After playing around a bit with the campaign map agents & generals, I've come to these conclusions:

Generals: Working pretty much as expected. Some minor tweaks needed though. Piety does seem to raise very slowly, the traits that add it seem quite rare. Some traits/ancillaries pop up too often, pagan magician anyone? Overall, the amount of different retinues seems quite suitable.

Princesses: Haven't used these beauties that much, not sure what raises charm? Succesful diplomacy? They seem to be quite balanced and useful.

Priests: Raising piety is sometimes arduous but sometimes they gain super abilities. Preaching in heretic / pagan regions seems to trigger these. Balanced and working as they should imo.

Merchants: Haven't used these much either. There's loads of good threads around on how to use them properly, won't repeat that stuff here. At low levels they are maybe a bit too vulnerable, they shouldn't vanish so always when they get acquisitoned, maybe there should be a chance of surviving, applying some negative effect (loss of money for the player and loss in finance skill) and boot the losing merchant back home or something.

Spies: Working as they should, but imo they gain levels even too fast, and the infiltration percentages are too often very high, I find most of my spy missions are 100% success, and I usually gain skill from them too. Small toning down needed. I'd like to see agent limit on spies too, would reduce the micromanagement.

Assassins: Definitely underpowered. Small boost on lower levels to success chances needed. Well, maybe not to success chance, but the chance of getting killed should be a bit lower. Negative traits are maybe a bit too usual too, it's very hard to build up a decent assassin without reloads. High level opponents shouldn't be impossible to kill either, small toning needed in high end "affairs" success rates. Agent limit for assassins would be good too.

Diplomats: Working quite nicely. Succesful treaties give positive abilities, negatives come when you blunder with your requests. Not sure if giving gifts has any effect? A nice bonus would be that high level diplomats would gradually raise your standing with the faction he is located at. Might be hard to add this in though :)

These are my opinions, I'm hoping most of the agent stuff can be modded when we get the unpacker so we can tweak the agents to perfection.

What do you guys think? Are spies too easy and numerous, are diplomats working like they should? Who's the hottest princess?


P.S. I was in a dire situation in my campaign as HRE, both Milan and Venice pressing me hard in North Italy due to me being too "active" there. They both just had declared war on me, and I was low on manpower. Milan and Venice were somehow linked to France through alliances or other weird stuff which I didn't notice. Well, in the meantime I accidentally spotted a real beauty in North Germany, a french princess with charm level 6, so I tried a marriage proposal, first time for me in M2TW. With a little charming words and not so little florins, Constance married my prince, and blam! => Milan and Venice forced to peace due to their relations with France => Holy Roman Empire saved! Long live To-Be-Queen Constance!

As a result, Venice came into terms with me after losing their capital and Zagreb, apparently they loved Constance too, and Milan was forced to re-declare war on me, which resulted into their excommunication which in turn spelled their doom in the coming years. A delicious diplomatic incident if I may say so :)