I have been hearing rumors regarding spy success rate being higher in provinces of lower moral, I decided to test this using intelligence spies on high moral (95-100%) and low moral (30-45%) provinces in pairs of 2 (because I'm lazy, I get this isn't ideal). Both settings were tested in the exact same density and both were done using pairs. I simply went to the reports and counted each success manually, as intelligence spies are pretty easy to figure out if they succeeded or not. Another thing to note, out of the 280 spy attempts tested, 0 were caught, even with some counter spies present. I accidentally proved intelligence spies cannot be revealed.

Success/Total
Test 1: 6/10 for low, 5/10 for high.
Test 2: 14/20 for low, 11/20 for high.
Test 3: 15/20 for low, 12/20 for high.
Test 4: 19/30 for low, 15/30 for high.
Test 5: 36/60 for low, 23/60 for high (At this point it was getting really crowded, so I think this is the cause for the suddenly low results).

Using 90/140, 30-45% moral results in 65% success rate.
Using 66/140, 95-100% moral results in 47% success rate.
A thing to note here is that the last test was significantly lower than anticipated.
- 54% average dropped to 38% in test 5 for high.
- 68% average dropped to 60% in test 5 for low.
- This could indirectly suggest that these experimental results are lower estimates if I were to be more consistent with these testing.

The results I am drawing from all 5 tests is that low moral had a significantly higher success rate than high moral in every single test. I suspect a system of 50% success rate on high moral (as suggested in the game), and an increasing rate of .25% for each moral less than than 100, peaking at 75% success rate at 0% moral. However since rebellions are a thing, this should only reliably reach 68% as rebellions occur at and below 28% moral (as in the last 7% is more or less unreasonable to consider). Note I am just theorizing here for these numbers using the results I got, but the numbers do suggest this could be true.

What are your thoughts on this? Has this already been confirmed before? If so what are the specifics about this, as it doesn't mention it anywhere in the wiki or in game as far as I can tell. What about counter espionage? It wouldn't be a bad assumption to assume all offensive spies work this way, but I have no idea about defensive spies. Maybe they have a higher success rate at higher moral, or maybe no change at all.

As of why I did this? A mix of curiosity and having to wait for the coalition cooldown to win my current round.

Yeah but I like numbers.

I just proved that intelligence spies cannot be caught, there were 10 counter espionage spies present, I know this because intelligence spies reveal this information. Some were directly in the center of my group of 60 spies, the result was out of the 280 spy attempts, you can see the success rate, and 0 were caught.

What point is it not luck anymore?

My gosh it was luck, would you look at this haha.

Long story short, I placed 211 intelligence spies, 10 economic and 10 military spies (for testing if they were actually be caught or if something else was up) in a province with 45 counter spies. This confirms I am in fact insane and/or incredibly lucky.

I will be editing the post to make this clear.

Yeah pretty much 20 spies total, 2 groups of 10 were placed on 2 different countries, the spies on one country were all low moral provinces, the other was on all high moral provinces. Each province had 2 spies on it, not for any particular reason beyond I figured I would be running out of provinces at some point once I reached higher numbers, and wanted to keep things consistent. The tests were just different day changes, I just counted how many succeeded.

So I may have missed one, but I didn't see anything in the newspaper article, I assumed it was a mistake on my end, as on the final test of 120 spies, the following day had 119. I figured since it was only 1 spy, I must have forgot to place it.