The spy counter spy handling reminded me of Nobungo's Ambition a very fun game as well.

It allow you to get a huge number of turns in and play a truly huge empire not micro forever. The diplomacy was super cool the idea you could grab governors and let them do the automation was cool. The vanilla patches that the fans made redid a lot of stuff and made it work much much better.

If you ever had that game got the patches and then installed the user made mods, it rocked. Cant believe so many haters of moo3 are here.