Is spying horribly unbalanced or what?

[Deggial]

... Whenever I go to do one it tells me I have 11% chance of success, ... I've lost a city-state to a coup ... I've emptied my treasury re-allying them each turn ... How could they be pulling off coups that often? They obviously get much more than an 11% chance.

The probability of a successful coup is related to the amount of influence the opposing player/AI has towards the CS.

The AI seemed to have quite a lot of influence in your case. Some more and your coup-chances would have dropped to 0%.

You, on the other hand, bought back 5 CSs in a row. I guess, you reached barely the necessary influence on each of them to be allied again? Therefore the probabilities of an succesful AI coup were indeed way higher than 11%!

 

[RedFuneral]

The probability of a successful coup is related to the amount of influence the opposing player/AI has towards the CS.

The AI seemed to have quite a lot of influence in your case. Some more and your coup-chances would have dropped to 0%.

You, on the other hand, bought back 5 CSs in a row. I guess, you reached barely the necessary influence on each of them to be allied again? Therefore the probabilities of an succesful AI coup were indeed way higher than 11%!

To the first comment, I was actually playing Monty. The civ in question was one I downloaded, the Rus, who had near no score and were completely bankrupt which just made it all the more irritating as they had no chance of winning by that point and were just bringing CSs into their wars.

I'm playing with the CCTP mod, hence the large amount of money I had to buy back the city states. I had near 200/60 relationship with the city each time they pulled the coup and I know for a fact they didn't have any money/units to gift to the city nor did it have any quests they could have completed.

 

[adwcta]

some city states you should just ignore.

for a UN victory, I had 600+/60 (not a typo) for a city state the runaway apparently really wanted... still lost it in the end, but luckily didn't need it to get past the vote threshold.

AIs trade with each other. Even if you empty thier treasury via trade, they can trade a resource the next turn to get gold and use it without you ever knowing.

As for coup-ing, just put one of your spies in the CS, and counter-coup (the turn after they coup for highest chance). Or, you can even feed it some money and then coup for better odds. It's really meant as a desperate attempt or bridging a small gap (say less than 15 influence) in contested CSs. In non-contested CSs, you can get 70%+ coup rates pretty easily.

I enjoying the coup system, since it lets you hold on to particular CSs better, while making it harder to hold onto an entire map of CSs. It only feels like you're getting coup-ed every other turn, because there's so many other civs out there with equal number of spies.

If you're going into the late game and not going super-wide, building the spy national wonder to level up all your spies and get an extra spy really makes a HUGE difference to your ability to control the CS map, or if you really need to control few specific CSs for resource/tactical reasons.