How does everyone get their special units skills up

[Budwise]

I kinda know like you should assasinate weaker targets first but how can you do that when all targets have a 5% chance to succeed. What really bothers me is Merchants, how can I get better merchants, I always put them to work right away and as soon as another merchant come up, I, 9 times out of 10, will lose my Merchant to theirs. Any help on building up any units or does anyone know where I can get a guide to read.

[Slug For A Butt]

If you create enough of a type of unit in a town/city you may get offered a guild which will imrpve their skill.
For merchants, they level up when they spend time on a resource, so send them to remote, rich resources like Timbuktu (especially Timbuktu, it takes time to get there but it's most definitely worth it) or the amber resource in Denmark. You rarely get challenged and you make good cash from them.
I'm not big on assassins but I think you just need to send enough of them with a low % and some will get a lucky hit. They get a more acceptable level after a couple of lucky hits.

[Irishman3]

It helps having a Merchants Guild, as they'll be trained right out of the gate with higher skill. But I find even with merchants trained in cities without, placing them on a resource for 5-6 turns earns them some skill and brings them up around 3-4 level. Then I'll move them to more lucrative resources, which pay better and will where they will (usually) not get bought out.

For assassins, kill every rebel captain you can within range until they've hit 3 or more skill, then send them to sabotage enemy or rebel settlements buildings. Once they hit 5+ skill and get a couple ancillaries, they have a good chance at just about anything you send them to do (assassinate, sabotage, etc.).

[KHPike]

Yep. For merchants they surely must be built in a guild and then 'trained' by trading at a resource. Usually this should make them a decent match against AI merchants. It's annoying to see your merchant slowly disappear. Safe places include north of Dennmark (after blocking oversea paths), England (after killing off the English), Timbuktu and the Russian Steppes. If you see a merchant you can't match approaching, get ready to run, or hide in a city until he's gone.

Unconventional methods include putting merchants in armies and then moving them over resources (it's a controversial tactic), making them unacquirable. You can also try to swarm an approaching rival one with many merchants, although this could be a pyrrhic victory.

As for assassins, they usually start off with 1-2 stat pts. In my opinion if some bad stat drops it to zero you can give up on that assassin as he'll probably never kill anything and just get killed. A guild could potentially increase his starting stats to 3-4 points.

For training I look for targets in the following levels of priority, as they are the easiest to kill.
1. Princesses (almost always die)
2. Diplomats (low level) and low level assassins
3. Captains (Note that the smaller an army is the higher the odds of assassination)
4. Generals (Depends on traits and retinue)
5. Holy men
6. Cardinals (always hard to kill)
7. Faction leaders (again depends on stats but are generally hard to kill)

I usually don't move on to 4-7 above until my assassin has a rating of 6 and above. From then on you can proceed on to remove any other nuisance that troubles you (Merchants!).

Choose your targets carefully. An untrained killer can't get past well-trained bodyguards anyways.

[stealingjoy]

Not a bad idea to move merchants into areas with a lot of warring factions, especially a faction that is losing ground. They won't be able to afford to create merchants and you should have fairly free roaming in their area.

[Jund23]

Spies are your friends, they can go around looking for opportunities for your other agents to train up! Whether it is exploring territories for heretics to train priests on, looking for handsome princes to marry your pig ugly daughters to. Whether they are finding noob enemy merchants for your own merchants to take over or small rebel armies for your assassins to practice killing rebel captains, spies are great. Spies can also give you advance warning if say a nasty enemy merchant is nearby so you can make your merchants run away to safety.

One way i use for training merchants involves using them in two's or three's and trying to get a monopoly on a type of resource. If you can get your merchants to gain control all of one type of resource in a territory they can train up to 3 points, i think, in the monopolist trait. So if an area has, say two iron resources, then simply plop a merchant on each iron resource and wait. I think they level faster if the resources are in another factions territory but that comes with the risk of the other faction suddenly sending their uber-shopkeeper and taking your merchants out.

I think there is a line of traits based on having your merchants trade a variety of different resources, so try sticking them on one resource for a few turns and then move onto a different type of resource, i could be making this up but i seem to recall getting traits that alluded to this. Can someone else confirm?

Once they get a few points it is then a good idea to try and find weak other merchants (using spies to look around) and try taking over their business.

With assassins i tend to use spies to go find targets in towns and use the assassins to sabotage the towns to start with. Send a spy into a settlement (i think having a spy in a town may actually improve your chances of success but i am not sure) and then try and sabotage their weakest building, after a few attempts you can build up a line of traits called summit like 'plotter'. It is slower to train via sabotage, the level ups seem to come slower than via assassination, but a good way to start out your faction leaders career as a master of assassins.

[Zghuk]

I kinda know like you should assasinate weaker targets first but how can you do that when all targets have a 5% chance to succeed. What really bothers me is Merchants, how can I get better merchants, I always put them to work right away and as soon as another merchant come up, I, 9 times out of 10, will lose my Merchant to theirs. Any help on building up any units or does anyone know where I can get a guide to read.

spies => dont try to kill someone at first, try to sabotage buildings, this will give your leader a good push :)

merchants => it's luck... sometimes you can build a +2 merchant, sometimes not ;) but when you build much merchants you will get a guild and your next built merchants will be better!

[Memnoch]

I kinda know like you should assasinate weaker targets first but how can you do that when all targets have a 5% chance to succeed. What really bothers me is Merchants, how can I get better merchants, I always put them to work right away and as soon as another merchant come up, I, 9 times out of 10, will lose my Merchant to theirs. Any help on building up any units or does anyone know where I can get a guide to read.

For merchants I found that putting them in a fort (where they are pretty much invulnerable to other merchants, incidentally) helps in increasing their skills. As for assassins, if you find a bunch of rebels, they are great to practise on. I miss the old days of MTW when you could recruit diplomats to act as cannon fodder for your assassins, though. I got some assassins up to 8 or 9 by letting them loose on my own diplomats.

[Goofball]

For assassins, start them out as saboteurs. Put a spy in the target city to determine the easiest targets (usually religious buildings). Two successful bombings gets you the "Plotter" trait. Two more gets you "Schemer." Four more gets you "Grand Conspirator," for a total of +3 skill. Also, you will most likely have picked up at least one (probably more) ancillaries while blowing stuff up, for a total of about 5 skill before you have tried killing even a single human target.

BTW, does anybody else giggle themselves silly when they click on their HRE assassin and he says:

"Here iss a message from se Kaisa."

or

"Don't schtruggle; you're only making it verse."

I only wish he would say "Vould you like to touch mein monkey? Touch it!"