It is true that AI will frequently fail at coups - which may be bad luck, or may be because he tries with very low CoS. However, I do think my loathing of coups is pretty substantiated. I don't particularly dislike the idea of being able to do coups in general, but the endless I-coup-you-and-you-coup-me-and then it all starts over again is just stupid.
Problem comes when you are pretty close in influence - say, if I have 100 points and he has 80. Then he coups me and get the difference (20) and I lose the same amount if I'm not mistaken so I'm not at 80 and he's at 100 (right?). That leaves me either the choise of buying him out or couping him back if I have my own spy in town. If I coup him, we go back to me being 100 and him being 80. If I buy him out, I can throw in 500 gold and perhaps gain 40 points - which will bring me up to 120 and him still being at 100, which means exactly status quo of original situation. He can then coup me next turn again.
So bottom line, unless I can throw in several thousand gold to bring me up to >100+ compared to him, there's not a single thing I can do about it except for endless coups until one of us get a bad roll. That just seems stupid. So I really think there needs to be a cooldown between how often you can perform a coup, and having your own spy in the CS should give you a chance of catching the enemy spy when at work.
at least if theyre going to include coups, give control to the player to build spies rather than being given one spy per era, which is pretty limited in what you can do to defend against coups or do your own coups. if multiple civs are couping multiple city states of mine and i only have one spy, then there really isnt much i can do to defend against these coups. at least if i had the option to invest my resources into training more spies it would give the player an opportunity to make the choice of how important defending against coups was going to be.
