Mr. Engel,
On your concern of the FreePs having larger armies than the DS. The 1650 scenario takes place 1400 years before the events of the LotR series. The DS were utterly devistated by the forces or humans and elves in the Last Alliance which resulted in the start of the 3rd age. At this mid-point of the 3rd age, the Free did indeed far outmatch the DS in strength of arms.
The 2950 scenario is nearly 100 years before the LotR. At this point, the forces were far more balanced. Years of war and disease has thinned the FP freatly and the DS are growing in power.
It is my understanding that there is also a WotR scenario, that attempts to recreate the situation of the LotR. In this scenario, Frodo will destroy the ring, the badly outmatched FP must simply survive long enough to keep Sauron distracted.
Now, as fo your concern about agents. I've been playing this game off and on for some 7 years or so. Yes, agents can really ruin your whole day. So can dragons and curse squads and a pack of kick-ass emissaries. This game is really intended to be a character game, with some army stuff going on in the background. The power of the characters to greatly effect other nations demonstrates this Role Playing nature the designers intended.
There are effective defenses to agents in the 1650 and 2950 scenarios. The most effective defense is the Curse Squad. This is a pack of 3 mages, each knowing the spell "curse". They can guess where agents will show up (capitals, recruiting pops, places where important armies will be) then sit a hex out and kill the assassins. 2-3 effectively used curse squads can certainly keep the agents at bay. Of course, the enemy can them set curse traps for your curse squads....
The real problem with agent imbalance comes in the Fourth Age scenario. Little was written by Tolkien about the time after the LotR. This made it the perfect setting for a scenario where each player gets to design their own nation. Great idea, horriable execution.
The fatal flaw of this scenario is that the secondary powers were removed from artifacts. The secondary powers of artifacts is the only way to build curse squads. The result of leaving off the secondary powers of the artifacts, is that there is no effective defense against agents.
It is this fourth age major flaw that has resulted in the LAS (Limited Agent: no agent special nation abilities) and NKA (No kidnap-Assassinate) games. Unfortunately, neither of these scenarios have solved the issue of fourth age game. With LAS, the killing starts a couple turns later, as it takes a few more turns to train up the agents, but agents still run the game. NKA creates new issues as mountain pops are VERY easy to defend with a small army preventing emissary action and small blocking armies delay movement of vastly superior armies, and deny them the food they need to scale the mountains to the pop.
In short, yes agents can GREATLY effect the military game. This is not an too much of an issue in the Third Age scenarios. It is unfortunate that a major flaw was introduced into the FA scenario.
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