More Influence over success of Assasins

[Theredlemming]

I would like to have more influence over the success of Assasins and ships for that matter. If any of you remember "conquerer a.d 1086" were you sneak around castles in the 1st person perspective i would like to do something like that with assasins.

Would do you guys think?

And any idea how to have a decent ship battle?

the red lemming

[torsoboy]

Would it be very hard to make sea battles possible using the M:TW engine? It seems to me that you need to make a map that's blue instead of green and use new sprites. To make it more interesting you would have to incorporate wind (but that might me too high a standard).

[frogbeastegg]

Quote[/b] (Theredlemming @ Dec. 07 2003,11:13)]If any of you remember "conquerer a.d 1086" were you sneak around castles in the 1st person perspective
Wow The hours I wasted on that game back in the day I finished it many of times. Romancing the ladies at the tournaments was one of the first times I had to sit through the absurdity of being a girl playing a boy romancing a girl. Out of interest did you ever get the snooty one (Adela I think) to do anything other than tell you to come back when you were famous? I ruled the entire kingdom bar London and she still blew me off as unimportant. Trying to be an honourable knight and needing to romance all of them at the same time was more than a bit difficult. Get the fancy lance off Jane and never talking to her again, getting whats-her-face to give you weapons (which you immediately sell for cash while eying up the kingslayer sword) until she ran out of gifts and then dumping her, twisting Victoria around your little finger while chatting up her mother (um, Wendessa?)....your honourable knight was such a rat

As I remember you didn't exactly sneak into the castles - you went in with an army and bulldozed the place Absolutely no stealth involved at all. The only subtlety was in memorising the layout of the castles and going straight to the champion and killing him. Then again I did get kind of sneaky in the basic wooden castles - you could stand in a certain building and attack all the enemies though the window for a guaranteed, uninjured win.

Killing the dragon and saving the kingdom was rather lame, conquering the entire kingdom, betraying your friends and allies and murdering your king was a lot more fun. Taxing the peasants into starvation, deforesting your fief for cash and turning the remains into a giant horse farm, taking out a loan and killing the moneylenders thug to avoid repayment, fooling the church into giving you vital information, beating the crap out of other knights in the tournaments...ah, those were the days. You know the more I think about it the more my honourable knight seems like a subrat level jerk I should send him a copy of my signature.

Conquer 1086AD had a lot in common with Total War, the mixture of battle maps and campaign maps, the medievalness, the combined arms tactics, the idea of a central character getting hit by old age and it resulting in game over (like the kings dying of age without an heir), the froggy addicting properties....It was a more primitive version of the Total War idea in so many ways.



Er, getting back on track you would have to be very careful with any alterations to the system or you would end up with a set of unbeatable ships and assassins. Geisha were fun for a bit in Shogun but practically infallible agents get dull very quickly. It is a delicate balance between underpowered and overpowered angents. As things stand the assassins are just slightly less effective than I might like but I can live with it. I don't really take much notice of ships outside of putting them in the sea zones and ignoring them until they get attacked.

[Lechev]

I would rather like the game to be somewhat like the old game " Sword of samurai " which i had mentione quite some time ago. You begin as a lowly samurai running errands for your feudal lords and competing with your peers as to " who will be the next boss ". Climbing the feudal system ladder until you become the ultimate Shogun

It has a nice touch of RPG couple with good strategy gameplay at that time. It would be real cool if Shogun2 Totalwar is model towards this trait.

[71-hour Ahmed]

Teams of assassins would be a good idea...and would fix this issue as well as clean up the board.

You could have different videos for this (bring them back&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif than if you use 1 assassin, so they work together...

[Theredlemming]

http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-wall.gif I never managed to suss out away in defeating that dragon in "conquerer a.d 1086" how the hell did you do it?

(I know it has taken i long time to post this reply)

theredlemming

[meravelha]

I've just discovered spy-spamming and its very effective if a little cheesy :)

I've managed to hollow out the Almohad garrisons in Andalusia with constant revolts while holding his main armies in Tunisia.
A policy of attrition forced on me by my total lack of tactical skill...

[Daveybaby]

The only way to get a decent success rate with assassins is to ONLY attempt to assassinate targets within your own territory.

(1) Only assassinate targets (esp. religious figures, since the AI tends to move them in on one turn, then out the next) on the turn immediately after they move into one of your provinces.

(2) If the assassin doesnt manage an attempt on that turn, cancel the mission, otherwise your assassin will follow the target when they move elsewhere, and will probably be caught and killed by border towers and/or AI spies.

(3) Only attempt assassinations if you have a good chance of success.

You have to go though ALL of your assassination missions on every turn and make sure they are safe. Its micromanagement hell, but the result can be that you have multiple 5+ star assassins which you can then use to take out high ranking enemy generals (or even kings) in emergencies. You'll still lose most of them in the attempt though.

[katank]

well, that's a bit extreme.

If your assasins are 3*, you can allow them to chase outta your territory religious agents etc.

I always take Syria if I want to assasin spam.

if taking out high ranking general or king, send them in packs of 20.

nothing have ever survived all 20 of my 5* assasins yet.

[Daveybaby]

Its getting them up to 3* (or indeed 5*) thats the tricky bit.

Agree that its a bit extreme though. The only time i ever actually used it was playing as the russians, trying to keep down the number of catholic religious units being thrown at me.

[mfberg]

Quote[/b] ]Its getting them up to 3* (or indeed 5*) thats the tricky bit.


Kill off your own religious agents or bad govs. When I'm catholic I kill my inquisitors and anyone going down a trade reducing path. As muslim I take out alim's govs and rebel generals. Once I have a group (3 of 3*'s is good)I will move them to my border provinces and invite atttack, and kill the enemy prince/general while my troops are hiding in the castle.

mfberg

[Kristaps]

Quote[/b] (Daveybaby @ May 10 2004,09:08)]Its getting them up to 3* (or indeed 5*) thats the tricky bit.

Agree that its a bit extreme though. The only time i ever actually used it was playing as the russians, trying to keep down the number of catholic religious units being thrown at me.
Well, if you take syria you can have 5* assassins rolling outta da factory :) With all tavern upgrades that is :)

I think, it would be more fun if the AI was more aware of this strategy. Maybe then I wouldn't have to say that the best i've seen AI assassins do is kill a couple of my bishops or some low 0-star peasant generals. :)

[katank]

well, if you have syria, getting 3* is a piece of cake as the provincial bonus is already +2 and castle level gets you +3.

I managed to build to +5 around 1180 or so as the Turks and then spammed them everywhere.

kinda cheesy.

with a lot of trade and big navy, my Imam spam and high level assasin spam means quite expansion when I want by provoking muslim rebellions, assasinating faction leaders, etc. I also used lots of spies and emissaries for stirring up trouble in enemy province/maintaining loyalty in mine and emissaries to bribe.

when the GH appeared, in two turns, I had the 20k GHC and GHA

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

[solypsist]

actually the success rate for assassination goes way up if your target chooses to move in the same turn the assassin strikes.
this is why so many people have luck taking out the Khan the first turn of their appearance (he always moves right after his horde shows up).

[katank]

really? if they move they are more likely to be killed?

I do get a decent number of interception kills but I never experimented.

did you run tests to verify this?

[solypsist]

yeah. it was pre-VI, but I don't see how that should have changed.

[Lord Armbandit]

It'd be good if you could have kind of 'defend' settings for your assassins, so that you could put them in border provinces and have them automatically target agents of certain types or factions.

That way, when a rival religious agent turns up, your assassin automatically tries to bump him off, http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-angel.gif but will not molest passing princesses http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-hair2.gif (or variations thereof)

[katank]

slice em all

I like stationing assasins in my territories and whenever an emissary or princess, or religious agent comes by that i dont' like, BAM the blade is whipped out and the poor fella is lying in a gutter somewhere.

Note: use Syrian assasins for this as it's easy to get them to 3 valour which is about the min. necessary to let them travel the map with impunity.