Aren't the spies uber-powered during the sieges?

[Handel]

It is easy to enter 3 epies 4-5 starts each in the targeted city/castle. Then you can attack and take the city in the same turn without any siege machines.

[Quillan]

I don't consider them overpowered. For starters, gaining skill increases on spies is easy. If the city contains even two reasonably skilled spies, you won't be dropping 5 spies into the settlement prior to assaulting, unless you're just doing that in the hopes that one will survive. For another, all the spy does is open the gate. It makes a huge difference if the target settlement is weakly garrisonned, but if the garrison is strong, the Charlie-Foxtrot that will be the mass rush through the gate will get the bulk of your army slaughtered on the spot. And, if your army really overpowers the defenders in numbers as well as strength, you'd win without the spies so it really doesn't make that much of a difference. The one place where it makes a difference is it allows you to make an immediate assault if you didn't drag slow moving artillery along in the army.

[Handel]

The point is exactly in making the aproach and the capture in one turn. This way the enemy has no time to bring reinforcements and the Pope has no time to intervene.

[Quillan]

I've made many without spies. Just drag along artillery.

[Darkmoor_Dragon]

I've made many without spies. Just drag along artillery.

Spies move further than artillery, artillery doesn't move as far as an army. His point is valid in that regard.

However, it is easy to maintain at least one spy per town/castle as the human player to help avoid such instances, really the AI should do the same. Upon checking though you will often find some places with 4-6 spies and other towns with none at all.

[Decker]

How does the spy open the gate? Do you have to do it manually or is it automatic?

[Aquitaine]

It's automatic. You can just walk through any gate (all of them, in a castle, even).

More devastating than the gates being open (which the AI doesn't really take advantage of most of the time - it will send people through, but usually only after it's knocked down a wall or brought up a ladder or a siege tower) is that, when your gates are opened, you don't get to deploy your troops - so your guys are all over the city in every which way and you have to run them over to the right part of the walls to be of any use.

[Decker]

Alright thank you Aquitaine. Is it only one gate or both of them?

[Zenicetus]

If the spy opens gates, it's all the gates. This can be very useful for splitting up a big defending army by attacking through three gates at once, or running in a cav unit quickly through an undefended gate.

Personally, I don't think it's overpowered because 1) the enemy can do it to you too, and 2) it does take time to train up one or more spies to the point where you can rely on this, instead of bringing siege engines, and 3) I've hit many cities where the enemy had the place filled with their own spies, that thwarted the strategy when I arrived.

P.S. one additional thought on play balance... I think all these things like gate openings, assassinations, etc. are balanced for players who don't try-and-reload when a spy or assassin attack fails. For example, the first time I sent a pretty good, mid-ranked spy down to Marrakesh to both spy on the city and maybe open the gates, he died instantly when entering the city. I re-loaded and found out that there were four enemy spies sitting in the city. If I hadn't loaded a save game to restore my spy, it would have made that attempt much more expensive in terms of resources and campaign time. So whether it's balanced or not, does depend to an extent on how you play the game... i.e. whether you take your lumps with failed spy and assassin attempts, or just reload and try another strategy. BTW, I never did manage to get a spy in there... I had to take the city the hard way. :duel: