Fear Me, The One-Star General!

[Guy]

It seems that my generals, imams and assassins just aren't up to the job when it comes to gaining experience. I often send my generals into battle, I always have my imams preaching across the lands and my assassins are forever destroying enemy buildings, but there's just no ranking-up!

I am wondering just how do I increase the piety of my imams, the stats of my generals and the stats of my assassins? I understand that generals gain such stats only through battles, but is there any other way? Especially with imams. I can't seem to train them high enough to declare a jihad - not that I can train them at all.

Any help?

[MeMongo]

Some tips to get higher piety Imams:

Recruit them in a settlement where you have your highest available religious building, use one settlement to build all your religious buildings as advanced as possible, recruit all your imams there, this will give you the theoligans guild, eventually the headquarters, thus producing better Imams!

Send your Imams into regions with low Islam religion, the more you leave them there converting the population, the higher piety they become.

Send them off to denounce heretics.

Hope this helps

[tudor93]

assassins won't gain subterfuge points by destroying/sabotaging enemy buildings; they gain them by assassinating (captains, FMs, diplomats etc.)

[Nazgûl Killer]

Sabotaging experience is expressed in the "Sabotage skill" that you gain from things such as the "Explosives" ancillary. Only assassinating increases subterfuge for your Assassins.

Stats of generals may increase and decrease based on their stay in cities sometimes, but mostly through battles and crusading and the type of victories you have. Along with that, having an Imam with your general in his army will increase the general's piety over time.


As for Imam piety... I'm not too sure about that. I just use them on enemy territories and their piety generally goes up, but for a few rare cases it does go lower.

[Avatar]

Imams gain piety best by rapidly improving the islamic % in a region. As far as I understand it, the game checks to see how much the percentage has shifted in a turn, and if its high enough then all Imams in the region can increase their piety. You can get up to 3 pips this way, and the good thing is that it doesnt really matter how many you have in the zone.

[In3x]

Your starting imam from any Muslim faction should be able to call a jihad As for your question about generals, luck and battle will make them improve. Honestly though, it doesn't matter a lowly 0 Star general will still be enough for you to dominate your enemies.

[Sitalkes]

Generally speaking it is easier to succeed with assinations and conversions on your home territory than on enemy territory, so try training these guys on defensive missions at home before sending them out somewhere else (to get killed). Look out for heretics and witches, these are the best way to improve your stats if they don't get the iman. Save the game before attempting something and reload if you fail, otherwise your agents won't survive for very long no matter what the suggested success percentage is for an attempt. For generals, ensure you pursue your opponents to the end in battle and kill the enemy general. Use an army that is smaller than your opponent's or split your army into a small group of cavalry with the general and an allied group (the rest of the army, mostly infantry) - this increases your likelyhood of getting an heroic victory. I think also that you have to win a certain number of battles to get an extra star, and the number of battles required increases with each star.

[Silverheart]

conversion units gain traits from successfully converting people - have them kill heretics and witches, and send them in large numbers into regions where your religion is virtually non-existent, and they should quickly become high-level.
Don´t underestimate the effect a Theologians guild has on their education, either.

Assassins can only gain traits/retinue that helps with sabotage from performing sabotages - nothing that helps with overall subterfuge.
Have them practice on killing a captain or two, then send them to take care of more and more important targets, such as diplomats/princesses, priests/imams/inquisitors and low-level family members.
Using captains as practice usually gets them good enough, but don´t forget to train lots of them so that you can gain access to a Master assassins guild - proper training makes them more capable right off the bat.

Generals more often gain traits when you leave the battle to them, and they win.
After they win lots of battles, they will gain more and more traits.
Also, you can just send them on a crusade/jihad - that always makes the general high-level really quickly!

[Parzival2211]

Just to emphasize again: Key to getting more command stars is fighting stronger enemy armies and gaining heroic victories. This way, generals improve very fast.

[Double A]

Kill captains and agents with assassins to level grind. Priests have heretics to burn and low piety regions (if they convert x amount of dudes within about 5 turns of entering the region, they get some rings). Generals get stars faster when the odds are skewed in your enemy's favor (1:1 is as good for you they can be if you want any decent stat increases). I practice on rebels a lot in the start.

[46thCharlemagne]

Generals:

The most reliable way to gain command stars is to fight battles where the odds of the battle are less than 2.25 to 1 in your favor. When you mouse over the battle odds bar on the campaign map and it gives you a ratio, use a calculator or your meat calculator (brain) to check the decimal form of the ratio, for instance if it's a strange number like 20:9, which is 2.22 in decimal.

You will gain one command star in the trait GoodCommander for each of your first two battles within those odds, and a third command star for the 4th victory with those kind of odds. You can gain a 4th and 5th star in this trait but it requires 8 and 16 victories respectively. This is do-able, I have gotten a few generals to 16 or more though it takes a lot of work.

Winning victories where the odds were against you also gains you command stars for traits like GoodRiskyAttacker, GoodRiskyDefender, etc.; you can gain stars in attacking cities too if you often do this well. These traits will only grant you command stars under certain circumstances of course.

Sitting around in a castle with certain unit-producing buildings, or in a city with a military academy, also gives you some greater command ability, with traits like StrategicSkill.

Imams:

Imams (as opposed to "priests" in general) have a harder time gaining piety or even starting out with much of it from traits and ancillaries, but they can eventually gain a lot of piety if you use them right.

As others have mentioned, send them to regions with no to very little Islam religion, but it is key that you send many imams to one region at the same time. This will cause the region's Islam religion percentage to increase very rapidly, and how fast the region changes to your favored religion is crucial towards the imams gaining piety traits. If you just send one or two imams, the region will convert much more slowly and it will not have much of an effect. Secondly, it helps to try and convert regions that are virgin to your religion, not ones that are well-established in another religion; by that I mean one with a very large church structure converting people to that religion instead of yours, and that probably has priests frequently in that region doing the same thing. (Of course, you can always sabotage/destroy the church with an assassin, and assassinate any religious men of other faiths in the area.) Regions that are strongly backed by another religion will not swing to your religion as much as one that has no competing church or priests. Of course, if the settlement is yours and low in your religion, convert it like crazy!

Once I've converted a region to about 80% my faction's religion I move on to another area. Doing this several times with the same pack of imams (say from 6 to 10 of them) will eventually turns those guys into VERY high piety machines. This applies to any religious agents.

Also as others mentioned, defeating heretics and witches helps gain immediate piety, but there aren't often a good supply of heretics in one region for very long. It's an opportunity that you should take advantage of, while relying mainly on the previous method I mentioned.

Imams don't need to have that much piety to call call for a Jihad, I believe it's 6 or close to this.

Assassins:

As others mentioned, you need to start killing, not sabotaging. Find "soft" targets like captains of small armies, and various agents with low skill that aren't anywhere near enemy spies. Kill as many of these as you can, having your assassin kill something every turn if possible. Personally I usually don't try to kill anything with less than around 75-80% odds of success, as the consequences of failing (and getting caught) quickly damages your reputation, not to mention can instantly trigger a war or cost you an ally. If you don't care about being diplomatic and respected, make kill attempts with perceived impunity.

Of course all this killing will quickly turn your faction's leader into a dread beast, but it's the price to pay if you want to have really deadly assassins. Plenty of killing leads to offers of the Assassin's Guild / Hashishim's Guild, which leads to better trained assassins who start with ancillaries, etc. Also by killing often, your killers will sometimes acquire an assassin's blade or handgun (after gunpowder), both of which greatly increase your chance of success in assassinations.

Be aware certain targets will always be extremely hard to kill no matter how skilled the assassin- any agent with very high skill, the leader of any faction, generals leading very large armies, and any unit in a city that has enemy spies in it.

I find it very helpful to have a spy team up with your assassin. Have the spy identify targets in cities and in the field. He will help reveal things the assassin just can't see on his own, including enemy spies and assassins in the field who are not that hard to kill (in a city, they are.), and "soft" structures in a settlement that your assassin can practice his sabotage skills on when he's got no one to slip his blade into.

Hope this helps...

[Slowpoke]

Odd, I've sabotaged a lot of buildings and noticed that, after my assassin maxes out Saboteur (and gains Explosives), he starts gaining Plotter (which increases General Skill, rather than just Sabotage). I did basically level several towns for that to happen, though.

[Avatar]

Odd, I've sabotaged a lot of buildings and noticed that, after my assassin maxes out Saboteur (and gains Explosives), he starts gaining Plotter (which increases General Skill, rather than just Sabotage). I did basically level several towns for that to happen, though.

While this is true, the rate of increase doesnt really compare to what you can achieve with a dedicated killer assassin. Those lucky few that survive their first mission can really start ripping holes in the medieval aristocrasty.

[46thCharlemagne]

Odd, I've sabotaged a lot of buildings and noticed that, after my assassin maxes out Saboteur (and gains Explosives), he starts gaining Plotter (which increases General Skill, rather than just Sabotage). I did basically level several towns for that to happen, though.

I did forget about the Plotter trait, though something was nagging in the back of my mind last night when I posted. I'm all for mixing in some sabotage here and there, and even intensively against a very powerful enemy, one who is sending way too many assassins or priests in my direction or who has too much money and keeps raising huge armies against me, etc. Blowing up most of the buildings in several of an enemy's key cities can truly devastate an opponent if you keep at it.

[Slowpoke]

True, but sabotage is much safer; after 1 Level of Saboteur and Explosives (and presuming your agent is relatively decent, say, 2 xp from creation), pretty much all buildings have a 95% success rating (and IIRC, Saboteur stops at level 3, Master Saboteur, so you don't have to grind that much) and the game doesn't seem to slow down trait advance the way it does with low-level kills.

And I've had several kills at <50% which gained my assassin zero points.

[Double A]

Yeah but you need like half a dozen assassins. I simply don't have that many inns unless I'm playing a Muslim faction.

[46thCharlemagne]

Same for me, which is why I employ this only in the late game. I especially like to take out and repeatedly destroy siege equipment and cannon buildings, as the AI builds hordes of them late game and forces me to always bring a substantial amount of cavalry to every battle.

[Akodo]

My assassin formula is to have a fresh recruit kill a rebel captain and then kill a faction captain, then find a low level merchant, diplomat, princess, or priest to kill. This should get you to 4 eyeballs, at which point you can start going after cardinals, blowing up buildings, and the like.

as far as imams, I suspect they are like orthodox priests. If you are trying to convert an area and are not making good progress your holy people will loose faith. This generally happens when an opposition religious figure is present or a heretic (or 3). What I do is pile 3 holy men in a single area to make it convert faster which also tends to make all 3 get good traits quickly...and then I will spread them out. This also gives me a buffer if another priest or heretic shows up. If you are at a 3 to 2 ratio of your holy men to others/heretics, better send your assassin in to clean them up. Of course if you have built up your holy men a bit they can take care of the heretics themselves.

The key seems to be having your holy man be effectively converting others...and the key to that is him not having to compete against other religious men.