a game can get coup-crazy

The CS gameplay in GK is much much improved. CS's are now a real site of action and the quests are more varied, so any CS is far more in play than it used to be, making it more challenging to keep a herd of them under your influence.

But the coup ability of espionage is amazing. Coups can happen over and over again because a spy can survive to pull the trick repeatedly. Hovering over the coup button with your spy in a CS is very informative, giving you the % chance of success.

I've had games where one civ will be pulling coups all over the place. Since nobody can have more than five spies, this means the spies are being moved from CS to CS to keep the coup ball rolling...all it takes is a few turns in a CS to be ready to act.

In one case, Hiawatha staged a coup in a CS that was my ally. I used money to get the CS back on the next turn, then on the very next turn after that, Hiawatha got the CS right back again with another coup.

Since Hiawatha was loaded with cash (18k gold), I wondered why he was risking a spy when he could have bought enough influence to put me in the dust for good...and still have enough left to buy beers for the house.

Coups are a pain, but apart from that: The upcoming patch will make "AI less likely to try coups", so apparantly the AI seems overly likely to do this instead of just buying you out, but actually there is good reason in using coups instead of buying you out - instead of buying full influence, you can spend less money to get perhaps 10-20 influence below leader and then use a coup with very good succes chance (70-85 %) and you will gain an amount of influence and they will lose that amount of influence and it doesn't cost you anything (apart from the small chance of the coup failing).

In my last immortal game, Austria has bought off 11 CSs, and the last city state standing had multiple coups each turn from all the other civs. Crazy.

The patch will also see that coups have less success rates in CSs where opposing spies are stationed.

I'd really love to see a "track and kill opposing spies" option for spies, though. Frankly, more options in general for the spies would be nice.