Concerning agents in Player1's bugfixer

[HoreTore]

"The second one is weird. It gives 10% to get religion of shrine that exists in city if there is any. That pretty much means that most agents will be atheist. The problem here is that second trigger should have 100% chance to be a fallback option if agent has no religion of the faction leaders. Also, it should check for shrine or bigger religions buildings not vice versa. This way most agents will have religion, exempt in cases when they are recruited in cities with incompatible religion buildings, like Sassanid agent in Christian city. Here I also corrected an error for nomad factions which lacked this trigger for Christian religion."

After playing a christian ERE campaign, I'm starting to wonder if that was indeed the intention of the developers.

That's because, when every diplomat gets a religion, it gets INCREDIBLY easy to convert a settlement. Just create 10 or so diplomats, send them into a province, and watch the fun... I'm thinking that was why CA decided that only a portion of the agents got a religion, to preserve the balance.

While it makes sense that every agent should have a religion, it screws up game balnce real hard. And it's not like you can play iron man and not to that, as your enemy will do it to you too.

Any thoughts?

[Captain Fishpants]

"The second one is weird. It gives 10% to get religion of shrine that exists in city if there is any. That pretty much means that most agents will be atheist. The problem here is that second trigger should have 100% chance to be a fallback option if agent has no religion of the faction leaders. Also, it should check for shrine or bigger religions buildings not vice versa. This way most agents will have religion, exempt in cases when they are recruited in cities with incompatible religion buildings, like Sassanid agent in Christian city. Here I also corrected an error for nomad factions which lacked this trigger for Christian religion."

After playing a christian ERE campaign, I'm starting to wonder if that was indeed the intention of the developers.

That's because, when every diplomat gets a religion, it gets INCREDIBLY easy to convert a settlement. Just create 10 or so diplomats, send them into a province, and watch the fun... I'm thinking that was why CA decided that only a portion of the agents got a religion, to preserve the balance.

While it makes sense that every agent should have a religion, it screws up game balnce real hard. And it's not like you can play iron man and not to that, as your enemy will do it to you too.

Any thoughts?

An agent being religious in this context should be seen as being actively engaged in a faith, as opposed to passively holding the relevant belief. Having a religion that converts others implies a small degree of proselytism, even without traits that boost conversion. Not everyone who is 'religious' is necessarily blessed with the ability to convert others to his viewpoint. That's why agents don't necessarily have a 'faith' with the necessary strength of belief.

And you're right too, that making every agent a conversion machine does throw things out of kilter. This would be a 'bug' then, that didn't actually need fixing, and the fix itself is something that we'd tried and rejected as being unbalanced. 10% seemed about right, because you could still use the tactic, but you'd have to train a shedload of diplomats in order to get enough religious ones.

It may sound surprising, but we do think about the implications of this stuff while we're putting it in the game in the first place.

[Kekvit Irae]

I immidiately saw the abuse potential in 100% religious agents even before seeing this thread. Can you say "MTW spy rush"?

[Sjakihata]

or STW shinobi rush, so easy to just swarm enemy castles with enough shinobi so it revolts, booya

[Kekvit Irae]

Yes, but in STW there was another, more drastic problem:
Send a couple Geishas at the daimyo and just wait. You can turn all of Japan rebel by doing this, without going into a single battle.

[player1]

Well, that does mean that second trigger should be put back to 10%, while other changes still seem like bug-fixing.

By that I mean adding missing trigger for christian nomads, as well as fix to make shrines and bigger buildings affect religion, not just shrines (which does not make sense).


Thanks for noticing this.
I do like to see CA comments on things like this.


Actually, I would like if I could get CA comments on ALL things in bug-fixer, to know if something does not need fixing, or if it does need what kind of fix it needs.

In few cases I really needed to guess things, since sometimes it's easy to spot something as not working well, while it's difficult to see what would be proper fix.


P.S.
To sum up,
in v2.05, second agent trigger will go back to from 100% to 10%.