Quote Originally Posted by derfinsterling
But assassins might lose some of their ability when they fail. And that really sucks when you're trying to build up your assassins and then fall back two levels. Easily a couple of turns wasted.
That relates to the question I was going to ask those who think assassins are overpowered or perfectly fine compared to their targets. Are you saving/reloading before attempts to help build your uber assassins? If so, then in my humble opinion that tosses out any opinion on the balances. If you're letting the dice roll as they may and don't restore after failures, then it can become a frustrating game to create assassins that have any chance of success against anything but the lowest starred cretins.

I'm not saying assassins are underpowered either... without any reloading, I had about three assassins in the 6-8 point range at one point close to midgame and a couple of times had one or two of skill. To me, having but a few great ones feels right and their still chancy attempts made sense, as assassins tended to have dangerous and often frustrating lives. They are weak against other higher level agents, which both makes and doesn't make sense, depending on how you look at it.

As derfinsterling points out, one of the most frustrating things about assassin 'training' is the 'one step forward, two steps back' situation with them. It would be nice if there was a better way to train them, but it probably would be exploited.

You know what I would almost like to see which would both help assassins and also be a bit realistic (except in terms of how long it takes to kill someone)? If an assassin could stalk someone, sort of like a siege. Tell an assassin to kill someone and when he gets near them, he's giving the option to strike or stalk. Stalking would spend that turn justing following a target and learning his/her habits and/or get into the target's confidence. Of course, the assassin has to make a skill check to avoid detection. If successful, the assassin would gain some percentage of success chance. You could choose to strike or keep stalking, each time needing a check against detection. In theory, an assassin who doesn't get detected for a bunch of turns would have a darn high chance (realistically, either he's become best of buds with the target and therefore has a billion chances to strike or knows exactly when the target will be least guarded). It would create a little risk vs. reward minigame of sorts as the player tries to figure out when it's best to strike.