To be honest it really comes off as half baked. There are no true spies, instead we have envoys repurposed into the role of spies. This in turn means that without real spies we don't have any real flavor from the side of who does the spying. No traits, not leveling, and such. Hence its just dull.
Then come the missions which seem to have expenses that don't scale in cost and that makes them look worthless to actually employ. Secondly they reused the sound effects from Archaeology which makes notifications a mess and a half. There is also no central spy authority which is my way of saying I want a tab off of F1 (empires) or F2 (Situation) where all my espionage network activities are. I want spies to be leaders whose limit is set by my buildings that I dedicate to their role, I want spies that are in defensive states as well as offensive states.
To be blunt, what we got looks like a pared down version of something better and sadly we have a one page design document left.
Now let me also say we cannot have a system which always intrudes on game play, lord knows we don't need more notification soup. However we desperately need a consolidate screen to manage ALL espionage. There needs to be spies either done as troops or done as leaders. Leaders would be much more fun as they can have traits but troop types could be assigned to the grunt work to support the leaders who are managing a specific operation. Think of it as this, you assign a leader then give him resources. All limited by what you build up on your planet or planets to support this type of play. Plus also a more advanced system could of course of have tiered espionage related buildings and such
