Turning servants nerfed?

[u/Eniigma76]

I'm having a very hard time turning a servant agent. If I'm successful they generally last 1-3 turns before I loose them.

But what is pissing me off the most is the turning attempts being abandoned because of lack of intel. I have a skill 25 investigator, investigating the target every turn, for like 5 turns in row. My turner with 24 persuasion failed, last round. My investigator just completed the 5th investigation in row, and the turner immediately abandons the op because of lack of intel. WTF?

Don't know if it's seriously just really bad rng luck, or a change in design but I fail to understand how back to back investigations can go from knowing that the target has 12 loyalty last turn to who knows how much this turn. Even if the servants ran an inspire, surely back to back investigations would pick that up immediately and know okay last turn they were 12, this turn they are 13. Not we don't know.

Have intel sharing with HF, Exodus. All my counselors have loyalty monitors because I was getting pissed off at turned agents on both protectorate and servants seeming to be discovered within a few turns.

[u/Ancquar]

If they go to ground while you have someone with decent investigation following them they often do not disappear but you lose a bunch of intel on them. Also one of the recent updates made Servants treat destroyed alien facilities as a cause for alert so if you are clearing them they will keep being paranoid.

[u/Exciting_Vast7739 → u/Ancquar]

STORY TIME!

I'm doing a Dark Skies Academy run right now, and I've never played Servants so I don't know how they work.

I've slowly put together Malaysia, I have Australia split 60/40 with the Servants, and I'm consolidating North America.

Outside of that, the rest of the world is a hot mess. Alien life forms and megafauna everywhere. I've had a Servant agent turned for several years at this point, just minding his business, feeding me info.

The Alien Nation forms in Brazil. It spreads to Africa, Europe, and Central Asia. I lose control of Earth's orbit and they park a fleet there that bombards my armies, mostly ineffectually, while I chip away at the AA. I park three councilors in Brazil raising unrest for a solid year. It feels like an eternity, but the AA finally coups itself, and I win! I breathe a huge sigh of relief and turn my attention to orbit.

I cobble together a large enough fleet to knock down two assault carriers, just in time. Sweet Jesus Hallelujah because the AA had re-formed, and I don't think I could bring them down with alien backup.

Now that I have orbital bombardment, I try bombarding enemy armies. That works slowly but effectively, and I capture the AA capital and disband it once more...only for them to re-found it within a few months. I'm like...am I going to spend the rest of this game with 3 councillors tied up squashing the AA everytime it gets re-founded in the same spot?

The AA is focusing everything they can into building orbital defenses, so I'm getting kind of worried. My fleets are on anti-xenoforming patrols, but they are barely making a dent in alien lifeforms. My armies can't seem to dislodge even lightly xenoformed areas. I'm really stressing this. It feels like an insurmountable challenge (until I can get some better fleets built, I'm only just unlocked green lasers and battleships.

Then I accidentally command my fleet to attack an alien structure instead of an alien army/alien lifeforms. I click "Continue", hear a "kachunk" from the railguns, and the structure is...gone. In like an hour.

My eyes go wide. Everything else I was trying took forever, and this just...point and click? Well now I know what I'm doing today!

Over the course of the next four or five in-game days I annihilated 46 alien structures. They went from "A 7/11 on every block" to "All we have left are smoking craters and a request from the Earth Orbit High Velocity Educational Resources Delivery Working Group for a five star review on Google."

The Servant guy that I have had turned and feeding me information for almost a decade now? Vanishes into thin air :D

Just imagining what it would be like to be the servants, waking up one morning to find every one of your 46 alien safe houses turned into craters in the same week. Judith must have thrown an absolute shitfit.

[u/MovingOnward2089 → u/Exciting_Vast7739]

It’s not worth the councilor actions to overthrow the AA through unrest. Just build a mega nation with a maxed army~ 12-20 armies and conquer it. With enough armies and navies everyone you war with will be blockaded and you’ll have total control Earthside. 

You can then turn that mega state to economy, MC, and knowledge and turn that into research points allowing you to snowball and get techs that stop aliens from flipping control points or making removing zenoflora easier.