Originally Posted by
Lord Baal
NONE. Ok, not so serious. But I think having agents, moving them as check boards as you move armies is annoying and not quite effective. You are bound to forget agents here and there and remembering them only when you read they are dead of old age or by an "accident" or some sorts.
I'm more in favor of the abstraction of this series of services. Picture, imagine if you will, a screen or frame, with the map of the whole known world at the right, taking most of the screen, it's provinces and who owns what... A mini map for all purposes and intention. Know, contemplate that at the left, for what it's left of this frame, there's a list. This list reflects several things and have sliders, yes, sliders that go from 0 to 100%. This sliders describe things like commercial interest, religion conversion, espionage, sabotage and other non conventional shenanigans, and right below there's the amount of money you spend on them.
As you click on regions on the mini map, the list changes to reflect how much you care and therefore invest on the underground of each region, and the trick is that for very well, known, or even own provinces establishing a spy network to keep your own forces on check and protect you from outsiders is not that really hard compared for example to do the same in unknown enemy territory. This will reflect on the cost of this networks. Having them for example in Rome it self at 100% would cost you let's say, 50 pieces of gold per turn, while having them at 100% in let's say, Britain will cost you 1000 pieces of gold per turn, at least until the region it's pacified and fully integrated to your empire.
Know, as you have this sliders up your rats network will start to grow on the region, adding "points", levels or percentage to it, progressively and directly proportional to the amount of interest you put on them versus certain things like the happiness of the region with their current government and certain cultural modifiers. It would be really hard and expensive for Rome to have a spy network in Cartage for example.
Anyhow, as your networks start to grow, things starts to happen at certain levels, like gaining random information about troop movements and camps, city population and happiness. Those would be passive actions that would happen automatically with minimal chances of getting caught.
Then there are the active actions, like ordering the untimely dead of a specific political or military figure, the occasional fire of certain buildings and so on. But before you order those things you need to have certain levels of certain networks on those provinces. And each time you oder something the level of that province lowers a little or a lot depending on the importance of your deeds. Burning a farm is not so much notorious as trying to kill the emperor or chieftain don't you think? This, way each time you order something the level of the network drops, combined with a capped max amount of "points" in each region gives a mechanism that refraining you and the AI from simply stocking lots of points and razing all with your spies and assassins for example.
As logic dictates, failed attempts could randomly drops the network level or "points" far more or even outright destroying the whole network with the risk of exposing you. But even successful attempts are not out of the scope of blowing everything. Why you ask? Imagine the agent gets caught, either after being successfully or not (of course failed attempts are way more prone to get caught) and he don't kill himself as ordered, and starts to sing all about who hired him and so on. This would make this kind of move more risky and exciting, adding a little more randomness and making developing a good network a necessity to get the job done.
Just my two cents. I hope people don't get mad as this would effectively remove all agents from the game. Or not? Because you could still have a list of agents, and deploy them to the regions you would like to. You just simply would not move them on the board as a piece.
Agents?
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