Question: Does the CL having hated relations to NG improve the chances of a successful assassination on NG characters?
I say it doesn’t. It’s the relations the target character has that is important. Others say it does, having NG at hated gives a bonus (this seems to be the generally held view).
What does the site community think?
I’ve always been under the same impression as yourself.
The Cloud Lord isn’t going to be any more stealthy, or “try harder” as an assassin or even an emissary, if he “hates” you…his job is to kill you. I’d hazard that Hated would work against this kind of work as it’d imply a certain amount of emotion is present to get in the way of doing a professional job… Now, if my pop Hated the Cloud Lord, they’d be ever more vigilant and watchful, and less prone to giving ear to the enemy’s emissary spin. If Neutral, the Assassin Wants to kill? Disliked he Really Wants to kill? Hated he Really Really REALLY wants to kill? Doesn’t work well for me as a bonus to the Individual, but in regards to groups (the populace, the militia, armies) it’s fine.
downgrading helps. it helps defend against agent actions. it helps an aggressor nation execute agent actions. I have lots of anecdotal evidence to support this notion.
My belief (and as we haven’t looked at the code, all of us have beliefs on this type of topic) is that agent action success/failure is influenced significantly by the “relations differential”.
ever wonder why your A30 fails to stlgold from your ally’s unfortified camp? Ans: it’s because you’re both tolerated vs. each other. if your ally was friendly to you and you were tolerated to your ally, your agent would enjoy a positive relations differential and the agent’s actions would have greater chance of success vs. that ally.
Freeps need to downgrade LR & CL. very very important. CL & LR need to downgrade their targets. very very important. the one that doesn’t do it suffers. I won’t bore you with all of the anecdotes (some from ongoing games that are quite amusing). but I strongly believe in the relations-differential factor in reducing or increasing difficulty of agent action.
cheers,
Dave
“ever wonder why your A30 fails to stlgold from your ally’s unfortified camp? Ans: it’s because you’re both tolerated vs. each other. if your ally was friendly to you and you were tolerated to your ally, your agent would enjoy a positive relations differential and the agent’s actions would have greater chance of success vs. that ally.”
Agree with that Dave. However, it’s only because your ally has ‘positive’ relations to you. Not the other way around.
The instructions say when taliking about agent orders (e.g. 615) “Success is based on… the relations between the nations”. P16 of the rule book is much clearer. It says “Relations effect the chance of success for some agent orders… the better the relations a nation has to your nation, the easier it will be for agents to carry out certain missions”.
Because Relations affect groups of people. They’ll increase the “defense” of the population centre (group) or increase the effectiveness of the army (group). Popular opinion (relations) have no bearing on the Individual’s (character) ability to perform that which he/she is attempting to accomplish, which is based on skill and/or modified skill at that particular (individual) task.
That’s simply my spin on the rules, but the rules are pretty clear.
The rulebook… well the version that I have… was issued many many years ago when many of the real rules were sort-of-distorted. GSI weren’t in the business of giving out the code… MoS helped gather alot of evidence and make some great deductions from all the data collected.
We have had rule changes since the rulebook was introduced, we have had rule clarrifications that the written word sort-of-implied something different, and we have had lots of anecdotal evidence that would suggest that the rulebook isn’t a comprehensive set of rules but a guide as to how the program sort-of works.
We know there are limits to certain actions… assassinations… pop centre builds… etc that aren’t actually written in the book…
There is a lot of strong anecdotal evidence that suggests that UpStNat and DnStNat are very very important… you ignore this at your peril… and not just for armies. Character actions “seem” to succeed much more regularly when you have the right relations.
Maybe what we need again is another MoS type… ready to gather information and distribute answers… wouldn’t work on a list like this though… could be a yahoo group but would probably work as an email distribution group better…
Michael
Don’t worry about downgrading with a thought to helping your characters succeed; it’s just a wasted capital order. Downgrade enemy agent nations. Downgrade to go from a 10% to 25% modifier in battle.
If it helps agent or emi activities, why is it easier to steal/InfOthr to/from allies? Assuming you’re both Tolerated (or both Friendly, whatever), then the relations modifiers cancel out, right? Same argument for stealing/InfOthr’ing an enemy then? Both Dislikes cancel each other out? I don’t think so.
Drew
Uhm…a YahooGroup is an E-Mail distribution group.
The ability to read and write on it through its web interface is an added feature.
It amazes me how many people don’t know this. YahooGroups started as little more than another listserv…
I guess you’re really trying to make a point here… 
You are right up to a point, but yahoo group is no longer just an email distribution group… it has more added features that make it similar in a way to this bulletin board.
What I was suggesting (though not saying in as many words as I will use now) was having a setup similar to MoS… a person/group of people collating information and disseminating it through email to a wider audience… with that wider audience participating by sending in relavent information for each issue.
We learnt a hell of a lot of usefull stuff about the game, made lots of inferences about the game mechanics, shared riddle information, dragon and other encounter information, etc etc… OK we sort of do that here, but with the MoS you had tables of information collated and updated… does that happen with this forum? Does someone take riddle answers and update the riddle file… do people send in dragon info and have the encounter tables updated… do we have people ready to have their strategy guides disseminated and discussed… I don’t think so but am willing to be corrected…
Michael
The encounter/riddle/dragon/etc. information on this site is just something I input on my own from various other online sources. If someone wanted to volunteer to maintain it actively, I could set up permissions to allow that. I just never figured anyone would care enough to do it, and I’m lazy enough as it is.
It has been buzzing around in my head for a couple of days, and I think that I might have it…or might not.
Think about it from a practical standpoint.
A bit lengthy, but I figured to share what I thought. Perhaps someone can shoot holes in it, and clear it up for us…shrug
You’re just trying to justify your Belief. You’re not really listening (is that one of the examples above…?) The Agent and the Emissary don’t care how they feel, they’re professionals doing their jobs. It’s the susceptibility of the Populace that matters. YOU have to downgrade the enemy that is attacking you with characters to give your people protection. HE doesn’t have to downgrade with you to give his characters an edge.
Here’s an additional $0.02:
while it’s intellectually interesting to think about what makes “sense”, it is not the best way to approach figuring this (or anything else) out about this game. I mean no disrespect to those of you who like to think about how things “should work.” It’s just that how things “should work” does not necessarily correlate with how things “do work”. Not to mention that you might things “should work” a certain way, whereas Bill Fields might have thought things “should work” a different way.
two superior methods I’d suggest are:
a. measure, measure, measure and measure again. fit to a model and see if your model correlates with your measurements.
b. realize the game is a software program. how would you code it if you were writing the software?
My answer to both b. and a. matches for the particular topic of this thread.
I’d build the software by creating a subroutine that computes relations differential. that subroutine would be called as a part of order processing for those orders where relations matter. I would not have a different piece of “relations” code for each order. different code doing the same or similar things is bad coding practice. yuck.
That implementation concept matches with my observations on how relations differential affects agent & emissary actions in practice, observed over a decade of playing the game.
All that said, I fully well admit that I could be completely wrong. Part of the fun is forming your own opinions on these more esoteric areas of game strategy.
cheers,
Dave
p.s. for example, how does stealth fit into agent order calculation???
My personnal belief on stealth is that it adds a random 1-x to your agent rank for purposes of your order. Say your a 62 agent with 25 stealth you would act as a 62 +(random 1 to 25) added to your agent rank. The random 1 to 25 would be similar to how in Personnal Challenge you get a random 1 to 100 and your opponent does likewise and then the difference is the 1 to x amount of damage the loser takes.
So Friendly vs Friendly is no different than Hated vs Hated? I took this from the word “differential”…
Clarity is required here, as you don’t appear to be weighing in on either side here.
Thanks,
Brad
Brad,
sorry. didn’t mean to be ambiguous. yes. believe it or not, i’m saying that friendly vs. friendly is identical to hated vs. hated. in character actions where relations come into play.
worse case is friendly vs. hated.
best case is hated vs. friendly.
etc.
It’s the differential that matters.
it’s easy to implement. So, it’s probably implemented that way. It’d be more difficult to implement a split-hieararchal approach based upon each nation’s seperate relations, so i bet it’s not implemented that way.
Also, my experiences seem to coincide with this belief. I admit freely that it is an “educated” belief.
Dave
Tuormo, thanks!
This is what I have always used as my “model” as well. I also think this calculation applies for Scout orders. Others disagree.
in fact, the full agent success formula I’ve used is:
Agents explained
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: 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), but I usually choose K/A based upon whether the target char has agent skill or not. A hostage with no agent skill doesn’t escape.
This is presented as a hypothetical.
Let it be postulated that a mythical ME player goes to Miami for vacation. While there he, possibly, takes out a game’s co-designer for dinner and drinks. Gladly buying the co-designer all the drinks he wants, the mythical ME player (trying not to be to obvious about it) tries to steer the converstion into revealing pathways.
This issue is (probably) not directly addressed. However, the co-designer (might) be familiar with US Army psychological sturdies conducted during WW II. In the Pacific Theater US combat troops absolutely hated the Japanese. Not only had they attacked the nation, mistreated American prisoners, had an alien culture but were “little yellow devils”.The combat soldiers, themselves, thought this motivated them to extra risk, effort and bravery. In the European Theater this hatred did not exist, except among Jewish soldiers.
Our mythical ME player receives (besides a splitting headache) the impression (from possible nuances in the non-existant conversation) that relative relations has an effect on both agent and emissary offensive and defensive actions. Motivated persons try harder and take more risks.
Dave,
Recently I seem to find I have less success in kidnapping then before, I believe some time ago there were some adjustments made and kidnapping is now harder then assassination. I got a lot of data on kidnapping when I played a special scenario where only kidnapping was allowed and I am 90% sure that assassination is easier now.
Cheers,
Alain
Considering the huffy/offended denials that have come out of Cardiff, one would hope that there have been no source code changes these last several years. It might reflect on someone’s integrety and judgement.