Alain,
thanks. I’ll look into that the next time I get to play a K/A power…
maybe in a team game coming up in Jan… (if we get DS)
Dave
“It might reflect on someone’s integrety and judgement.”
No changes have been made by us, we’ve not been able to! Polite request: please don’t do this.
If we were to change things we’d discuss it with the players and see what they felt about the changes.
Clint (GM)
A respected player once advised that he takes 2/3 the stealth value and adds it to the agent value straight up. I respect this particular player enought to say “That’s good enough for me”, although I shall continue to read and consider. I haven’t heard anything new on the subject since, certainly nothing with any kind of MoS style data analysis to “prove” a formula, so 2/3 it is in my mind.
How can you use data from a scenario where Assassination wasn’t allowed to compare K to A…?
Mind you, the common belief that kidnapping is easier than assassinating kind of flies in the face of “common sense” anyway, doesn’t it? Just kill the guy or tie him up and carry him off…? Seems easier to get away without carrying an extra body around. Common sense flying in the face of common knowledge? Ah, lovely game, this!
On a side note, does anyone have the article from WotW regarding the changes made to the code making army commanders harder to kill?
To the best of my estimation, it appears that stealth is a percentage modifier on base agent rank. By this, I mean that if you have 30 stealth, your base agent rank is increased by 30%. This is reflected in the lack of any appreciable increase in agent effectiveness with 10 stealth, and also in the fact that a 20A with 70Stealth will never succeed in assassination anyone. If it were a random roll of 1-70, more some percentage of the time, your agent skill would be 70+ and you would have a chance of assassinating a character, but 70% of 20A skill is 14, which would make you a 34A and very unlikely to kill anyone.
Yet another theory in a long line of many.
“Fact”…? Beware of such flippant use of the language. It’s been done on more than one occasion. Careful readers, always insert various synonyms of “opinion” when people speak of behind the fog.
I recently had a 32 challenge rank character kill a 124 rank challenge character with but a single blow in a personal challenge. I ran the challenge calculator quite a few times afterwards and it comes out at around 1 in 40,000 to win this challenge.
I wouldnt say fact when saying a 20a with 70 stealth cant kill someone, it could happen but it would be extremely rare as in my little guy killing off the big guy.
Depends on the formula. If the 70 stealth adds “70% of 20” then it’s highly unlikely. If the 70 stealth adds Random(1-70) to 20, well, it’s entirely feasible.
Well it is definitely NOT as rare as that. I have had Carrog, agent rank between 30 to 40 with 30(70) stealth rank, kill more then one Eothraim army commander, though their command rank would only have been between 30-45. My experience leads me to think (same as some of you have already mentioned) that a random number between 1 and the stealth rank is added to the agent skill and then another roll is made for the success of the agent action.
Alain
Well, assuming of course that the formula for assassination and kidnapping is the same for every scenario, I compared that data with other games where I was going for assassinations more often then kidnappings.
We are getting a little off topic here, but…
I am v happy for people to think what they like on downgrading for agent actions. Hopefully the people I play against dont think it is important
In BOFA, on T2 Bilbo, a 20 agent, killed the Necromancer on his city castle. Necromancer was in charge of an army and was guarded. This is a pretty tough assignment… Bilbo did have 80 stealth to go with the agent rank though…
Bilbo - I had the exact opposite with Stealth - had Bilbo die with similar stats on a Goblin commander so my take it that’s it more likely to be a random modifier of 1-X on stealth but that’s just me “feel”. I’ve also had Carrog do some early kills so…
As for downgrades - I’m a big fan of them. Often seems to be the difference in combat and more so in agent/ems v enemy action. I always try to attack nations that won’t have downgraded (stealing gold seems to be a good example - normally 5k max for a MT, 7500 with a downgrade - from memory but you get the idea).
Clint (very much player here).
From memory, the random Stealth modifer was the way to add to Agent rank before the last (many years ago) change by GSI.
I was, and still am under the impression from data stats that Stealth is very much more important than just a 1-x random number… I would even go as far as suggesting that it is 1+y - x+y where y is the number GSI added to the Stealth modifier to make it a more usefull stat, while at the same time making ordinary Agent characters have some sort of -ve modifier.
Haven’t any of you ever wondered why a A40S10 succeeds more often at identical orders than an A50S0 character? Or do you guys have different data collections?
Michael
Oh… and that’s my opinion… not Fact… now give me the code for a few days and I’ll give you Fact
What do you reckon Clint… you don’t even have to look at it
Michael
Michael,
I wonder if every character might have a unique “Y” for each game that is persistent throughout the game? Some characters never seem to fail. Others seem to fail all the time. The vast majority fall in the middle and seem to conform to “expected” results.
Thus, I think at game-in, a character gets a luck factor, or your “Y”, which is persistent for them for the entire game. I have different emissaries right now that fall into either the “never succeed” or “always succeed” categories.
And I do think your point is interesting and has merit now that you bring it up. Stealth is a VGT (Very Good Thing).
David, I think you are right. In one game my two Dun mages never got more than one skill point whenever they prenticed. The game went around 40 turns. This is streaching the random factor beyond breaking.
Dave,
The reason I pointed towards stealth was the update that GAD sent out from GSI re Agent order changes… long long time ago… can’t place my hands on that piece of paper at the moment… but all talk from then on and data collected seemed to point towards Stealth being made more important.
It’s an interesting concept… a Luck factor allocated to each character at character creation.
Michael