After nine long months, Firaxis patched their epic strategy game again. In addition to addressing some small but important errors, the new Civilization IV patch lets you disable an entire feature: the espionage added in the Beyond the Sword expansion. Apparently Firaxis heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth from those of us who felt the new spying system was a mess of nearly Love Guru proportions. So, like this Administration before invading Iraq, we can simply check a box before starting a game and then not worry one whit about espionage.

Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Yes, espionage is often tedious and micromanagement-intensive, which doesn't jibe with Civilization IV's clean elegant rules. But it's threaded like spaghetti code throughout the game. Espionage is a part of buildings, Great Persons, technologies, units, and even the way information is presented. Taking it out will require a bit of effort.

So what did Firaxis do? Not much. In espionage-less games, buildings that produce "espionage", a resource similar to gold or "happiness", simply produce "culture". That's right, culture. The same resources produced by theatres, cathedrals, Rock n' Roll, and Hollywood. The Scotland Yard wonder of the world will be your new Sydney Opera House. Your civilization will earn more culture with every intelligence agency, courthouse, and jail you build. I can only imagine Firaxis' inspiration was this instance of jailhouse rock :

On the plus side, the patch includes a poor-to-middling MesoAmerican scenario and a really cool map script called Earth2. The new map script situates different civilizations in their proper locations around a randomized Earth-like layout. It's a fun bit of revisionist geography leading to a world known for, say, the exotic spices of the American Northwest, the silk of Australian, the wines of Mongolia, and the rich oil fields of the Caribbean.

You can get the patch from the ingame updater, because 2K Games and Firaxis can't be bothered to actually host it on their own sites.