Are spies getting killed/captured bugs or what is it I'm doing wrong??

[Rapid85]

Hi Everyone,

On my first Civ 6 playthrough on vanilla. I wanted to share my experiences with espionage so far.

I've had 3 spies killed
1 captured
0 successful missions apart from 100% ones
3 of the 4 killed/captured missions have been done with the boost % (listening contacts or whatever it's called?)

I accept that having 4 unsuccessful missions could just be deemed very unlucky but all 4 being captured or killed? I did a very rough calculation of that being a 1 in 100,000 chance. So it appears there are 3 possibilities here:

1. I'm doing something wrong (most likely...)
2. There's a bug somewhere in the calcs
3. I'm the unluckiest Civ player in history (doesn't everyone think this about a game involving RNG....?)

As it's my first playthrough I haven't got any other games to compare it to. When things like this usually happen it's a case of probably missing something. Am I? (doing something wrong). Or could there be a bug somewhere?

I have no idea if it makes any difference that every leader in my game hates me due to perceiving me as a warmonger, even though all I've done is decimate someone that declared a surprise war on me

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences and letting me know what you think about the above.

 

[Equilin]

your target player has been doing counter-espionage, and/or have Cartography civic (-2 level to enemy spies) activated, maybe even have Diplomat Governor with -3 enemy spy level trait.
And no, listening contacts isn't the boost, it's Gain Sources.
Having more military units near spies increases capture chance as well (happens quite a lot when i recruit partisans in enemy territory)

 

[Pualee]

Odd...

My first play through, I lost most of my spies - even with the boost and going for siphon gold missions... but now I don't seem to have any trouble and use them a lot.

... undocumented feature for first game?

I also remember my first game was prince, and I don't play that easy any more. Is it a feature to protect the player on easier difficulty - all spies have reduced chance of success?

 

[AriochIV]

The thing with random chances is... they're random.

One of the shortcomings of computers games is that you (usually) can't see the dice, so you don't know how awfully you're rolling.