No Coup for you: AI spy mechanics?

Something that's been going on for a while but hasn't caught my attention until recently is the tenacity and effectiveness of the AI to stage successful coups in an allied city state. This has happened in a few games but it's been most notable in my last one where a single opponent was able to stage a successful coup of a city state every other turn or so. When I try to stage a coup, my chances are next to nix and I hardly ever succeed. As far as I know, there aren't any special abilities or SPs that grant higher coup success. The civ has adopted most of patronage and has built the Forbidden Palace.

What I want to know is how spying works for the AI in comparison to a human player. It turned into a struggle where I was throwing all of my money at city states to regain my influence, which was putting a hamper on my treasury for ages.

Two games ago I had the Celts coup a City-State I had about 170 Influence with and drop me to around 20, I've also seen the same in G&K, which leads me to believe they can coup with a much better chance than a human player has as if I tried that it would be 0%.

Honestly, I think it's less nefarious than you would believe and more stupidity. I think the AI is probably spamming coups all game and failing 99% of the time. They probably don't wait for 85% success chance and just continously lose spies all game.

I base this hypothesis on what I've seen and it matches up with what you've seen aka Occasionally they succeed with a level 1 spy which gets leveled up in the process and you end up with them performing coups every other turn, only this time its successful because of the leveled up spy.

I believe it's a bug/unfair design and have reported it as such. I think the AI gets some bonus or another performing coups. It happens too regularly to be the AI just getting lucky. Ashurbanipal snatched the city-state I just purchased during their '+50% from gold' phase. I had 117 more influence over the city-state than them, ie. they had practically none before. My spy listed a 0% chance of successful coup. Even in the unlikely case it was in fact just a matter of the AI getting extremely lucky, it's still a bad play sending off a spy to die on a 0% chance bet. Those spies don't respawn instantaneously and would be better spent elsewhere.

This is sounding exactly like G&K. It does confirm though my suspion that the spy/diplomat bug in initial release of BNW was causing it not to use spies for city states, and is now fixed.

Basically, don't throw cash at a city state; just place your own spy if its important; use it to rig elections until good enough and then coup.

Even if going for diplomatic victory, you don't really need diplomats until aprox six turns prior to the next vote following you getting Globalization.

Yes, it's the same bug/'feature' from G&K, they just still haven't addressed it. I actually thought it was gone; I've had only a few episodes of it with BNW whereas with G&K, city-states would get couped left and right. I'm guessing this is due to the AI using its spies differently now (diplomats) but the core bug definitely still persists.

I wouldn't call it a bug... I do the same thing to the AI once I get a level 3 spy. I've couped a CS while being at war with the CS' ally to immediately flip their allegiance a handful of times.

The AI seems to always go after the same city state too.

I wish spying had more depth to it. I'd like to be able to threaten war if they keep spying on me. After I catch the enemy faction stealing tech, or find out they stole it, unless I declare war on them, I am unable to do anything about it short of turning spying off.

NASAROG said:

I wish spying had more depth to it. I'd like to be able to threaten war if they keep spying on me...

Click to expand...

You can ask the civ that is probably spying on you to stop in the "discuss..." option of diplomacy. Though it doesn't always stop them if they agree to. You also risk offending them by making that request if the refuse to. You can also click on the "[civ] stole [tech]!" bubble and confront the civ about it.

As for the rest of the responses, I'm not sure what to make of it myself. Bug or design, it just doesn't seem sensible. Perhaps I'm not seeing the whole picture but it's definitely annoying when it happens.