Earlier on FFa, I was taking out a kill target that had no spies.

Being that I didn't have anything important to do, I decided I'd SR him down for a low HPK.

My spal: 105
His spal: 0

I burned through the first 50 ops, and got through about 85% of the time. I switched to my next country and started getting through only half the time. When I switched to my third country, I was getting through 20% of the time. And by the time I got to my fourth country, I didn't get through at all.


This just struck me as odd because I remember once upon a time rubbing my hands together greedily and laughing manically when somebody posted a war time op on somebody that reported no spies and then getting to kill them in 47 hits.

It still took 200 hits to kill my kill target, and that's with all of my countries having strategy tech.

Are people really spied out after 150 ops? That's nuts. The guy had ZERO spies, my ops shouldn't have even been bouncing.

imo u shouldnt be able to harm people with spies, spies spy ^^.

there is diminishing returns for spyop success... and it's exponential essentially, so the more you do the harder it will be to spy... the first 10 or 20 are usually not to bad, beyond that becomes increasingly difficult

though it shouldn't really happen for zero spies, but i dunno entirely

Exponential difficulty for 0?

O^2 = 0
O^3 = 0
O^4 = 0
O^5 = 0

. . .

0^34523452345243 = 0

Should have been a cake walk.

Why should countries with a single spy be awarded so much more defense than countries with zero spies?

The "spying out" effect applies equally to all countries.

Technically, a single spy doesn't ride that much more protection

1^2 = 1
1^3 = 1
1^4 = 1
etc.

Though if that one spy were like james bond or something, he might prove a problem.

You are misinterpreting what exponential means in this context. Spying out has always been related to ops done on the country, not the defender's raw spy count.

confirmed.
the game actually would become *very* broken if it wasn't set up like that.

Wasn't it also based on the number of failed ops? Like if a bunch of noobs with 3 spal ran a few ops each and bounced them all, it would run up the spied out factor faster than if somebody with 300 spal got through on the same number of ops.

I know I've been able to take people down in less than 50 hits before because they had no spies and I set them to our readiness dump. At present, I don't think that's possible.

atm i don't believe success or failure affects the DR rate

Qz is correct.

it used to take 350 ops to get a country within ~ 5-10 BR/GS hits of death that had 0 SPAL

is this still the case?

No.

more/less needed?

i haven't tried a solo spy kill yet so i don't know...

i bet on way more if even possible.

I doubt it is possible based on what Slaggy and Qz are saying.

And based on the frequency my ops were bouncing / number of people leaving / number of hits I still had to make, I'd guess if it were possible, it'd take in the area of 800 ops to get somebody's population down that low.


I reiterate my previous statement. This should have been a cake walk. We don't have arbitrary numbers for BR/GS/AB to protect people from their own stupidity. If they have no turrets, troops, or tanks, they get boned after they tick somebody off. If they have no spies, they should have to live with the consequences of that also.

There is no significant difference between having 0 turrets and having 1 turret. You are lobbying for us to add a significant difference between having 0 spies and having 1 spy so you can get easy kills on the countries with no spies. That is not sufficient justification.

i echo Xelah's general premise that the restrictions on spy use are too harsh

and i would like to follow up on his question about what is essentially spy DR

there are tools to track a country's DR from military actions

is there a tool to track a country's spy DR?
is there a formula for calculating success?

and would you consider raising the number of spy turns from fifty to 100?

no other action is so limited
i can ab somebody as long as i have turns etc
but spies are restricted
i agree with Xelah that the restrictions are currently too tight and should be loosened

"there are tools to track military DR"

this is because news is public


imagine a tool that showed spy DR for everybody; you're netting away, thinking somebody might attack you; you notice your entire clan's spy DR goes up to 1 or 2...

hmmm

maybe an FS is imminent?

this is why a tool like that would be dumb =/

In old Earth this used to be very NW biased. Against a guy with 0 spies, if you were going after a smaller or similar NW guy, you'd start off getting most thru, then after 50 or so you'd average 50% success. Against a much higher NW target, you'd start off with most thru, and by 50 in you'd find it almost impossible to get 1 thru.

it was nw & land based

it is that way now too i think

i can see how a clan game might be effected

what is the rationale in individual games?