3 military sabotage spy or using agent with 9500 gold as cost to reveal all armies

wiki.callofwar.com/wiki/ESPIONAGE

As a rule of thumb you can use 7 sabotage spies. In my mind, this gives you a 70% chance of success.

The technique is to put 7 spies in the enemy territory where he is unlikely to post counter-spies. In other words, not his capitol. This will have an initial cost of 7 x $10,000 = 70,000 + 7 x 4,000 = 28,000 for a total cost of 98,000 for your first attempt to reveal all. Then it is 4k per spy per day.

Some people state chances are good with just 5. In my mind, this would give you a 50/50 chance of success.

Put them in a province without any buildings, so they don't get distracted by trying to blow those up.

I usually use four, with an estimated success chance of 60-70%.

That's kind of ridiculous. Anyone, please ignore him, he's played too many RPG games.

I thought 3 give a 50% chance and 5 give a 99% percent chance, is this correct?

Five giving a 99% chance is definitely not right.

If the too many RPG refers to me thats not right either. However, I have played around 250 games including at least 150 thinking this way on reveal all. I have not kept any records but the 10% per spy feels accurate. I first got this number on the forum at around game 50. Who knows what the real numbers are and they could be changed at any time. The only number you can really figure out is 100%.

If you can reveal all 100% through ten trys with just 5 spies, you would definitely beat my numbers.

I am playing one of those all in games where 10 countries have huge resources. I found myself with 17 spies and only one major enemy. I put 10 sabotage and 1 military intellingence spy in country. I did not get a reveal all. First time, I have ever had that many spies return with nothing and the spies were not caught. They just failed to deliver.

Recruit 10 spies then put them on military sabotage in 2 different rural provinces without buildings. Works nearly 100% of the time for me.

The wiki says a spy has a 50% chance to succeed. Therefore by my reasoning, each additional spy would cut your chance of failure in half so one = 50%, two = 75%, three = 87.%, and four = 93.75%. However, based on my experiences in game, this math is probably off. My experience is similar to K.Rosskossovki; four spies probably succeed around 60-70% of the time. The wiki doesn't specifically mention the effect of additional spies. I'm no statistician either.

And here I was wondering to myself why my 4 spies did not reveal all and none of mine were caught either...that would be super frustrating

Does it matter if you place the spies in the province 5 minutes before day change or 5 minutes after day change? In other words, is the chance of success higher if they were in the province longer during the day?

No, they just need to be there when DC comes.

I believe they have updated the Wiki since I started playing (for sure) and maybe since this thread began.

Spies can be assigned to your own or foreign provinces in order to fulfill various missions. In contrast to instant actions, spy missions have a 50% chance of failure and are always completed on the next daychange. Deploying more than 1 spy in the same province increases the rate of success. There is also an inherent chance for spies getting caught either before or after they have executed their mission. Caught spies either vanish or join the enemy.

I have been playing this game quite a long time, since before there was a "Call of War II" in the "Call of War: classic" days. How spies work has changed in that time, I think at least twice. I am not a good enough statistician to prove this, but here is my take on the success rate of military espionage spies.

I think the success rate of each spy is 25% or something very close to it. The total success rate is the chance that at least one spy succeeds; which is to say 1 - (.25)^(number of spies). In words: One minus point two-five raised to the power of number of spies. In tabular form: [Ugh, I explained this incorrectly, and I'm too tired to write a better explanation. But it's right in the table if my theory is correct, and I think my numbers are very close to what the game uses.]



Other spy uses -- revealing units is usually the most useful thing you can do with a spy, but there are others.

Military espionage -- destroying military buildings is of limited usefulness, with, to my mind, one main exception: airbases. There are many ways to disrupt enemy airbases, but if you don't have the units to do it directly you can always send spies. Note that you pretty much have to know the base is there to attack it. You can get an idea where enemy airbases are by watching enemy planes move, another option is to send your planes on patrol looking for airbases. Also, you can probably weaken or destroy forts using spies, but honestly I've never tried, my cure for enemy forts has always been just to bring up ranged units like artillery.

Economic sabotage -- this can damage the enemy's economic buildings but it's slow, and a bit iffy costwise as you may wind up spending more on spies than the enemy spends repairing the damage.

Intelligence -- as far as I can tell all this does is let you read some of the enemy's diplomatic messages. A heads up when you're about to be backstabbed is nice, but you're likely to spend more maintaining the spies than any info they gather is worth. Also be aware that messages in the coalition channel apparently cannot be read, which cuts into the usefulness further.

I only learnt the trick right before my last game. I tried it in the game and I haven’t failed in revealing all armies yet with 3 spies

Honestly, I think you can do better than stack all the spies in an unoccupied province. It doesn't matter where they are, so long as they're in the right country, they still get their ~25% chance of reveal units. Why not place them where they can mess with your enemy's day? What does it hurt if they damage the occasional naval base or something?

I say scatter them around where they can do more potential damage. Check your spy report daily, and if they actually damage a facility, assume the enemy is now going to place counter-espionage in that province, and THEN move any spies elsewhere. I'll grant you this requires some attention and activity compared to just parking them in an unoccupied province, but it gives your enemy some extra aggravation, so I think it worthwhile.

One last comment -- sometimes you don't want an enemy to know he's being spied on. In that case, yes, put those spies in empty provinces.