The Percentage of Success

[Mr.Hyde]

Ever since I started playing vanilla Medieval II:Total War I've never been confident in the percentages of success when it comes to agents attempting their missions, i.e spying, sabotage, priests, etc. When an agent has 70-80%, I'm thinking I've got somewhere between 30-40% chance of success. It has become such an annoyance that I've given up building brothels and Inns simply because I feel spying is a waste of florins.

To my dismay the same issue seems to be occurring in DLV.

Is this just delusional madness, or have others experienced this as well?

[yukishiro1]

I'm not convinced the percentages are wrong per se, but they certainly arn't determined every time you make an attempt.

You can see this easily enough by saving, sending a spy into a town, and then reloading and doing it over and over. If you've got a 40% chance, it won't be 4/10 that succeed, even projected across a whole lot of trials. There seems to be some stickiness to the calculation, but not complete stickiness because you will eventually succeed even if your spy dies 5 times in a series of reloading.

It's possible it's just a complete random chance and I haven't done enough tests, but it sure doesn't feel that way.

P.S. The value of spies isn't so much for their actual spying as for the LOS.

[Mr.Hyde]

I understand spies have multiple values, I'm just annoyed at having a spy killed, with an 80% chance of success, 6 out of 10 times(not by loading up a quick save, but multiple spies through out a campaign), yet an assassin with the same 80% chance succeed a lot more often, seemingly.

[Ichon]

It depend where you are sending the spy... from what I can tell the % odds do not include spies inside settlements or the security ancillaries and traits of family members. So your odds might be much lower than what is apparent. However if you are just spying on a random captain leading an army and it shows 75% then you should be pretty confident of success. Between 50% and 75% though low skill spies seem to die more like 80% of the time. less than 50% don't bother unless you don't mind reloading multiple times. In that regard assassins do seem much better where I often will try an assassination at 20% odds or less and seem to succeed alot or at least the assassin only missed the target.

[Mr.Hyde]

...However if you are just spying on a random captain leading an army and it shows 75% then you should be pretty confident of success.

This is the exact situation that I'm not confident in. You would think that 7/10 times the spy would succeed. Instead, it seems like 7/10 times the spy dies.

Again, this is not from saving before I spy and then trying to load the save. This is based off of my assumption that If I had 10 spies and they all had 70% chance, I'm quite sure most of them would end up dead in a disproportionate number to the odds.

P.S. does anyone know where I can find the code that generates the random calculations for agents?

[Ichon]

This is the exact situation that I'm not confident in. You would think that 7/10 times the spy would succeed. Instead, it seems like 7/10 times the spy dies.

Again, this is not from saving before I spy and then trying to load the save. This is based off of my assumption that If I had 10 spies and they all had 70% chance, I'm quite sure most of them would end up dead in a disproportionate number to the odds.

P.S. does anyone know where I can find the code that generates the random calculations for agents?

You would have to test this many times to truly tell. I've had strings of no spy dying for several 75% chances then a run of every single spy dying. I do think the odds might be more like 10-15% lower than what the 75% indicates but in my experience a spy succeeds more than half the time at 75% but probably not really 75%. I generally save the first mission a spy goes on and reload if he dies but after that no reloads and many of my spies survive until old age so somewhere around +60% it really is slightly better than 50% and at 75% it is more like 60% etc. By the time get to 95% I can only think of a few times I've had a spy die and it was always when trying to spy on a king or crown prince so I think the % doesn't show ancillaries and security traits.

[Taiji]

I think descr_campaign_db.xml has settings for success rates of agents. Good luck, Mr Hyde

[Mr.Hyde]

I really dislike reloading a saved game. I like to live with all of the mistakes from the campaign, makes it more interesting. Only time I save is when/if I quit for the night.

I looked in the descr_campaign_db.xml and there wasn't very much in there as far as spies go. Only saw the additions from the mod. I couldn't find the original series of strings or code that encompassed the entire spy event anywhere. Oh well, it's probably hard coded or beyond my comprehension anyways.

[Alatar98]

i never tested it but does this game suffer the same problem as empire?

in empire the dice for success is only rolled once per turn, if the first person succeeds they all do, if the first fails everyone else fails. it worked that way with gentlemen stealing tech, i never used any of the drakes.