How can someone with 1/6th as many spies as me blow up thousands of my buildings?

I tested spy defense a couple sets ago when I got 6.7m spies with 140% spy tech as a dictator, and I still couldn't stop harmful spy ops despite having one of the best spy defenses ever on the alliance server.

It's apparently impossible to stop people with significantly lower spy counts than you from succeeding with harmful spy ops numerous times.

I don't know but I am constantly failing ops on people with far less spies/spal than me. I also have two good spy allies.

I don't quite understand the spy thing, but it doesn't seem to add up to me.

Haha I've asked qzjul about this before. Even if I have a better SPAL they succeed on 75% of their bomb buildings and blow up like 20% of my buildings everyday.

Yeah, the spy thing is definitely messed up.

And for anyone who chooses to multitap someone, be prepared for what ensues. The wise general is one who wins the war before ever declaring war. And when the guy you hit decides your ass is grass, you have to be focused and dedicated to the war effort. If you are not actively warring the guy or using diplomacy, you better be growing the fluff out of his range. Thinking that you can just half-ass the war and go about your business???? Well, good luck with that.

I have over 500k spies and I have been failing multiple times in the past 3 days to just spy into countries with 100-200k spies. I just figured its my bad luck.

To top it off Rockman, if that country is smaller than you, not only does he get a good chance to succeed even though you have a better SPAL, but the damage he does will be far beyond what you can do back to him in the same number of turns. At least that is what I have encountered dealing with harmful spy ops.

I had all my buildings get blown up in Tourney multiple times by countries with SPAL about 60-70% of mine and they succeed like 75% of the time. This is what qzjul told me when I asked how/why it was happening:

Spy success rate is a gaussian with a fairly large standard deviation; it's not pass/fail nearly as much as attacking is, it's much more of a gradient

does the luck bonus apply then?

This is false

Correct; it's not a thin gaussian like attacking is, it's many times wider than that;

It's definitely felt more interesting lately at closer spals. With 100 spal going against 60 I failed nearly half and had a fair amount get thru against me. With 340 spal against 80 I could ran 20 ops against several countries barely failing any, but still saw a string of 3 SRs go thru against me at one point.

Holey Moley, Crest23 said something I agree with 100%. I'm gonna faint... puff puff

Cerberus do you play primary?

Ya he does (based on the fact he posts on Primary forum).