Passive enemy assassin's?

[Werner]

I see maybe one or two enemy assassin's moaping about at any given time yet they never seem to do anything. Some of them are of enemy factions as well, yet no attacks on generals, no blowing up buildings. Has anyone else noticed this? Also, if the enemy is trying to assassinate one of your general's do you see the little movie clip or does he just die? They really should have those movies if they don't already.

[Slaists]

I have seen AI assassins move around the map and gang up around some of my towns from time to time. It seems, they also try to do something (the animation is there), but fail most of the time (and die trying)... I have to add that, I have spies in the towns they are attacking (that's the reason why I can see the assassins) so the probability of success for the AI assassins might be pretty low.

There could be several things going on: 1) the AI does not know how to sabotage buldings (I have yet to see the AI succeed in sabotaging my building), 2) the AI does not know how to pick victims/targets that have the highest probability of success so it can "build up stars", 3) AI does not know it should leave a town if the probability of succeeding is low. I have seen gangs of AI assassins evaporate around a town where I have a 10 subterfuge spy...

[Oaty]

I've been asassinated, but the problem for the asassins is there is no spy to see buildings and when there is a spy there that snuck in past my spy his chances are still reduced. I'm guessing the AI is programmed not to take a chance if it has no probability percentage.

The AI only uses spys on boredering territories, the other problem is the AI spams em hard leaving the player forced to counterspy in there own cities wich makes an asassins job much harder. A spy greatly reduces an asassins chances.

So the AI rarely gets chances wich leaves them with low level asassins. I think the AI tries on anything with a ~33 percent chance or better.

[Quillan]

I've seen spies standing around doing nothing, too. I think 2 things are at work here: 1) the AI doesn't know how to skill up its spies and assassins, and 2) the AI will avoid trying something that is almost certain to fail. It doesn't always, though. I had one general in my Spanish campaign that was up to something like a +8 to personal security and +2 to public security from all the failed French assassination attempts against him.

[Husar]

Yesterday a polish assassin killed my russian king, first try I think...

[Barny Bangs]

Hmm, no problem with that. I was expecting some low-scale backstabbing from the AI like in RTW, not caring to much about counter-espionage.

Bad idea that was. They (Milanese, my mortal enemy, at least one of them( killed two of my princes and two generals before I could say "Whatyoudoinginthissettlement". Now each of my upmarket generals never leaves the house with at least one spy with him.