Here i go again, pan-handling for information from the lore-rich…
I know that the difficulty of assassinating/kidnapping a target depends in part on the target’s highest skill rank. Is this base or net rank? Is stealth a factor?
Are the following commanders listed in the correct order of difficulty from easiest to most difficult?
C70 [easiest]
C70(100)
C100
C100 St 30 [most difficult]
Or is there some overlap here–like maybe number #1 and #2 are equally as difficult, as are #3 and #4…
And being an army commander would flip the difficulty with those command ranks; a 70 commander in charge of an army is harder to kill than a 100 commander who isn’t. Otherwise your order of difficulty is correct, at least based upon my experience.
I remain unconvinced that a C70(100) is any harder a target than a C70 w/o artifacts. However, stealth on a target adds nothing to difficulty or defense, as stealth only comes into play when the stealthy character attempts an order (besides of course the effects on scouting reports).
Much of this is from Mouth-of-Sauron, mixed with my edits and comments received from lots of players over the years:
Terms:
Net Agent Rank: Agent Rank + Agent Artifact(s) + Stealth Modifier
Stealth Modifer (1): Rand () * (Stealth Rank + Stealth Artifact(s))
Stealth Modifer (2): Agent Rank * (Stealth Rank + Stealth Artifact(s))/100
Net Guard Rank: Rand () * 2 * Net Agent Rank of Guard
Character Rank: Victim’s highest unmodified (no artifacts) skill rank
Relations Adjustment: (see table pg 54 of rulebook. take the difference)
Note: Choose between Stealth Modifie (1) and (2). I tend to believe Stealth Modifier (1) is the correct one as it more closely matches the way the rest of the software was apparently written.
Agent Action Success %:
Assass success: Net Agent Rank - Net Guard Rank - Character Rank*0.5 + Relations adjustment
Kidnap success (1): 5-10% easier than assass
Kidnap success (2): same success as assass success, but consequences of failure are less severe
Note: from my own experience I believe kidnap to be easier than assass, so I’d go with (1)
So, all of the above says that your question can be answered by saying that (1) and (2) are both equal and easier than (3) and (4) which are also equal.
What is not accounted for in the above is fortifications & whether or not the target is an army commander. I believe both add to the difficulty, although I am not sure how much.
So, two of you say that artifacts don’t make the target harder, one says the opposite. My rather limited expereince agrees with the idea that artifacts do not enhance the target’s resistance. I also agree about stealth not being a factor if we are to believe what the rule book says.
Guards are dealt with separately, so the agent success formula needs to be adjusted to remove the guard from the formula.
I am still interested in any other imput regarding the effect of skill-artifacts held by the target.
My limited experience also tells me that base agent rank is more important that net agent rank. So a 70 agent is better than a 50(70). Likewise a 70 IK agent is better than a 50 CL agent. Here is the reason: I was told that the difficulty is in part determined by a COMPARISON of the assassin’s agent rank to the target’s highest skill rank, and I believe that this comparison is made with regard to their BASE ranks. So a 50(70) who attacks a rank 70 character has a handicap that a straight 70 agent does not.
Also does anyone have info regarding how much a target’s difficulty is modified by being in his own pop center, or in his capitol, or at another nation’s pop center, or how fortifications affect the difficulty, and how much being an army commander makes a difference (other than that it makes a HUGE difference).
– Whether or not you’re in the targets popcenter
– The loyalty of the popcenter if it belongs to the target
I don’t have a shred of evidence to back this up, except a mountain of annecdotal evidence, because it sure seems hard to assassinate someone in their own capital with a 100 loyalty.
And a number of players swear by this as a tactic for helping defend against agents.
Regarding pop centers, I was told that there is a percentage chance that the militia at a pop center will thwart an agent attempt and that this is made as a separate roll without any regard to the level of the agent.
Does anyone know if being in your own pop center, or having high loyalty, or forts improves the target’s INNATE resistance (similar to how armies improve its commander’s innate resistance) or do these things make the militia more effective?
For sure it coulden’t work so.
In my experience the pop center, fortification, army command or capitol modifier are much more important that the “guard”.
As cloud lord with 90+ agents I used to kill any guard that try to stop me, no regard on his skill. But still sometimes (rare) I failed in enemy capitol or with a 30 army commander no guarded.
With the above formula an 80 skill agent (or two 55 getting the best of the two dice roll) guarding a 80 army command make quite impossible to assasinate without lots of artifact and good fortune.
And the success is far too easy for low ranking agent on normal chars, becoming quite impossible if there are guards. In my experience a ranking 40 agent (no other bonus) killing a 30 char is quite impossible. With the formula above: 40-15 = 25%!
I think an open ended d100 roll is needed (as for challange, with a 96+ roll yuo gain one more roll). I’m quite sure the other chars rank dosen’t count so much, and dosen’t seems to be linear.
With the formula above a 90 agent on an 50 commander guarded by a 70 agent score success only:
success% = 90-140*rand()-25 <6%.
And experience teach us yuo have a big impact on your chanches if any (or all) of the following is:
is army commander;
is on an enemy population center;
the pop center is fortified;
the pop center is capitol;
bad relation.
I used to kill more then 50%, and usually the guard is wounded or killed.
I think the formula above dosen’t help at all, and could be usefully ignored. I belive it give really too much importance on guarding agent.
That sentence about agent strength being doubled on defense is one of the biggest misleaders in the Rule Book. One of the deliberate errors used to separate the sheep from the goats. Easy to disprove, seen it many times and you can try it yourself. Have a 40ish allied agent steal from a camp that you are defending with a 40ish agent. The defender is injured almost every time and fails to prevent the steal. There is no substitute for initiative, which this is replicating.
When you look at the current misunderstandings (in the war on terror) on the relative values of passive security, active security and preemption you realize the game designers got it right afterall.
Chrisitian, there is no such thing as a “Local Militia”. It is a message and not an action. It is the message a pop center owner gets when an agent (friendly or hostile) fails his random roll. It is more elegant than saying “Ufgamog failed his random roll”, if less elegan than saying “Ufgamog stupidly lost his knife and toolkit during a drunken binge”.
Well, Ed, believe what you want. I just had an A55 captured in a StlGold attempt against an unfortified Dunlending pop center on Turn 10. Couldn’t have been a much higher level agent guarding it… Face it. Most of the time, there are no guards vs. StlGold or Assass or Kidnap attempts. Thus, people’s perception that guarding doesn’t work is colored by the fact that most successes weren’t guarded against. Add in the real importance of the relations-differential and the other factors, and I continue to believe that guarding is indeed potentially effective. So…
Q: Does guarding work?
A: Sometimes
which is what the Rand() in my formula is there for…
But to all who disbelieve the formula, that’s fine. Propose an improved version. All we have is an approximation of what works based upon accumulated experience. the problem with random things is that they’re random. It takes a meaningful sample set to really figure things out and none of us really have enough data. I’ve played CL where I didn’t get but one stealth bonus in the first 12 characters named. Does that mean that CL’s stealth bonus is 8% likliness? no. It’s just statistics. a 99% chance of success means that sometimes you get that 1% unlikely event. That’s why the statistics on a melt-down of a nuclear reactor core are so damn scary.
A couple of points on guarding:
Ed is right about the “2xRank” canard that crept into the rulebook. GSI posted a disclaimer about the statement in a Whispers a long time ago (a different century at least).
One possibility is that the Target’s Character Rank isn’t necessarily the straight rank of the target. Instead it might ‘float’, and be some function of the difference between the natural agent rank of the assassin and the target.
Another hypothesis that has much merit is that guarding is a complete second action in a sequence, where the target number is defined by the result of enemy’s agent action. The sequence looks something like:
Guard issues guard order, gets rank bump of 1-5 pts
Enemy agent takes his shot at target: Rank + Mods + Random Roll
he may succeed or fail based on whether he gets above 100
note Mods include a rather large negative due to Target’s Character Rank
Guard then gets a roll to stop the enemy: Rank + Mods + Random roll
he may prevent the action based on whether his score exceeds the Enemy agents score from 2)
The guards modifiers do not include a negative from the Target’s Character Rank
the Stealth of the enemy agent might be negative modifier to the Guards roll.
there may be no relations modifier in this roll. (This is an implication of an answer GSI made to the question of whether having the Guard Doubled improves the chance of anassassination. They replied “No, because the guard doesn’t know the nationality of the attacker”)
The main attractions of this type of structure is twofold. First, this explains both guards getting a bump in rank despite an assassin ‘blowing through’ the guard, as well as the occasional instance where an assassin blows through the guard, but fails to nail the target (i.e. the assassin failed on his roll, but the guard failed to beat the assassin’s score). The second is that since the guard’s roll does not include the negative modifier for Target Character Rank (and possibly relations), he effectively guards at a higher rank. The latter is the source for “Agents guarding tend to be effective even against Agents twice their skill rank” statement in the Order section of the Rulebook.
One final pontification, er note, - it doesn’t really matter whether Dave’s equation or the above algorithm reflects the actual “truth”. They only need to provide a reasonable estimation of the chance for success in as wide a range of situations as possible. The key is always going to be to evaluate options in the context of risk/reward, and for that a rough sense of the success chances - i.e. “poor”, reasonable", “odds-on”, etc - is all that’s really needed.
FTR, I tend not to guard the targets for assassination. More often than not, my agent has fulfilled his purpose just by being there - I assume my opponent has seen him via ScoChar. The threat of him guarding is usually enough for him to “draw fire”. For the better agents, there’s usually a better option - like assassinating the assassin, or stealing an artifact (including ones you expect to lose)
Hi Ed,
Thanks for clearing up my confusion regarding “local militia.” So Ji Indur’s failure to steal gold later in the game is probably no more than a really pitiful skill roll?
Does everyone concur?
Perhaps I was misinformed about there being a random element in pop centers that causes agents to fail missions regardless if they make their rolls–sort of like a random chance of guarding with 100% success.
