Okay, the whole thing is a good idea. What you are talking about is not espionage, but rather reverse engineering. I think there should be some amount of both. The alien race is far more advanced right? So that means that at some piont in time, they could probably mimic human ships and humans themselves, for espionage missions, however, humans would not be able to mimic the phisical appearence of the aliens, due to less advanced tech, however, humans have an enoumous amount of ingenuity, and they could reverse engineer debris. Its a kind of trade off for the same outcome, the aliens infiltrate and steal tech, while the humans salvage and reverse engineer tech. Reverse engineering alien technolgy could be the major stepping stones in human advancements (like say graviy well tech, or reactionless drives). While at the same time as studying for something specific (like say Ion cannons), they will notice about 30 other things that they may not understand at the time, but when the time comes, they could look into their records and say, Oh yeah! so thats how we could make this reletively minor technology work! Basically in-game, reverse engneering alien tech allow leaps in technology, and slightly decreses research time for all other techs. Aliens would lack something that the humans have (like efficiency) and infultrate the human populace and find out how to moke their technology more effective and efficient (building ships and facilities faster, get more use out of your resources, exc.). By stealing, reverse engineering/infiltrating techs results in allowing both sides to know the weaknesses of other ships, making attacks and defenses more effective.


How about That? ^^^^^^


Note, I just copied my post in the discussion entitled Corporate Espionage, so if a few thing don't make perfect sense, thats why