Assassins mod?

[Sweetlou]

Assassins...sigh. This is one area of the TW series that I keep wishing CA would fix ever since the original Shogun. I love using assassins in my gameplay as a concept but the constant babysitting and the fact that my CTRL-S and CTRL-L keys are getting worn out from over use is killing all the fun I should be having.

I definately don't want uberkillers running around with laser beam eyes or anything but when my 7 star assassin with a 95% chance to kill a 1 star merchant dies during the mission...well it honestly takes a few years off my life. I like the fact that TW now has it (or maybe they always did?) that an assassin can fail a mission without dying but when the kill chance is at 95%, the chance of him dying should pretty much be 0%.

So I humbly ask if there is any mod out there or any possible way to improve on assassins. Some ideas of the top of my head would be:

-To give in the map bubble that shows up over a target, the percentage of a kill, a failure w/o agents death, and a failure with agents death. And to keep them balanced so in the above example the chance of agent death is 0%. Don't get me wrong, it should be balanced and killing a king, prince or pope should be damn hard and always have a chance of agent death.

-Even if it were impossible for agent death on my 1 star merchant target, now, if the assassin fails, there's a chance that his rating could go down. So that all those dozens of needless deaths you orchestrated to get him up 1 star higher is now pointlessly lost, so you still have to play the "quick save, quick load" game with every target. To counter this it would be nice if rather then your agents rating going down for every miss, the target security rating would increase after absolutely every miss. So if you don't kill the target you lose nothing, but that target is now harder to kill next time, so you can't keep trying over and over again on the same target with no consequences.

My modding knowledge is a big fat zero but some the mods you guys pump out of here are pure magic, so I'm just asking my betters if anything like this possible of if anyone has any tips on how to better use assassins in general.

Thanks

[thomonkey]

lusted's lands to conquer mod does a wonderful job balancing asassins.

[Sweetlou]

Thanks for the response, how does the mod balance assassins? All it says on the description page is that he made assassins stronger. Thanks for any responses!

[Sweetlou]

Could anyone point me to where I would change the assassins ai? I'm using the winning combo mod.

I want to:

-limit the amount of assassins that are buildable at one time.

-remove all chance of an assassin losing stars if he fails a mission.

-remove all chance of an assassin dying if he targets any other agents (priests, merchants, diplomats, etc. not generals, royals, or pope)

thanks for any help

[Orientis]

To counter this it would be nice if rather then your agents rating going down for every miss, the target security rating would increase after absolutely every miss. So if you don't kill the target you lose nothing, but that target is now harder to kill next time, so you can't keep trying over and over again on the same target with no consequences.

That's actually not a bad idea. That system would be more realistic than the current one, since in my opinion, the only assassin that deserves to get a reputation as a bad assassin is one who was caught. The others can just learn from their mistakes.

As for the security rating, I also agree - however, it should go down with time (just because a noble has high security when there are obviously assassins around doesn't mean he will keep it for the rest of his life). Both of these things are easily possible to mod.

It is also possible to have an agent limit. I believe (haven't tried it myself) you do this:

Open export_descr_buildings.txt

Search for the tavern line of buildings

The capability section should have the last line added:

capability
{
agent spy 0 requires factions { northern_european, }
agent spy 0 requires factions { middle_eastern, }
agent spy 0 requires factions { eastern_european, }
agent spy 0 requires factions { greek, }
agent spy 0 requires factions { southern_european, }
happiness_bonus bonus 1
agent_limit spy 1
}

...or assassin, or whatever you want. Bold just for the purposes of the forum. You have to include the agent_limit for each level of the building. If you only ever want a city to be able to produce 1 spy/assassin, set the limit to 1 for all buildings. If you want higher levels to produce more, write agent_limit spy 2 etc.

As for changing the effects of assassination by the type of target, as far as I know this isn't possible, because there is no code which specifies what type of character an assassin target is. It annoys me, for example, that you get various bad traits from killing enemy assassins - since the AI employs so many assassins, you are often forced to kill them, and your faction leader gets various dread traits.

IF anyone knows a command for the type of assassination target, or a way to fake it, please tell me!

I might try out that new system of assassination in my next mod Sweetlou, but until then my VnV mod in winning combo is the best solution I know of.

[Condottiere SOG]

You know a 95% chance of success means also that there is a 5% chance of failure and even the not-so-talented can get lucky. It adds to the suspense of such operations.

'The assassin elite, Maridi el-Afrid ibn-Mahmood, snuck up on the unexpecting spy, Jehan deNancy, when he was betrayed by glass on the floor from a broken bottle dropped hours earlier by his intended victim. Maridi died drowning on his own blood while a naive Frenchman learned a new trick since coming to the Levantine.'

**** happens........then you die

[hypo]

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=75084