John-117's Complete Guide to Agents

[Upxl]

Solely to avoid criticism.

[Fiddling_nero]

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.

[Hooahguy]

good guide!

[DrHaphazard]

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?

[pevergreen]

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.

[Rothe]

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.