Stupid is what stupid does

This may be a stupid question, but here goes:

Even I - being just a simpleminded person - can think of many ways to "code" text. I might change letters to codes in a number of different ways. 'A' might be 65 but it might as well be anything else, like 12345. Or maybe I "code" pairs or even triples of letters, say 'SPY' as a number 0 ... 16777215 or something like that.

These different "codings" are not cryptography, true. They are rather simple, true. But surely using ASCII-codes is not the only alternative. Maybe the number of different simple codings is not unlimited but I believe it is quite big.

So, how can cryptoanalysis work? Does a cryptoanalyst check for every possible simple coding of letters? How can he do that?

I suppose a cryptoanalyst thinks he has found a solution when he sees text he understands. Well, the "codings" are simple, but they make it unlikely that the cryptoanalyst sees normal text.

I have a feeling this is wrong but I don't know why and how.

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