Reveal all probabilities hypothesis

(4^n - 3^n)/4^n ? Or 1 - (3^n/4^n)

That seems more accurate than the assumed 50%

How'd you get there?

1. Spy missions have a 50% chance of failure.

2. Military sabotage has a chance to damage or interrupt production OR reveal all armies.

I'm guessing it flips a coin twice 0.5*0.5 = 0.25. So a given spy would have a 25% chance to reveal. It's also possible that damage, interrupt and reveal are separate and weighted equally so reveal would then be 0.5/3 = 16.7%. The numbers above assume 25% and uses the binomial distribution; each spy is a separate coin being flipped with a 25% chance of being heads. If it was instead 16.7% the probabilities would be as follows:

1 16.7%

2 30.6%

3 42.1%

4 51.8%

5 59.8%

6 66.5%

7 72.1%

8 76.7%

9 80.6%

10 83.8%

If it does work something like this I'm questioning the long held belief that multiple spies in a province or buildings in a province make a difference. This would require quite a bit of data to test, but you could scientifically test it by gathering data and seeing if the data rejects the above hypothesis at a given confidence level.

Oof, if it turns out that buildings in a province don't matter for reveals then I've been missing out on a lot of secondary sabotage effects!

Cool stuff.

Do you have a theory for how presence of counterespionage spies would affect it? It's tough to isolate and gather data on probabilities of the spies themselves if we're mostly in real games where we don't know whether the opponent's counterspies are blocking some amount of success.

Maybe I’ll try this in a game soon. I’ll put 6 spies in a country and at the end of the game calculate how many days were revealed or not. To me I feel like 6 spies work 80% of the time so I’m guessing that this is actually quite accurate.

jubjub bird wrote:

Do you have a theory for how presence of counterespionage spies would affect it?

That would make sense. We could craft a 2-d table calculating probability of reveal given X milsab spies and Y counterespionage spies, assuming that each spy is independent and that it doesn't matter whether they're in 1 or many provinces.

Well counter spies only affect spies in the same province they are in.

I don't think that's true, I think they cover all territory. When I use them I usually just stack them in one province and they catch spies in other provinces as far as I can tell.

Well according to what I quoted above from the wiki "failing their mission and being caught in the target province", implies they do their job in a specific province.

Hm, and of course I don't have any active games to test this in. Maybe target province is referring to the enemy spy being caught in the province it was targeting...

I'm pretty sure counter spies work for your whole empire, or at least a larger region than one province. Like jubjub, I have caught (lots of!) enemy spies operating in different provs than the counterspies were located. Still I usually use counterspies in my core, so I don't know how big that region actually is.

They actually do

I had counter spies in Addis Ababa and they caught some in Trelew, South america

Also like jubjub, I fell that reveals are MUCH more common in provs without buildings. I sometimes try using spies in provs with buildings (just for the heck of it), and often find they attacked buildings instead. I think this works something like, "first we figure out if the action was succesful, and then what it did". The "what it did" part of that brings is to 100% reveals on empty provs, and some sort of division between reveal/attack building in the other case.

Ah yea I've got an example too, just remembered from my heavy tank game. I had counters in my core, East Mexico, and caught an enemy spy that was in a province up in Oregon.

Another thing I've wondered is whether spies can be caught without counters, or if you absolutely need a counter to reveal a spy.

K.Rokossovski wrote:

Also like jubjub, I fell that reveals are MUCH more common in provs without buildings. I sometimes try using spies in provs with buildings (just for the heck of it), and often find they attacked buildings instead. I think this works something like, "first we figure out if the action was succesful, and then what it did". The "what it did" part of that brings is to 100% reveals on empty provs, and some sort of division between reveal/attack building in the other case.

If anyone is in a test game right now, spread a bunch of spies across different provinces. I'm pretty sure espionage reports come at the province level so it'll be easier to tally up individual spy results if it's just one spy per province. Split em across buildings/empty and we might be able to put some data to this. I wish I still had my whole-map game to provide my own data.

jubjub bird wrote:

Another thing I've wondered is whether spies can be caught without counters

What the above comment says. Spies get captured all the time, with or without counters.

jubjub bird wrote:

Ah yea I've got an example too, just remembered from my heavy tank game. I had counters in my core, East Mexico, and caught an enemy spy that was in a province up in Oregon.

Another thing I've wondered is whether spies can be caught without counters, or if you absolutely need a counter to reveal a spy.

DxC wrote:

2. Military sabotage has a chance to damage or interrupt production OR reveal all armies.

I'm guessing it flips a coin twice 0.5*0.5 = 0.25. So a given spy would have a 25% chance to reveal. It's also possible that damage, interrupt and reveal are separate and weighted equally so reveal would then be 0.5/3 = 16.7%.

Don't you think the algorithm skips the damage/interrupt flip coin if there are no buldings in the area? Like K Roko, I have always noticed that the spies will reveal more often, if there are no buldings to sabotage. Either that or I am having confirmation bias.

DxC wrote:

Well counter spies only affect spies in the same province they are in.

jubjub bird wrote:

I don't think that's true, I think they cover all territory. When I use them I usually just stack them in one province and they catch spies in other provinces as far as I can tell.