How to change "recruitment costs"

[Corbeau]

How to change recruitment costs of Assassins, Spies, priests, etc.

I was looking for a way to change the recruitment costs of Assassins and friends. Basically because it annoys me that after Turn 50 or so, there a masses of Imans, Assassins and Spies flooding my map and especially the middle east. I am not against the use of them, but I just want to lower their activity (or at least make it more valuable because they are expensive)

I found an entry in the

descr_cultures.txt

spy spy.tga spy_info.tga spy.tga 350 1 1
assassin assassin.tga assassin_info.tga assassin.tga 500 1 1
diplomat diplomat.tga diplomat_info.tga diplomat.tga 250 1 1
admiral admiral.tga admiral_info.tga admiral.tga 100 1 1
merchant merchant.tga merchant_info.tga merchant.tga 550 1 1
priest priest.tga priest_info.tga priest.tga 200 1 1

does anyone has an idea if this is the right entry?!

[alpaca]

Yeah, the 3-digit-number is the recruitment cost.

Moved to modding questions.

[Corbeau]

Thanks a lot!

[Corbeau]

ok report about the change

I changed the recruitment costs for Agents. the AI does not send hordes of priests, assassins, spies and diplomats any longer into the world

Assassins 20.000 (therefore they spawn as Rank 4 assassins and are quiet useful from the start, still you are more cautious on what you order them to do)
Spies 5.000
Diplomats 5.000 (increased the base DiplomatSkill to 4 too.)
Merchants 5.000 (no more perma take overs)
Priests 10.000

I did not change the upkeep costs. High recruitment costs seem to be sufficent for the result I wanted

what I noticed and what I was positivley surprised about

Religous Unrest:
its harder to take over different religous provinces and keep them.
because you cannot afford 10 priests any longer. Somehow this feels more real, no more 4 turns province religious changes. Building churches results in a higher conversion rate, but still it is slow enough to take around 50 turns (=50 years in my game) to convert population from 0 to 50 or more.
interesting result: Pope conversion missions are not easy any longer

Assassins:
If I produce an Assassin for 20k I wont send him on suicide missions (or at least not that often). So does the AI as it just has not so many of them. More politics instead of ruthless killing sprees.

Spies:
still useful but expensive. you tend to focus your spies to a front not to the whole map

Diplomats:
I made them the cheapest agents, still more expensive than before. Lesser Diplomats resulted in my campaign in lesser diplomacy of course, but also in lesser backstabbing. Personally that was the biggest surprise

Bottom line:
Using Agents was improved for me. I now use spies with armies instead of having them running around all alone. reaching an enemy city I sent the spy ahead and after the battle I take him with me again.

Also assassins are more valuable. Still you think twice before sending your 20k assassin or your 10k army to do a job, depending of the intended political consequences (killing a faction general/king/cardinal/heir by assassin or army can make a difference diplomatically )

Diplomacy got somehow more limited so there are lesser chances of unreasonable alliance networks, just because there are lesser diplomats.

and the religion change is awesome. the low conversion rate due to lesser priests make it much harder to take over opposing religious provinces or at least more expensive as you have to keep lots of troops there to prevent unrest. It also gives the AI much more time to take a settlement back from you without the province loosing its identity.

Also the cardinal collegium gets more important. Killing a cardinal with an assassin now has an influence as there are far lesser candidates to succeed the dead one. So by killing a cardinal you can prevent a faction from getting a chance to be pope for quiet some time, or help your candidate or the one of your alliance to become one. (or influence the pope elections even as muslim/orthodox)

I still have to test if the AI is rather going bancrupt because it still tries to hire priests at the first occasion, or if the AI just produces a smaller and more reasonable ammount

maybe my change can be an input for the real modders out there.

[nikolai1962]

Reducing the agents a bit does improve the game i think, especially the priests for the reasons you mention. I did something similar but by reducing the agent limit. IIRC 2 priests become available for a city at abbey level so i moved that to cathedral instead. Was going to make diplomats/spies/assasins have an agent limit too using the town hall and tavern buildings but i haven't got round to it yet.