John-117's Complete Guide to Agents

For anyone who doesn't know about agents in E:TW, this is the place to be. I will try to be as organized as possible, and as simple as possible. I wish I had an agents guide to help when I started playing. So here it is:

Overview

This is, as you may expect, a guide to agents in Empire: Total War. The agents were changed so you would not have to track and micro-manage every single spy, assassin, diplomat, priest and princess inm your empire. Instead the agents list has been shortened to 3 simple types: Gentlemen, Rakes, and Missionaries. I will try my best to help you understand these new agents fully and thoroughly. The manual doesn't really tell you much, and half the things agents do you will not find on your own for a while. I strongly advise everyone to read this guide. You may think you know everything about Agents, but you very well might not.

Gentlemen

Gentlemen, my personal favorite agent in Empire: Total War. These will become the mainstay of your agent force. Gentlemen do more than any other agent, period. Following is a list of all Gentlemen abilities:

Gentlemen Abilities

-Boost Technology Research Rates:
Building a School or educational building in a province will result in a Gentleman being recruited in the city. Once you receive a message saying he has been recruited, move him immediately to your nearest School/College. Then, any technology this building researches will have a turn or 2 cut off the time taken for each Gentleman in the building.
-Duel other Gentlemen:
If you wish to try to mess with another nations research, you can duel any gentlemen in the schools. Be sure to save before engaging in the duel, so you can always retry if something goes wrong. Occasionally, your Gentleman will gain dueling traits for a consecutive number of wins (In my Dutch campaign, my starting Gentleman is on a winning streak of 7-0.)
-Steal Technology:
Moving your Gentleman into another nations Schools will allow him to try stealing Technology. If failed, he will not be killed, just ejected from the school. You can easily move him back if you wish. Once you end the turn with a Gentleman in a school stealing Technology, he will attempt to steal it. If he succeeds, you will recieve a message saying so. If not, he will try again until he is either ejected or succeeds.

Scholars

Scholars are simply an Eastern version of Gentlemen. The only difference is that they cannot duel anyone.

Rakes

I personally do not use Rakes much. They are useful if you desperately need an assassin or spy, but are rather inefficient. Even so, I must explain them.

Rakes are basically just a Spy and an Assassin put together. At the beginning they are somewhat hard to use, but can be useful later on. If you can get a kill/sabotage/infiltration streak for a Rake, he will begin to succeed in pretty much everything he does.

Rake Abilities

-Assassinate Characters:
Rakes can be used to assassinate enemy nations' characters. Assassinating multiple times in a row with no failures will gain positive traits that will give better chances at succeeding.
-Sabotage Enemy Buildings:
Rakes can also be used to sabotage an enemies buildings. Sabotaging several times in a row without being discovered will gain positive traits and give better chances of succeeding.
-Spy on Enemy:
Rakes can infiltrate enemy armies, cities, and villages/towns. You will not go to war with any nation infiltrated if he is killed. Several successful infiltrations in a row will gain positive traits and aid in chances of succeeding later.

Missionaries

Missionaries are very useful if used correctly. They can convert your populace and keep happiness high in provinces occupied by them. If you intend to heavily tax your subjects, you should maintain many Missionaries in the least happy provinces and cities.

Missionary Abilities

-Convert Populace:
Keeping Missionaries in a certain city will cause the population of that city to begin converting to the religion of the Missionary. This will help with the next ability.
-Satisfy Citizens of Missionaries Religion:
For every citizen of a city who is the religion of your Missionaries, the occupying Missionary will keep them happy. For cities where most of the population is of your countries religion, this will be a substantial bonus to happiness in said city.


That is my official Complete Guide to Agents for Empire: Total War. Thanks for reading and have a nice day!

what about the hashassim??

They are the eastern fractions' rakes. No difference with the western rakes.

is there really a point of having hashashin and thugees? i only included scholar to say they cannot duel. i guess i could include them.....

You should always be thorough. :whip:
That’s why I never write guides.
That and my awful, awful spelling.

i have awful spelling online too. but i think its a little overkill to make a whole new thing for 2 of the same agents.

Solely to avoid criticism.:yes:

One can have your gentlemen gain traits by staying and not stealing in foreign schools as well, think of it as training on someone elses dime.

I do this when I have more gentlemen than schools and I haven't built new schools yet and I wish to open a new branch of study while focusing on other techs. (Say I am focusing on military techs and I send a talentless duelist(happens often enough)to a foreign university to study at some nation that focuses on farming/industry) Then when I have enough population to build a new school then I take him back to start applying what he learned back home.

good guide!

What I really would like is a guide on leveling up these agents.

I remember in MTW people had lists of things you could do to improve your agents, for example it was pointed out that you had to leave your priests in place in a province that was predominantly a foreign religion for 4 turns before he would gain a "zeal for conversion" trait or whatever.

The rakes are particularly annoying because theres no easy mission for them anymore. In MTW you had lots of people running around that gave you a 90% chance or better to inspect them. So it was easy to get your guys at least a few "stars" of experience with little risk.

Here it seems that the default is 60% to infiltrate, so you have a 1 in 2 chance almost of your agent failing (although technically hes more likely to escape rather than be lost) and even when he succeeds he doesn't seem to gain any experience worth mentioning.

Also infuriating, ive noticed, is that say you want to infiltrate a town to see what kinda troops are inside. You send your guy in and hes lucky enough to make it in and wallah(sp? how would you spell that?) you see the enemy stack. Then when you come back the following turn the rake is still infiltrated but you can no longer see the army anymore. What the heck is the point of that?

So really what I'm trying to say is, is there a way to level rakes beyond simply resorting to lucky rolls of the dice?

You might want to clear up the Gentlemen and Rakes section.

"Taking a turn or 2" off research times isn't very clear. Normally, its about 4 research points per gentlemen. Traits/ancilleries gain them extra under the three tabs (military, industrial, social).

That may surprise some people, research is done via points, it may take, for example, 20 research points to get plug bayonets. With a school, that will take 4 turns (5 points per turn.) however, if you put in a gentleman, you are now at 9 research points, making it only 3 turns.

To my knowledge, there is no cap on the bonuses gentlemen give.

Gaining skills, it is the same as previous games, just do the action and you will get better at it.

You haven't said anything about counterspying. There is at least one whole line of traits dedicated to counterspying now. My rake had a local network, and now has a large network. If they move however, they lose it. Its been about 10 turns to gain that. Presumably it will be faster next time.

Few tips/notes on this:

- Rakes are best used to kill missionaries of an opposing religion on your turf. This will speed up the conversion if you have a school and/or a missionary there. The success rate is not really high, but the rakes rarely get killed if you have something like 30% to start with. 10% I would not bother with. Experience seems slower than it was in previous TW games, but that is ok since we have 2 turns per year, also the traits make up for slower gaining of actual "stars".

- Gentlemen can be stacked in a single school, on my first campaign I somehow missed this. Stacking them is often a good idea if you wish to go far in the tech tree quickly (as opposed to wide range of research). I usually try to get 4-5 schools max and each one has one gentleman - the rest of them I will stack to one school or two if travel would take too long. Stacking gentlemen is usually the way to go for enlightenment techs, as they are better if you get them early (wealth per turn gains) and tend to take long times to reseach.

- AI never seems to duel with the human player's gentlemen, not sure why.

sabotage/assasinations

you can attempt them even if you are not at war. i am at peace with therussinas and i have tried it a few times. ive never been sucessful but it has never stopped me from trying.

it also appears in my realtions modifiers. assasination attempts -1 etc.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by crpcarrot

sabotage/assasinations

you can attempt them even if you are not at war. i am at peace with therussinas and i have tried it a few times. ive never been sucessful but it has never stopped me from trying.

it also appears in my realtions modifiers. assasination attempts -1 etc.

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in my experiencee you had to be at war to assassinate/sabotage...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by John-117

in my experiencee you had to be at war to assassinate/sabotage...

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well not in mine

thats weird.....well, if i find out otherwise on my other computer ill change it, but otherwise its staying.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by crpcarrot

well not in mine

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I concur: I could assassinate Spanish and French priests while being at peace with them.

well ill try it on my other computer later and update if you guys are right

Not only have I used Rakes against states I am at peace with, I've used them on my allies too! :sweatdrop:

fine il change it >:P

Minor points:

- Assassination attempts will have a slight negative hit to your diplomatic relations with everyone

- The percentage amount converted per turn is a function of the region's population. Thus, converting inhabitants in Dutch Guyana is much faster than converting for example Amsterdam.

i asked Google "maximum values", not just description of values for agents, to increase chance of success
i don't like search something in Google