(2-02) Proposal: Coups require one successful election rigging to activate

Stalker0

Baller Magnus
Joined
Dec 31, 2005
Messages
10,598
Proposal: The coup button begins inactive with a tooltip noting, "you have not yet completed an election rigging in this city state". Once one election rigging has occurred, the button activates, and coups can proceed as normal. Anytime you move the spy into a new CS, you must complete a new rigging to start coups again.

Rationale: Currently coups are far too strong. It is easy to spam them, and they activate in relative short order, that it makes all other spy activities look like child's play in comparison. It is trivial to control massive numbers of CS through coups at the moment, there needs to be a nerf. This proposal maintains the strength of coups but also greatly increases the time it takes to activate them. This prevents players from just moving spies around constantly couping, you now need to "invest" some time in the city state to get the benefit. Thematically this also makes sense, you have to rig some elections and get your spies situated before you can pull off a coup.
 
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Election rigging is when the spy adds some influence to you and subtracts from everyone else every X turns. You get it simply from stationing a spy there.

Coup is the action you select that switches your influence with the one of the civ with the highest influence, and that has a chance of failing and getting your spy killed.
 
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Election rigging is when the spy adds some influence to you and subtracts from everyone else every X turns. You get it simply from stationing a spy there.

Coups is the action you select that switches your influence with the one of the civ with the highest influence, and that has a chance of failing and getting your spy killed.
Ok, then how can you select coup? I could only move spies to CSS, but that's it. It's just election rigging then, right?
 
It is in the spy screen, in which you can see where all your spies are assigned. Currently, you can only select a coup after the spy finishes building a network in the city-state, and that city-state isn't allied to you. Also, once someone coups a city-state, there's a 20-turn cooldown (standard speed) before it can be done again by any civ.
 
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This seems like a reasonable nerf, agree that currently coup is far too strong. You shouldn't be able to ally every CS on the map!
 
I don't think this nerf is enough, since as far as I can see non-statecraft AI rarely use spy to coup, so once you passed a 75%+ roll you would likely be their ally until another statecraft AI step up with diplo units spam.
It won't do anything to the coup then DoW cheese, practically only reduce the frequency of getting new ally CS by a bit.
The core issue is still the huge success chance, which we would need a new formula to fix. With influence decay AIs won't get to stack thousands of influences at late game anymore, coup chance should be balanced around 80% when you have the same amount of influence with the ally (thus reasonably the chance would be 40% if you have half of their influences, and get to 80% with freedom tenet).
 
This is a really good proposal I think. A nerf to coups is much needed, and the proposal fits thematically and also adresses the problem that coups are too easy and valuable compared to the other spy actions.

Would you require a successful election rigging for the coup? How exacly is it determined if a rigging is successful, do you know that?
 
Would you require a successful election rigging for the coup? How exacly is it determined if a rigging is successful, do you know that?
Technically there is a mechanic for a CS election rig to fail, but either its so low that its practically non-existant or it was taken out in VP.... because I have not seen an election rig fail in a very very very long time.
 
It can fail if there are two spies in the CS.
 
It can fail if there are two spies in the CS.
Ooh, that's interesting. That could actually make leaving spies in super-valuable city-states more useful, since it would provide partial protection against coups under this system.
 
I looked into the code and if I'm not mistaken, the calculation is as follows:

In each turn in which a player has a spy stationed in the city-state, the player gets a number of votes (1 vote for a Recruit, 4 for an Agent, 9 for a Special Agent). On election day, the votes that have been collected by the players in the previous turns are compared. The chance to rig an election for each player is (number of own votes)/(total number of votes). Some modifiers (policies etc) are applied as well.

Example: Player 1 has a Recruit for 6 turns in the CS before the election, Player 2 has an Agent there for 2 turns. Then the number of votes are (6, 8). Player 1 has a chance of 6/14 to rig the election, Player 2 has a chance of 8/14.

Numbers of votes are reset after each election. So, if two spies of the same rank are stationed in the same CS for one complete election period, the chances should be 50/50.
 
I looked into the code and if I'm not mistaken, the calculation is as follows:

In each turn in which a player has a spy stationed in the city-state, the player gets a number of votes (1 vote for a Recruit, 4 for an Agent, 9 for a Special Agent). On election day, the votes that have been collected by the players in the previous turns are compared. The chance to rig an election for each player is (number of own votes)/(total number of votes). Some modifiers (policies etc) are applied as well.

Example: Player 1 has a Recruit for 6 turns in the CS before the election, Player 2 has an Agent there for 2 turns. Then the number of votes are (6, 8). Player 1 has a chance of 6/14 to rig the election, Player 2 has a chance of 8/14.

Numbers of votes are reset after each election. So, if two spies of the same rank are stationed in the same CS for one complete election period, the chances should be 50/50.
Unless the AI just never puts spies in CS, that can't be right. CS rigs are way way way more likely than the odds noted here, close to 100%. Its honestly been so long since I've seen a CS rig fail that I had forgotten it was even a possibility.
 
Unless the AI just never puts spies in CS, that can't be right. CS rigs are way way way more likely than the odds noted here, close to 100%. Its honestly been so long since I've seen a CS rig fail that I had forgotten it was even a possibility.
I've had hundreds in a row without fail.
 
Unless the AI just never puts spies in CS
You can know when they placed a spy on a known CS because you get a message saying that "your influence with <<city state name>> has mysteriously fallen". That message rarely happens to me, so it is likely that the odds of placing a spy on the same CS they placed theirs is abysmally low simply because they may not even place any spy anywhere in the first place.
 
Yeah - I have seen the "election shenanigans" notification, but usually it's because it's England and it's early game.

Not sure I see the AI attempt coups very often, either, now I think about it?
 
I looked into the code and if I'm not mistaken, the calculation is as follows:

In each turn in which a player has a spy stationed in the city-state, the player gets a number of votes (1 vote for a Recruit, 4 for an Agent, 9 for a Special Agent). On election day, the votes that have been collected by the players in the previous turns are compared. The chance to rig an election for each player is (number of own votes)/(total number of votes). Some modifiers (policies etc) are applied as well.

Example: Player 1 has a Recruit for 6 turns in the CS before the election, Player 2 has an Agent there for 2 turns. Then the number of votes are (6, 8). Player 1 has a chance of 6/14 to rig the election, Player 2 has a chance of 8/14.

Numbers of votes are reset after each election. So, if two spies of the same rank are stationed in the same CS for one complete election period, the chances should be 50/50.

I tested it using a hotseat game: it works indeed as described here. The AI just (almost) never uses spies in city-states when another spy is already there. I will open a github ticket
 
Coup chances have been changed in version 3.0, they base chance for a coup (before modifiers from higher spy ranks and policies) is now 50-(influence difference to the current ally)/25. It was 100-(influence difference to the current ally)/10 before.

Also, it just happened to me that an election rigging failed, in turn 181. Maybe this was due to this fix:
- AI less likely to assign all its spies to do the same thing
Has anyone else experienced that the AI are more likely to rig elections now?
 
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Coup chances have been changed in version 3.0, they base chance for a coup (before modifiers from higher spy ranks and policies) is now (50-(influence difference to the current ally)/25)%. It was (100-(influence difference to the current ally)/10)% before.

Also, it just happened to me that an election rigging failed, in turn 181. Maybe this was due to this fix:

Has anyone else experienced that the AI are more likely to rig elections now?
Ok great to know, I knew something had changed!

Yes CS rigs are a lot more common now, the AI is going to work on those CS.

I may actually withdraw this proposal. With these new adjustments honestly coups have come down in value a great deal. They are still good, but the lower chance (which is basically 46-48% out of the gate instead of 75%) really makes you consider the risk to losing a spy now.
 
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