Can I turn bribing off it just ticks me off!

[therother]

Well, I suppose this is as good a place as any to dump some preliminary research on bribery. (Ode for a research forum! )

(All the numbers here are for Very Hard, but the numbers don't seem affected by difficulty.)

So, I have 10 units of peasants. Bribe cost: 1000 Denarii, which is their recruitment cost. Now I add various level of spies, diplomats, and assassins to see what effect they might have on the bribe cost.

I was, for the most part, using a valour 2 diplomat to do the bribing. I ranked him up to valour 6 for some tests, but influence seems to have no influence!

Anyhow basically what I've found is that, surprisingly enough, all the agents add to the bribing cost. This was, of course, not unexpected. What is a little surprising (at least to me) is that is seems that all they add is their own bribe price. They don't seem to imbue the army with any sort of extra bribe protection.

For instance, a valour 9 diplomat costs 3700 Denarii to bribe. If the army you're bribed would cost 1000 Denarii on its own, then the entire deal will be 4700 Denarii.

It seems that an agent costs 2000 Denarii to bribe with 0 valour. It costs 300 Denarii per valour. So a 10-valour spy should add 5000 Denarii to the deal; similarly a 5-valour assassin should cost 3500 Denarii.

(Things get a little more complex when there are multiple agents – still trying to figure that out.)

Another odd thing is that you do not seem to get the agents if the bribe is successful. Perhaps you might if army is joining your faction, but I have yet to try that.

I reiterate that this is only preliminary data, in that I haven't checked all this thoroughly, but I thought it was interesting enough to post at this stage.

Edit: There might be a Culture effect as well, i.e. it appears to be cheaper bribing someone from the same Culture to join your faction.