Quote Originally posted by Bilbo of Bag End:
How are these units best deployed?[/QUOTE]

My favorite use for spies sounds boring but has an underappreciated yet enormous impact: pacification. Spies don't cost any maintenance, but garrison armies do. Before I started using spies, I was having to maintain such large garrisons in some sectors that I was actually LOSING money on those provinces!

But now I just have one peasant in each province to hold the fort in event of an unexpected rampaging army and then maintain scattered stacks of reaction armies. I use spies to keep up the loyalty on all sectors now. It saves a lot of cash.

Using spies offensively enables you to drop the loyalty in an enemy sector, but this is too powerful to be realistic, so I hold myself to not more than 3 spies in an enemy sector. And even then I only do that sparingly... mainly to force the enemy to drop his tax rates or hold a large garrison in place rather than to induce revolts.

bif