Another newbie-type question – this time about using agents to guard another character.
If you have multiple characters with agent skill (of varying degrees: agent 10 through agent 40) and each one issues the order to GrdChar another character in the same hex, will the guarded character receive EXTRA protection? In other words, will a hostile agent have to fight through all of the guarding friendly agents to get to the target character?
Thanks to anyone who has the answer.
Yes, the attacking agent will have cut through all of the defending agents. Fortunately for the Cloud Lord, this is not difficult. In a combat situation it is usually not advisable to agent guard. You just allow the enemy attacking agent to kill or wound 3 or 4 of your characters with one order. The defender is actively aiding the attacker. The Rulebook comment that defending agents are doubled in effectiveness is absolute hogwash. A deliberately misleading passage.
Originally posted by Arthedain73
Yes
This implies that multiple agents ADD layers of protection.
the attacking agent will have cut through all of the defending agents.
But note, this isn’t “…will have TO cut through…” It’s almost as if the answer was written in a style that one can interpret as
A deliberately misleading passage.
If the question is “Do 4 40 point agents equal 160 points of defense (supposedly 320)?” At which point, I believe Arthedain73’s answer would be a resounding “No” The guard orders are taken into account individually in random order. Thus, 1 50 is better than 2 40’s, no? Another example of the linear nature of the program would be Overrunning armies. If your huge 25,000 HC army met up with 12 enemy armies, it’s irrelevant what their total numbers (constitution? 
) are, they’re each taken into account as individual armies and could thusly all be overrun…just as all your weak agents are likely to be prejudicially harmed if guarding against a big meanie.
I would like to reiterate what Arthedain73 said, if you believe an enemy ‘super-agent’ is about to assassinate one of your characters, guard with only one agent per target. You could try an assassination on the enemy agent if you are at your own pop centre and have a 60’ish guard agent and you thought he was alone?
Another interesting point is that guards can be injured / killed by agents who are not double their agent rank, I had a ~65 agent injured by an enemy agent with ~ 100 rank. I guess the double guarding formula does not apply to assassins once they exceed the 100 agent rank. Anyone else find cases of this happening?
Paul
It is not just assassinations. Any guarding in a combat zone is fraught. In a recent game one of my ‘team mates’ lost situational awareness and stole gold from one of my camps. The camp was guarded by an A33 and an A36. His A42 cut right through the two defending agents, wounding them and stole the gold. This sort of thing happens all the time. Don’t guard in combat situations. Those few times it works is not because the guard worked but because the enemy agent got his 5% ‘fumble’ random roll. Oh well, you have been warned.
The example of your team mate’s agent cutting through your guarding agents may be a good example of how a bad relations modifier effects covert actions against your nation? My experience is that few or no enemy agents of a similar rank would have succeeded in similar circumstances.
Paul
Paul,
Yes, I have had guards injured by agents that did not double them in rank. My general rule of thumb is:
Gaurd < 1/2 enemy agent rank: Forget it, you’ll just get hurt.
Guard >= enemy agent rank: You’ll succeed.
in between: might work, might not
I think it should be quite “easy” to find out if this is the way multiple guards work.
Has anyone ever experienced that an agent cuts through the first and the second guard, but gets stopped by the third guard? Because I havent as far as I remember? The agents always seem to go through all guards, or get stopped by the first.
Maybe this is because if multiple guards are pressent, they get calculated as one entity?