On the use of agents...

[mir]

Is it just me or does anyone else use masses of agents?

In my current Turkish campaign, I have 3 diplomats, maybe a dozen spies, 15 imams and 20 assassins...

It gets really tedious using them every single turn after a while...

But I do use them (especially the imams to convert newly-conquered regions) to full effect...

[pevergreen]

I will never, ever use agents.

If i get a mission i will build the agent for it, complete the mission and forget about it.

If i migrate to The Holy Lands, I will use 2-3 priests. Thats it.

[Ethelred Unread]

I'm with mir, I always use loads, especially merchants, spies and priests.

It is a hassle to micromanage them so I usually:-

- Group all the priests together to go converting, except maybe one to eal with heretics at home.

- Merchants are usually being trained in my home provinces or out acquiring other merchants or on the long slog to timbuktu.

- Spies are ahead of my armies, or in my own towns. They take up the most time as you need to move them the most to react to what the AI is doing.

- Diplomats to the local capitals and assasins when my king has over 3 dread, (my own house rules)

So not too much trouble!

[PBI]

I'm lazy with my agents so I tend to have a lot of them. Especially with diplomats or spies, I will create the when I need them for a specific mission, and then forget about them until they die. If I need them again I usually forget I have them and train a new agent.

Priests I always have lots of, they're cheap and help you to control the holy lands. Merchants I also have tons of, I tend to have virtually every resource worth more than about 100 florins a turn covered by a merchant, cumulatively it adds up to a lot of extra income if you control the resources at Dongola and Timbuktu and all the spices, sugar and silk in the middle east.

Assassins i don't tend to use much, for some reason I always tend to end up with more chivalrous characters than dreaded ones, so I don't want to mess up my faction leader.

EDIT: Forgot to mention another good reason for spamming merchants: It gets you lots of merchant's guilds, which increase the trade income of you cities.

[Anonymous II]

I ususally keep 3 diplomats or so... one for Southwestern Europe, one for Northern Europe, and one for Middle East.

Priest, I always keep a lot of. I try to keep one per province. I usually get many cardinals, so later in the game, it seems whichever cardinal I vote for, becomes the pope. :yes:

Spies I keep at frontier cities.

Merchants I never use, only in Africa if I ever bother.

Never use Assassins either.

[Rhyfelwyr]

I usually have a diplomat at Rome if I am a Catholic faction, plus one or maybe two elsewhere. I basically have a spy for each hostile frontier, or general exploration early on to make my map info more valuable. I rarely use assassins. I only bother if enemy religious agents are being annoying, or sometimes to take out Mongol generals or characters targeted in a mission. Even the Pope sometimes, gives really cool movies if he's in Rome.

Generally though I don't like the micromanagement and I'm looking forward to seeing the new system in ETW.

[mir]

Hmmm. Thanks for the input everyone. Glad I'm not alone. :laugh4:

I find that I'm addicted to Assassins... They serve three major purposes:

1) I've already stopped the Mongol invasion by killing off their leaders - the armies just disappear without leaders. Of course, it took a LOT of Assassins but it was worth it. I only had to engage maybe two stacks in battle at most...

2) Halting/delaying Crusades. Every so often, the Western empires will declare a Crusade on one of my cities, usually either Antakya (Antioch) or Kudus (Jerusalem). Poland, Hungary, France, Venice, Spain and Portugal all sent Crusader armies mainly via land. All had to pass through Sofya (Sofia) where my Assassins were waiting...

Assassinate the Crusade General(s) and the army turns back for home. Or in some cases, I simply wiped out the army once their leaders were dead! Cut off the head and the body will die!

3) I also eliminate rival factions by decimating their leadership. Byzantium lost all its family members thanks to my excessive use of Assassins (with Spies sent ahead to find them). Now, all the former Byzantine provinces are rebel provinces instead and much easier to mop up.

Tedious micro-management but pretty useful in a pinch... :2thumbsup:

[mfberg]

I'd really like it if they gave us the option to use AI for our agents. We'd just build them and the computer would do the rest, the only screen we'd see would be diplomacy.

mfberg

[Diehard_TH]

Agree that micro-manging can be a pain, so i don't spam agents, plus i feel spamming assassins etc is cheating:no:

Priests, i really don't see the point (except for Holy Land). i liked the idea of the Cardinal thing but it doesn't really work in practise.

Merchants, a must have. Aquisitions are great and the Master guild is good too, i still don't spam them though, i have about 5-10 usually.

Spies, very useful but i only have 4 or so around my frontlines and maybe a couple in recently conquered cites.

Assassins, i keep a few around for missions and killing off enemy agents but thats it really.

Diplomats, useless as the AI is awful for this and there is no 'threaten' option. It would great to have the option to say 'withdraw your troops or i will attack' or 'pay me 3000 florins or i will attack' etc. Once your empire is established though the AI won't let you do anything anyway so i don't bother with diplomats later on.

So in summary - Merchants and Spies useful, Assassins less so, the rest pointless. IMHO of course :beam:

[PBI]

There is a "do this or I will attack" option in diplomacy. It never works though, usually just gets the other faction angry at you. There certainly isn't a "get off my land" option though which is very annoying.

Diplomats are still handy though, for getting trade rights, selling map information and giving gifts to the Pope. You can also use them to trick the AI into giving you money or lands very cheaply if you don't mind exploiting them; check out Askthepizzaguy's Denmark AAR if you want to know how to master these dark arts.

[Anonymous II]

Priests, i really don't see the point (except for Holy Land). i liked the idea of the Cardinal thing but it doesn't really work in practise.


What do you mean? I think it works exactly as it should. As mentioned above, with so many cardinals I usually get, I get to pick the pope every time. :thumbsup:

[Diehard_TH]

What do you mean? I think it works exactly as it should. As mentioned above, with so many cardinals I usually get, I get to pick the pope every time. :thumbsup:

Must be me then:embarassed:

How do you get Priests skills increased? I wander them over to non-Catholic lands but they never seem to gain anything. Burning Heretics is good, but they are rare. Do you have to spam priests or something?

[Anonymous II]

Must be me then:embarassed:

How do you get Priests skills increased? I wander them over to non-Catholic lands but they never seem to gain anything.

You'd have to make sure these non-catholic lands are owned by catholic factions. If you go to, say Turkey, there will be city masjids and imams working against your priest. So if he's got low piety in the first place, he won't increase his skills at al. So: at least don't do that.

The best thing is off course if you have some newly conquered lands that are not entirely catholic, and make your priest wander around there.

Another important thing: Make sure from the beginning of your game, that one of your bigger cities becomes your religious centre. Recruit all your priests there, and build church-upgrades as soon as they are available. When a priest is recruited from a city with cathedral or above, he'll be "born" with the "bishop" trait, and I also think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) he'll be more likely to get retinues that increases piety.

Recruiting priests and building churches builds up points for the theologian's guild (I guess you already know this :yes: ), and this will give him theologian's guild traits when recruited from this city. This guild can be obtained not to far into the game if a city is specialised.

Above tips always work for me. It's nice to get to choose pope, and thus choosing which faction to improve relations with. :thumbsup:

And finally:
As long as your priest has higher piety than an opponent (imam or orthodox priest), you can safely send him over to foreign lands. Or, when that being said, I don't know if or how much the masjids affects his abilities to convince the people there to listen to your priest rather than the local imam.

[CynicalP]

I put a Priest/Bishop and spy in every town or castle I have. When I conquer a town or castle where I my religion is the minority I usually put about 3 to 4 priests to convert the populace ( I rarely raze or exterminate the populace ).

I will add a spy with several of my main generals to provide protection from assassins. I also use them to scout ahead of my stack advancement to provide some recon and watch for ambushes.

I like to play chivalrous so I normally don't produce assassins.

I maintain about 7-10 diplomats that I park near factions I want to keep on peaceful terms. I have been able to stave off many unwanted wars or broker immediate ceasefires giving me enough time to reinforce regions near a future hostile faction.

I don't bother with merchants because they tend to require the most micromanagement to use effectively and by mid-game my economy is usually in overdrive so I don't need the extra income a merchant would generate. I don't even want to bother with the merchant warfare aspect of the game.

So yeah I generate and use alot of agents.

[Walternat0r]

As a catholic faction I always always always have a diplomat sat on the popes head incase I do anything naughty and he needs a swift bribing (God <3 £££ apparently), and usually a diplomat or 3 floating around updating map info for no real reason other than to justify their existence.

Spies I use maybe 3-5 of, basically as advancable and moving watch towers, to see whats coming and if I should plonk an army on a road, a bridge, or 3/4 of the way up a mountain. And sometimes to quickly assualt a place but thats rare.

In my England campaign (SS 6) i've got a huuuuuuuuge amount of priests. Some even converting in the holiest of ways possible:
https://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/Walternat0r/HolyCross.jpg
In that campaign i've also got Egypt trapped in Mecca as my vassals with a bunch of priests and cardinals converting it to Christianity. At about 60% christian now and the place is always rioting, they'll rebel soon and I can swoop in for the taking in a nice, honourable way. I own the entire college of cardinals in that campaign with 5 extras incase any of the current ones pop their clogs, the last 4 popes have also been English, wahoo!