\"where oh where have my assassins gone...\"

[barocca]

These are my thoughts,
it would be nice to know for sure...

from playing a couple of heavy agent campaigns,

a border defence catches one agent automatically each turn,
so if your 4 star assassin is the ONLY agent to enter the province, guess who's gonna get caught,

unsure of difference between watch tower and fort at this function.


If your "target" is taken out by some other means, ie another factions agent or faction elimination THEN to avoid the wandering agent problem (in STW)
YOUR assassin Dies - automatically caught!

If the princess gets married, or dies by some other means THEN your assassin is auto caught.

Same if the target is a general, who dies or disbands - your agent is auto caught.

example -
I just targetted all 5 of my assassins on 5 honour Zero polish emissaries, all my assassins were 4 Star, all had 95% chance of success!
the faction was crushed by Byzantine, eliminated!
and all my agents got caught!!!


again this are just observation,
it would be nice to know for sure...

[Pragmatic]

Watch Tower: Gives you views into neighboring provinces.

Border Fort: Catches some enemy secret agents (spies and assassins) as they cross the border. (Small chance. Better to use assassins and spies for counterspying. Not that I've ever seen them get any valor for catching any enemy agents...)

[MajorFreak]

uhhhhhh...actually, the way i understand it is the first agent in gets ganked by the border fort. autogank. regardless of skill of spy/assassin.

quite pathetic actually, especially if you happen to be chasing a target around the map (dumb idea anyways)my suggestion? do what i do: limit your ports and landlock some bishop/princess and gank her/him from all sides...takes alot of assassins, but they cost no maintenance and it's satisfying to get the buggers[/list]personally, they really should have spent the time to make this a real subgame. unfortunately, it would probably take about 6 man months to program. *shrug* thems the brakes. (hopefully next game they put out in the TW series will have actual realtime naval battles and a decent diplomacy subgame)

one can only hope.

[olaf]

If the border fort really does autogank 1 per turn, that sucks badly.

olaf

[Pragmatic]

According to what I've heard, the border fort is supposed to only have a percentage chance of catching an agent as they enter.

It's supposed to be the enemy assassins and spies (and emissaries?) that catch the others.

But yeah, if it IS an auto-catch, then it should catch the weakest assassin/spy, not your best and brightest.

[Gringoleader]

Using assassins on enemy turf is generally too dangerous to be worth the hassle in my opinion. It's much easier just to hit anybody that comes into your territory and pull your assassin back if they leave. Having the assassins in your own back yard improves your own security and keeps losses down, which means that given time and easy targets you should soon have some pretty handy assassins lying about the place.

[TomThumbKOP]

I've seen my assasin traipse around all of Europe chasing a running scared bishop. They went through several provinces with border forts where unless the AI was moving spies/assasins in at the same time, my assasin would have been caught several times if the border forts auto ganked.

[hrvojej]

barocca,
I don't know about other auto caught issues, but if you send several assassins at one target, and the first one gets his target, the remaining ones sent on the mission are not autocaught. I've sent at least 20 assassins after a single target, and if one of the first ones there gets the target, the others just stay in the province where the target was. Only one gets caught per entry, but also they get caught upon exit. In other words, if you're moving from enemy province to enemy province, you have to pass the "border fort exam" twice. And then you have to successfully eliminate target, which is a third check, and not be caught by enemy counteragents, which is a fourth check (don't know which one of these two comes first). As it sounds from your Byz example, you didn't send them after the single target, so they probably got caught independently? Were the emissaries all in the same province?
It just crossed my mind that you might be speaking of the case when they didn't even have the chance for assassination, i.e. were only en route to the target. Maybe it's different then?
Would you care to clarify what do you mean?

[This message has been edited by hrvojej (edited 10-14-2002).]

[barocca]

my assassins were in the same province as the emissaries already,
none of the surrounding provinces even had watchtowers,
the Byxantines and the Poles had taken/lost/retaken the provinces several times over and i thought the honour zero emisaries would be a juicy soft target,
but the byzantines caught the Polish king, and the faction got dissed!

In STW there was a database that contained all AI eligible targets, generals, emissaries etc.
IF a unit got destroyed, disbanded or killed it's slot in the database would be re-used for the Next eligible target built by the AI.
THUS
your agent sent at target #12 Shimazu Emissary,
BUT Oda assasin killed target #12,
Takeda builds an Emissary that turn, it becomes the NEW target#12 and
your agent would be Automatically keep on chasing target #12
and hence try to take out Takeda Emissary!!

It would appear that,
to stop your agents running all over the place killing people you did not target,
if your target is taken out your agent gets caught!

If i send several of my own at one target they do not all die, it seems that if something Else kills the target THEN they all die.
- just odd that all 5 of my 4 star assasins bought it in the same province, on the same turn, trying to kill emissaries that had been "removed" before they even got to try by Polish faction elimination!
- hence my theory...
NOTE the province they were in did not get taken by Byzantines - it went rebel!

again - would be nice to know for sure http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

[This message has been edited by barocca (edited 10-15-2002).]