Spying
Espionage in Mech Wars is done by spydrones. Specially crafted robots that look like and behave like humans. They have also very special skills when it comes to hiding, breaking into computer systems, and other abilities that will come in handy when you are seeking information about the enemy.
Spying is the main method for doing basic recon in Mech Wars, however it has many, many other uses as well. Spydrones are typically quite cheap to build and train, at least when compared to most other units in Mech Wars. In addition, they move relatively quick; the fastest ones will get you a full report within 1 hour.
However, due to bad engineering, spydrones have one major drawback: they might fail. At first, this might not be such a bad thing, however, if they fail, the spydrones might reveal something about you. Failing alot, and the enemy suddenly knows alot more about you than you know about them. Fortunately, spydrones don't fail that often. Their success ratios can be found in the Agent Stats stats.
Still, it is important to spy early, spy often. One huge benefit of being in a clan is that you don't have to be alone about the spying. Whenever you have spied and received a spy report back, you can submit it to a shared enemy intelligence database for the clan of which you are a member. The data in this database can be browsed and search at all times.
You are highly encouraged to use this feature as it lessens the amount of espionage you have to carry out — and thus, the risk of giving your enemy the overtake will be lessened immensely. Furthermore, if you are currently in a clanwar, and need hourly updates on the enemies you are at war with, this can be done by the players that are awake while you are asleep, making it much easier to keep track of the enemy.
Be wary though, if too many people from one single clan start spying on one single player, and a lot of those spydrones fail, the player that is spied on might get some free clan member lists for “free”. This means that when using multiple clan members to spy on the same person, limit those people to just a few for each target. 3 or 4 per target should be more than enough, and that should be able to cover all of the 24 hours of the clock as well.
You might wonder why you would want to spy on a single player every hour. No matter how silly this might sound at first, if you are able to extract patterns from the enemy's actions, that's a lot more power to you. This, in turn, will give you the ability to understand the enemy's strategies and tactics, which will be most important when faced with battle. Learn your enemy, and you will never fail.