Okay, I have a better understanding of this now. I came across this table relating to fleets (somewhere in this forum): I then made the assumption that the average values for attributes in a group do not matter (as such). You do need to maximise the average, but it is not the key factor. You need as few people in the team as possible. Then I did calculations. The planet had 6 mon cals (Detection Rating = 6*20) and a character (leadership=89) I then assumed that the same multipliers as above applied: 6*20 *3 = 360 detection rating. I then assumed that i only need to beat this with espionage. So I took a group of 8 characters, 4 as decoys and made sure both real and decoy had espionage greater than 360. This worked perfectly. (Although one of my team got captured as i set them to sabotage the mon cal). Things are still unclear from this such as do then teams over all stats count, or do you have to seperate decoy and real. Perhaps some more playing around at some point will reveal this.