Question about spies

**Forward Observer** · 05-20-2007, 08:43

It's not a big deal, and it doesn't seem to happen all the time, but after sneaking into a settlement, why does my spy occasionally exit on his own? Is there a limit on how long a spy can hang around, or is it different for a castle versus a city?

**Flavius Merobaudes** · 05-20-2007, 09:22

To me it seems more like he is thrown out of the settlement. I always thought he has been discovered but managed to escape.
Probably there is a trigger for being discovered every turn your spy's in there, because in my games the time until being discovered is very different. But that's just what I think.

There's an other strange thing: When you want to infiltrate settlement with a really good spy, it say chances for success are 100%. But he is still killed in some cases. Happened to me yesterday when trying to spread the plague. I guess CA don't like biological warfare.

**Zarky** · 05-20-2007, 09:45

The spy dying with 100% changes is weird indeed, happened to me twice, but it was when i was already in settlement, trying to spy it again to gain skill, quess it shows 100% if you´re still inside settlement, even if changes are lower?

**Didz** · 05-20-2007, 09:49

I assumed that this was just the games mechanism for making a resident spy test his personal security against the cities counter-intelligence network.

So, he periodically gets thrown-out of the city and made to retest his ability to sneak back in.

**madalchemist** · 05-20-2007, 14:03

Maybe spies die with 100% chances because AI doesn't always take in consideration the existence of a counterspy in the city, who lowers your chances to spy/assassinate/sabotage but seldom doesn't display it in the percentage ratio you read.

I've seen more than one assassin in the same turn failing an easy city kill (each 85%+) or dying for failing sabotage while my spies noticed 1-2 enemy counterspies within the target city (counterspies with 15-20% chance to be killed by the above assassins) where they "worked".

Maybe it's just the showed pergentage who is bugged.

**WhiskeyGhost** · 05-20-2007, 18:12

speaking of which, is it just me, or do some of the cities around the HRE-Poland area have some sort of permanent low success rate for spies? I've checked for enemy agents and none appear present, but even my maxed out skill spy only gets a 7% chance to get in?

**SIGGE** · 05-20-2007, 21:20

Just a little question: Do spies spread some kind of propaganda so that the happiness and the public order in the settlement decrease slowly?

**Tambarskjelve** · 05-20-2007, 21:58

Not slowly, but instantly, by an amount deoendent on the spy's skill.
Great way to wreak havoc on the enemy before war has been officially declared. If you at the same time target the "happyness buildings" with assassins, the city may revolt, and you can take it without anyone thinking worse of you :)

**RedDevil** · 05-20-2007, 23:14

I noticed that all spies have 100% to sneak into the city or castle...
It is little stupid because i always can enter into the city or castle without siege weapon! Only thing that i need to do is to throw in couple of spies...

**Foz** · 05-21-2007, 05:35

Originally Posted by RedDevil

I noticed that all spies have 100% to sneak into the city or castle...
It is little stupid because i always can enter into the city or castle without siege weapon! Only thing that i need to do is to throw in couple of spies...

I guess that depends on when in the game you are. If you have a thieves guild up and running, you may be generating spies that have 100% success I suppose (still somewhat unlikely). Success chances in general should not be as high as you are noting, though. It's likely you modded your game, are not playing 1.2, or have a botched 1.2 install in which some files did not update, causing 1.1 behavior to stick around. In the early part of the game at least, infiltrating a settlement is usually more like a 50% proposition, if even that good. Basically if you are running a working copy of 1.2, spies should be much more difficult to use, and decidedly NOT totally easy to train. On the contrary, they have a propensity for dying on the job now, about on par with assassins.

As to the other various questions about 100% chances still having failures, I think it's a display error. In general the maximum displayed value is supposed to be 95%, and the minimum 5%. So at best you will still have a 1 in 20 chance of failing a mission. Even if the game indicates 100%, I would regard that as incorrect and assume your spy will still have that base 5% chance of failure.

Also, spies "leaving" a settlement is in fact due to them being found out and fleeing, escaping with their lives. You can sometimes spot this happening to enemy spies in your cities too, which is how I figured out what was going on: the enemy spy is thrown out of your city when you get the pop-up message about an enemy spy being uncovered but escaping the guards.

It also seems worth noting that it is not necessary in all cases to infiltrate a city or stack just to see what is going on in it. Usually you can spot the details of things just by having them in the spy's field of vision, which can help keep them useful, but more importantly alive. That way you can see all the things you want to, but save your spy for use on easier targets where he stands a better chance of success and thus survival. It really pays to be more selective now about what targets you send your spies on missions against.