Oct 10th 2014, 2:50:33
GDI protects from most harmful spy ops, but not all of them.
You can notably still steal cash, food and oil. Stealing tech was put on GDI protection a few resets ago; I pushed hard for this particular change because mathematically, it is proven that ignoring tech stealing (and any form of stealing) is better for netting, even if you are losing 50k tech points a day. It'll lower your finish slightly (maybe 1-2 ranks lower), but not as much as eating missiles from the RoR would.
The other thing is that you can mitigate cash/food/oil stealing by storing food and oil on the market. You can mitigate cash stealing by stocking food and storing that on the market. But you literally cannot mitigate tech stealing (you can only put 1/4 on the market), there were countries that run 100 SPAL that did nothing but tech stole. If you were a 40k country, no way you were going to run 4m spies just to have a 50% chance to block those ops, the upkeep costs of that much spies is a few times higher than the cost of just buying back the tech points lost (and that you would need to dedicate a large portion of land, about 25%-30% to indies making all spies, lowering your income).
You can notably still steal cash, food and oil. Stealing tech was put on GDI protection a few resets ago; I pushed hard for this particular change because mathematically, it is proven that ignoring tech stealing (and any form of stealing) is better for netting, even if you are losing 50k tech points a day. It'll lower your finish slightly (maybe 1-2 ranks lower), but not as much as eating missiles from the RoR would.
The other thing is that you can mitigate cash/food/oil stealing by storing food and oil on the market. You can mitigate cash stealing by stocking food and storing that on the market. But you literally cannot mitigate tech stealing (you can only put 1/4 on the market), there were countries that run 100 SPAL that did nothing but tech stole. If you were a 40k country, no way you were going to run 4m spies just to have a 50% chance to block those ops, the upkeep costs of that much spies is a few times higher than the cost of just buying back the tech points lost (and that you would need to dedicate a large portion of land, about 25%-30% to indies making all spies, lowering your income).