Assassins - does the AI use any?

[zarkis]

I only played one full campaign so far and never encountered an AI enemy assassin. Also AI spys seem to be very rare which you can't say about their diplomats. It even may be that they don't ever recruit a second one beside the one they get from the start. Does anybody had a different experience?

[Bogdanovist]

I often see spies tagging along with enemy armies. You can see them if you look at the details of an enemy army before a battle. Any spies lurking around by themselves on the campaign map are invisble (unlike the diplomats) so don't assume just cos you can't see em they aint there!

On the assassins though I have also never seen any evidence of them. Never had a character assasinated and never had any pop-up telling me of a failed attempt (which I assume would happen if this did occur).

I guess they are a bit like forts and watchtowers, great additions to the game that someone just forgot to tell the AI about....

[Vlad Tzepes]

I got a spy killed once, he was outside a town, no action from him, it happened during the AI move.

[Sleepy]

I've killed a lot of Egg assassins, but they were defending their cities. Though I did have 1 spy mysteriously die.

The AI can uses a lot of spies to defend its cities from your spies.

Enemy spies/assassins hide on the campaign map and need to be found by one of your agents moving close to them.

[Bob the Insane]

You know you don't need an assassin to kill a spy, spys with attempt to kill each as well I believe.

I have seen enemy assassins revealed by my spies but I have never seen them attack anyone and can't remember ever seeing a message saying I had lost someone to an assassin...

Surprizing considering how effective a well trained assassin can be once he has gotten to the Master level any character except Faction Leaders and Heirs is a dead man and even factions Heirs are about 50% chance of success...

[Feanor]

My spies have seen assassins loitering outside the gates of my city as the spy was passing on by. I've also had family members die under suspicious circumstances. This is on normal difficulty too so I'd imagine they might be more active on the harder difficulty levels.