AI Espionage is Out of Control

I’m really enjoying my time with Civ VII, and most of the changes are just flat positives on the experience in my opinion. However the changes to espionage are causing it to become meaningless and also makes your lead as a player matter less in later eras.

At first I was a big fan of the changes, because moving spies around in VI took a long time and also rarely felt impactful. Giving us a diplomatic currency to spend on any number of operations that have clear, distinct impacts is very welcome and most of the time feels pretty great.

However, starting at the end of Antiquity age, the game quickly spirals into chaos with regards to spying stemming from a number of issues:

• AI does not seem to consider relationship when spying. Like, not even a little bit. Everyone short of an alliance member can and will use operations on you, CONSTANTLY. There seems to be no meaningful impact to relations from being caught outside of a flat reduction that can be quickly overcome with other positive influences.
• There doesn’t seem to be a limit to diplomatic favor usable by the AI. They’ll regularly befriend independents, start and support normal diplomatic actions with you, and still have the currency left to spend on spying operations on cooldown. It also doesn’t seem to matter if you discover them spying, because they can still use all the diplomatic favor they want even with the penalty applied from revealed spy actions
• For some reason I cannot understand, counter spying is limited to one opponent at a time. It also doesn’t seem to do anything to stop them from succeeding, it just makes you more likely to discover them, which as mentioned above, doesn’t matter at all in the big picture. I understand why other diplomatic actions are discrete and unable to be applied to every available player, but counter spying should absolutely be available on at least a few opponents given the deluge of attempts.
• There is no way, that I’m aware of at least, to augment your empire’s ability to both spy on other players or limit their ability to spy on you. You can activate Counter Spy, and that’s it. Buffs or debuffs to this system could easily be added to late era buildings, wonders, or policies, but there aren’t any at the moment.
• Base success chance for the most common operations (steal tech/civics) is locked at 100%, and steals obscene amounts of the resource. The cost-benefit relationship is completely unbalanced. You spend ~150 influence to receive 700-1000 of your chosen yield, with the only possible fail state being a temporary debuff to your influence-per-turn

Overall, the player’s ability to interact with the system beyond the very basic “initiate action or initiate (one) counter action” level is nonexistent. You have functionally no control over who spies on you and whether or not they succeed. At best it feels awkward, and at its worst it makes diplomacy and culture/science leads feel meaningless. I really hope they take a look at the numbers involved and make some changes to make this more interesting with future content, because at the moment it’s making me turn my brain off on the whole mechanic. It also has so much potential to be good, but we need more ways to add modifiers to the system before it reaches that level.