

Played three games yesterday in 1.50 classic, to get a feel for the effects of different spying boni in-game.
Setup was small galaxy with 8 players, for early contact, on Impossible difficulty.
My race was Unification, Production +1, Large HW and Repulsive.
With: Game 1. Spy bonus -10; Game 2. Spy Bonus +20, Game 3. Spy Bonus +20 and Telepathic, for total +30 spy. (for game 3 i set the maximum_positive_picks to 16 to be able to get Telepathic)

Play Style:
- generated a map on which i was in contact with minimum 2 opponents.
- no expansion, playing on homeworld only, did not scrap colony ship but kept in orbit around HW
- from t0 all i did was build spies and put them on the offensive, for the entire game which lasted until t100
- if i got leaders, i did not hire them.
- no interaction with AI (was repulsive anyway)

Results:
-10 spy: During the entire game i only stole 3 techs. At end of the game I only had 3 spies because the rate of attrition was so high. I lost this game at turn 95 because i was at war with 3 AI (I wonder why...) and they destroyed my HW.

+20 spy: Stole 9 techs during this game, and at turn 100 I had 17 spies on the offensive spread over 3 opponents. Diplomatic stance with AI was poor but there were no wars!

+30 spy: Stole 27 techs, which is basically everything they had and i am sure I could have stolen more if they had had more techs (many turns, the AI had nothing for me to steal). I had 21 spies on the offensive and needed to set a tax rate to maintain them. I was at war with 1 AI, but alive and well at turn 100.

I have been testing as well, but I could not reproduce the behavior. I don't remember which government the AI had but it was either 0 or 10 defensive bonus (well maybe they had a special leader as well), and, judging from my tests now, from 2-5 defensive spies.

In my attempts spying was quite effective with just two spies and +20 bonus. Except against unification government obviously, then my spies started to disappear.
The strange thing before was that no spies where lost, while not getting any techs either, for what seemed like an eternity.
But I guess it must have been bad luck. If something like it should happen again I can use Alt-X to investigate, and I'll save the savegame :p

No fresh bugs to report, so here are a few nitpicks that have been bugging me for a while:

- At any colony screen, right-click the output area. This will open a window explaining how jobs and outputs work. The last line says, "Lef-clicking on each of them will show you a breakdown of the output."
- When a race at war with you offers peace in exchange for a demand, the text reads "peace between our empire." This should be "empires."
- Several news reports appear to have unusual spacing issues, but I can't tell just by eyeballing them if those are genuine errors or the result of the game using justified text.
- In news reports, it should be "hyperspace beast," or, if you're feeling generous, "Hyperspace Beast," but not "Hyperspace beast."

I haven't delved too deeply into the game in search of grammar and spelling errors, as I imagine that between the database, the tech descriptions, and the various UI screens, there are probably quite a few.

Hey thanks for that feedback;
- The 'lef clicking' was a typo of my own. fixed it.
- Hadn't touched diplo texts until now. Will look at entire file when I fix that one at some point.
- In general spacing in gnn is correct, with one notable exception, that is when 'the' is inserted before an empire. ' The Darlok Empire' will have a space before 'The'. Last time i looked at it, it was not an easy one to fix. Might try again some time.
- Hyperspace beast will be with 'humble h' from next release.

Oops, I forgot one:

- Phase shifter is still listed in the reference database, even though it can't be researched in a vanilla game.

I left that entry in there since there are mods (like ice) that can use the tech.

Copied from another thread:

Dreamteam67 wrote:

In general, in my experience there seems to have been a large drop in AI aggressiveness that happened somewhere between the initial introduction of 1.50 (where one could change the config files... awesome patch btw) and the current version 1.50.8 I have installed. It almost seems as if the AI difficulty is permanently set to "easy" or something. I'm not seeing the epic late-game AI buildup I used to encounter in past game versions. Not even when using the ICE mod. Is it possible a bug has been introduced into the difficulty settings somehow through the inclusion of the front-end launcher?

By epic late game I mean more like around turn 250. I'm just not seeing AI Battleship spam or anything similar. Anyways, I'll see if I can produce a concrete example between 2 different versions. That means I have to reinstall an older patch, correct? Are there archived files somewhere?

It could be that my SP play has developed so aggressive I don't give the AI a chance to build up at all. But it seemed like in the earlier 1.50 versions, the game was more challenging overall. Certainly the ICE mod eliminated many of the early vanilla rush strategies, almost guaranteeing the game would go above 200 turns in a huge impossible galaxy. Yet the AI seems quite passive compared to the first few games I remember playing using 1.4. I'll see if I can produce a concrete example.

When the player is bombed by an enemy fleet, the current format for the summary message is: [colony name] bombed by the [race name]. This results in grammatically awkward messages when the attacking race has a singular name as opposed to a plural name (i.e., "bombed by the Antaran," rather than "bombed by the Antarans"). A better alternative might be: [colony name] bombed by the [race name] fleet.

Well, how about that, a bug.

An outpost ship is en route to system Lora, where leader Nimraaz is waiting to be rescued, and will reach it on the next turn. As you can see, Lora has been previously explored; a scout reached it as the result of a "wormhole" random event some turns earlier. However, this failed to recruit the leader, and on the next turn, the game will treat the system as newly discovered.

SAVE1.GAM