New spy skills and orders a bit overpowered?

[Caledoni]

Has anyone else noticed how OP spies are now?

just dropping them into an enemy province and using their free standard ability raids the province of food (which you get added to your stock) and within 3-4 turns all of the provinces units/garrisons are depleted to red so you can just steamroll in.

I was initially disappointed with the new skill tree as I liked training them up for use poisoning but could understand that they got a bit OP. This is ridiculous now though as base level spies are faction killers..

[Alwyn]

I think you make a fair point. It's not only the food-stealing ability. In one campaign, a high-level enemy agent assassinated a series of generals for an army on my border, one after another. Maybe I was just unlucky - even if they set the chance of assassination at a low percentage, eventually an enemy agent will keep having lucky dice rolls. To be fair, I'm probably not making the most of the general abilities, agent skills and buildings which reduce the success chance of enemy agent actions. When I have used the game's counter-spy mechanics more fully, I'll be in a better position to judge this. I like the way that agent abilities vary according to your faction's culture.

[romanius24]

The new agent skills are really great but definitely unbalanced. I actually think they are the best thing in the update. The intrigues are a joke.
Still much better than the RNG spamfest.

[Skotos of Sinope]

I don't know, for me agents seemed to be less of a problem. Or at least they annoyed me less. It's probably their reduced number that made it feel like they had less of an impact on game play. I mean with this DLC I never had the old familiar experience where you're at an enemy city with two full stacks, and then you get surrounded by three to four agents who pull that old one-two punch where they gang up and keep one army from reinforcing and the other from moving, and then the half-stack that's inside who's backed up by a sizeable garrison if it's a capital city---he can sally out and in a couple of turns virtually wipe out both your armies. And so you get some defensive agents and come back, but the agents at that city have now leveled up and your agents are the walking dead, and they pull the same trick again and level some more.

It's stuff like that that really made me hate agents. I don't know if the agents in this DLC are OP, maybe I just haven't had that experience yet. Or maybe they're just used more creatively by the AI, instead of the same formula, over and over again. BTW, does bribery effect your movement range? They were doing a lot of that. I didn't seem to notice much of an effect.

[Caledoni]

I've not had a chance to play beyond early game yet so hopefully the spamfest days are over at least.

It was more during the first few turns I basically wiped out a couple of 1 province factions without any real fight ridiculously easily

I do like that the Skill choices are no longer a tree so any skills can be spent where wanted rather than based on where points have been spent before

[LuckyPistol]

Agents are definitely less OP than before. With two or three leveled agents, you could cause an entire province to rebel via public order and agent actions. A leveled Champion could also get you a silver chevron army in no time.

[Caledoni]

Agents are definitely less OP than before. With two or three leveled agents, you could cause an entire province to rebel via public order and agent actions. A leveled Champion could also get you a silver chevron army in no time.

Now that I've played a fair bit more I'd agree with you with the exception of early game. Untrained Spies stealing food devastates small factions. once factions have a couple of provinces this is pretty ineffective though.

The best thing about the changes are they seem to have killed the late game agent spam where armies could often be stuck for turns.

With the new Tree i'm finding champions (with no starting bonus training skills) are training my armies a lot faster than before. probably because they can max out the Skill for this very quickly.