assassins don't work

[eeL ylleK]

Every time I get an assassin up to about a 4 valor rating they get killed, evn though thier target shows a 90% chance of success. Also the only people I can kill with them are other emissaries, nobody good, like a General. I finally just stopped using them except to counterspy.

Anyone had any luck using them? Whats the trick?

[Naagi]

The AI likes to keep generals moving around which makes your assassin follow them. Doing this increases the chance for your assassin to be caught by border keeps and other agents. It really hard to use assassins, some say to use multiple assassins per target. I never tried this before though, and mostly use assassins for defense. If there were a way to take out structures with agents it'd be a lot easier.


Naagi http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif

[[alex]]

hmmm, strange..

Sometimes my assasains even kill kings when its only 20% chanse, well... only the italian king anyway :P, he have died on all other attempts...

but just train your assasain, what you could do is to make alot of emmesaries and order your assasain to kill them, and the more he kills, the higher his valour gets :P

hope that helped

[Exile]

Assassins work pretty well for me. I am reluctant to send them into an enemy province with border forts unless the target is really worth it. Usually I send them to take out emissaries and princesses. Occassionally I go after an enemy general. If it were easy, the AI would be assassinating all our good generals, that wouldn't be good.

The life of an assassin is a short one, so I train many. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif


As a side question on the topic, does anyone know if assasinating holy men has a tangible negative effect? For example, if my Christian faction kills an Alim, what are the potential consequences?

[hundurinn]

I allways use assassins. E.g. I train 5 assassins and send the on a enemy king even if the chance of successfull kill is 10% always one of the assassins can kill him and then he get 3-6 stars. If I get excommunicated i send 5 assassins to kill the pope and then i'm no longer excommunicated
http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/joker.gif

[Jeroen Hill]

Well, I usually build about 4 assasins and a bunch of emmisionary's. I let the assasins kill my emmisionary's to gain valour.

I too figured out that assasins are best to be used in your own territory, specially if you see a message during the end turn that an assasin from a specified nation was caught. Than you know that country sends out peeps after your guys. So you assasinate everybody from that nation wom remains in your provinces.

I wonder if I can assasin my own king...

[[alex]]

nope you cant, I tried to assasinate my own king, but it didnt work http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/frown.gif


what you need to do is to assasinate the heirs before they get kings, so check theyr stats and see who's worthy of becoming king and kill the ones that are standing in the way http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[Jeroen Hill]

Good idea. Now I get rid of bad heirs by sending them off to fight a huge army with only his own unit. Works most of the time until this morning. A 7 star heir attacked an army of at least 700 and managed to kill 500 in the auto-solve option http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/frown.gif Than he conquered province after province with just that unit of cavalry. His biggest triomph was that his unit of 13 men killed over 2000 golden horde warriors. This is all done by auto-resolve. Finally he got killed but he actually became a 9 star and thus outclassing his younger 8 star brother. No problem because the younger brother also was about 20 years younger and thus more interesting as a heir.

[_Martyr_]

Why would you want to kill off a 7 star royal general????

[Jeroen Hill]

Because he was totally no suited to be nr. 1 heir.

[LadyAnn]

I found managing horde of assassins, bishops, spies, etc. quite tiresome. I have to drag them around one screaming-and-kicking guy at a time so they will do the work I asked them to do.

The computer have the assassin baiting technique: a bishop moves into a province with a port, and immediately move out to Novogrod. And for some reason, there is an early version of the KGB there, and every single assassin I sent to kill that bishop would end up dead in Novogrod, caught by bodyguards.

So, I sent my assassin to a place where there is no port, sit and ambush a bishop. I don't bother follow the bishop around. If he is not dead at first shot, I immedately cancel the assassin's mission and wait some more.

Perhaps I should automanage agents.

Annie

[andy119]

lol lady ann. Ive stopped using assasins because i find the best way to take some general out is by making war on a country:D I managed to get a valour 5 assasin and he was killed killing a valour 0 preacher http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mad.gif. There are many ways of killing kings however. One is to try and get a very good assasin and 1 is the expensive force in numbers. This means buying lots of assains and puting them on 1 target in the hope 1 will kill the king/general. I find assasins most usefull to kill the pope. This guy cuases cerious troble in hard or expert for you and your fellow christian nations are more than willing to crusade against you for your land. As soon as im excomunicated i Kill the pope. This means im recomunicated so to speak http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif
cya guys soon
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[chilliwilli]

I only use assasins on the big guys like The Pope or a king. I don't do petty stuff like killing bishops. I'm a tolerant leader http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif.

[Musashi]

I use assassins and spies to great effect. In one campaign I more or less swept the board just by causing rebellions and buying off the resultant rebel stacks. Only ended up at war with anyone once or twice when they attacked me. This doesn't work now that I've modded the building construction times to half their normal values though, the AI seems to build up agent defenses and populace pacification structures too fast.

Assassinations still work though, and I used them to great effect in my last campaign, took out 6 or 7 successive French Kings, totally wiping out their influence (Though it seems like it's impossible to break the faction by assassinating their leaders, they must have some annoying fallback mechanism like the HRE do) and ended the Italian faction entirely thanks to one Guy of Gisborne (6 star assassin).

Here's how I operate. When I want a king or other general dead, I send 3-6 valorless assassins and usually a few spies as a screen for the main assassin. The agent defenses in the province will usually pick off the low valor units because they're not as good at concealing themselves (Or so I assume), and the high valor guy will make it to the target.

Even with this technique though, your assassin can be caught and killed. That's life. There's always a chance that you'll fail, no matter what. Still, if you manage your agents right, they can be very useful. The main thing is to make sure you have an assassin and spy (Or even two of each) in every one of your provinces to defend against enemy spies and assassins. Each agent can pick off one enemy agent per turn while they're counterspying, and they gain valor in the process, so it's a good way to farm future offensive agents.

Never use assassins against priest units, it's not worth it. They don't cause enough of an inconvenience to you to risk losing a potentially valuable assassin on them. For one thing, the computer almost always moves it's priest units every turn, so your assassin will likely as not end up following the priest into another faction's territory and be picked off by their agent defenses.

The only religious agent you want to use assassins against is an inquisitor who's making trouble in your territory, because he can inflict real damage on you, and once he starts putting people on trial, chances are he's not going to be moving from the territory anytime soon. It's still a risk, but generally a decent assassin can handle these guys.

So to review, use your assassins and spies defensively, they're valuable defensive units, they keep province loyalty under control, and they warn you if your generals are plotting against you. They will gain valor by defending against other agents, so you can use the ones who gain the most as offensive agents later.

-Musashi