Stealthy camping: [40]% chance of any new camp becoming hidden when placed. Will automatically reveal if improved to a town or fortified beyond a tower
No allegiance: 20% chance of a non-command character defecting to an allied nation if he in the same location as their pop centre or character. Characters with armies immune, cannot take a nation above 21 characters
Slave labour: all camps and villages produce an extra 20%, but lose 1 loyalty / turn
Political games: target nation incapable of going hated to your nation OR relations of a target nation towards your nation improved by 1 level each turn you transfer 5k gold to them, cannot go beyond neutral. Order sequence has to be at end of turn.
Wartransports: all transports of nation have constitution of 10
Sage master: All new mages starts with one extra spell. (This SNA could be split in 3 with diferent cost for one extra easy, moderate or hard spell).
Shadow magic: Mage`s ID is not revealed in the army combat description. (but there is still a mesage revealing that a combat spell was cast)
Awareness: +20 (or +10) to guard orders.
Active patrol: All Cities and Major Towns outside your map produce a scry report regardless of its loyalty.
Healer expertise: All characters have a higher natural healing rate (double or +50%). (note: but not “new character have a better chance to have the special ability of double healing”, that would be lame)
Heroes in battle: Double the combat bonus for artifacts and spells in army/navy combat.
Militia: Population centers gain +50 loyalty bonus against enemy armies.
Local spies: Population centers gain +50 loyalty bonus for identify the presence of foreign character (flag) and -20 penality to hostile agent orders.
And here are some aimed at increasing the use of light troops. I have suggested some pretty big bonuses here; i think this is needed to make them attractive vs the default hiring of HC or HI. I absolutely recognise that some of these would be pretty gross if they were to stack and this needs to be avoided (or carefully thought through)
Mumakil (Evil only): A limited number of Mumakil have been trained to accompany armies; however they will only work with armies consisting only of LI, AR or MA. Such armies add 40% to their CON and 120% to ATT STR
Longbowmen: (FP only): Archers have additional range, allowing them to fire arrows once before combat starts, and thereafter fight normally (i.e. they get an additional first round of combat)
Archers of courage: Archers all carry 2m wooden stakes, giving them a 200% bonus to STR and CON against any all-cavalry army
Mass-muster: every pop centre can muster 500MA / turn, in addition to its normal recruiting allowance
“We build ladders”: LI, AR and MA all carry ladders / other similar equipment, giving them a 100% bonus vs fortifications
“Live off the land”: all non-heavy troops (i.e LC LI AR MA) all move as fed, regardless of whether there is food in the baggage train
“We shun armour”: nation views wearing metal armour as cowardly and may not recruit troops with anything better than leather armour. However, all troops are significantly faster than normal, giving heavy troops effectively +20% CON, and light troops +60% CON.
“Are we going to combine the ones that clash or just have them as options we can vote on? Are we going to give them an expected cost before we vote on them as the viability of an SNA will depend on the cost associated with it.”
Can you send on the spreadsheet? Expected cost is always useful btw.
Similar ones we can do different polls on and do it that way I suspect.
I propose a SNA that will make troops automaticly guard PCs of their own nation and at their location and characters with their army. And that troops will support their own agents at their location duing guard and other orders.
Lay Low - A character may expend one or both actions hiding in a safe location. For one action expended give a 25% bonus versus agent actions and for both actions a 75% bonus. (play with the numbers as necessary, but the idea is that if they are completely in hiding in a secure location for the entire fortnight, they should be awfully difficult to act upon, while if they are mostly hiding but still perform some other action during the week they will not be nearly as safe).
I have included all the ones listed above on the Spreadsheet and sent it to Clint - there are 74 suggestions. It’s obvious from the suggestions is the #1 requirement is for a way to make guarding characters easier against assasination.
Gavin, I think this has already been done. Guy (Happymadcats) Roppa suggested this about four years ago and the two of us a lengthy discussion on this matter. To summarize:
Guy, like others, was irritated at the loss of armies and army commanders from agents. Military resources could be diverted into anti-agent activities when not otherwise occupied.
Ed points out that military resources are not designed for anti-agent activities and Stassun/Feild obviously thought them inadequate for that purpose, although provisions had been made that huge and very high morale armies are resistant to agent actions. The histories of the terrorists Zarquawi and Carlos the Jackel were reviewed and these men seemed able to go anywhere they wanted and do whatever they wanted, no matter how many boots-on-the-ground. However Ed acknowledged that dragnets and roadblocks do, sometimes, catch low level agents and terrorists.
Do not consider this confirmed, but I SUSPECT there will be a new commander order of ‘Anti-Agent’ which will be ‘hard’ and have an inverse effectiveness. Low ranking agents being killed/captured while high ranking agents just laugh. Only Clint knows for sure.
Ed - I think that in game stealth is the respresentation of an agent not being found when carrying out such activities and not agent rank - which I suspect is more with carrying out the evil deeds. Carlos the Jackal might be a A80 but with S30 meaning that he would hardly ever get caught.
I can’t comment as to what is in the program as in practice very low level agants never try and kill army commanders. The way I would see this working is that army commanders could have this extra ability SNA to catch agents but that it would be much less effective against an agent with stealth. Obviously this is my opinion and not ME policy.
Hero Killer - Nation receives 10,000 gold each time they kill an enemy Hero character
Profit from Destruction - Nation receives current product stores and any gold production for the turn when they destroy pop centre.
Friendly Face - 20% better chance to recruit an NPC from the same allegience
Market Influence - 4th Age Kingdom’s ability to influence caravan prices
Evasive Ships - Double chance of your ships not being caught by enemy navies when moving evasively
Hier Apparent - If your last commander is killed nation receives a new C30 for free next turn
Improved Safes - Chance of agents stealing gold from the nation are reduced by 25% and they agent only steals half the amount they would normally get if they succeed.
Militarly troops DO guard locations and their leaders. ESPECIALLY in a society with no real policeforce. I belewe troops could behave a little like local militia. I also belewe local militia should be stronger. Or atleast this could be a SNA.
I belewe a player should be more in controll in areas where he should be in controll. Like when/where he has a PC and/or an army. The hole point with militarly present is to gain political and administrative controll of an area. That do not prevent the actions of very good terrorists, but it do make it harder for them.
There is no ‘local militia’. It is a message, not an action. It is the message the owner of a pop center gets when an agent (of any nationality) fails his random roll. It is more elegant than saying ‘Doofensmertz failed his random roll’ if less elegant than saying ‘Doofensmetz stupidly lost his knife during a drunken binge.’
As noted, there are passive anti-agent factors in the code. Improve pop loyalty and increase its fortifications. Increase the army size and morale. These require aforethought and nurturing—which are often is short supply. Some folks want the results of long-term planning without exerting themselves. Hopefully, someone is not anxious to indulge them.
My gripe is that these factors seem to be “speed bumps”, i.e. they matter in the early game when agent ranks are modest, but once you get into the mid-late game agents pretty much kill anyone with impunity (even those who are guarded).
If the effectiveness of these defenses was more proportional to the effort required to improve them, then perhaps it would be a better investment. But when Warlord Tarondor with a 70 morale army is getting knifed while hanging out at a 92 morale Minas Anor, what’s the point?
Of course there are no local militia. Actually there are no Middleearth at all. There are only “messages”. These factors that makes it harder to do an agentorder at at PC should be stronger and even more stronger when there are troops present in my opinion. Alternativly there could be a SNA work like this. Let me invent another ‘message’ : “XX was stoped by a patroll of troopers” or “local militia supported by troops” aso
If the effectiveness of these defenses was more proportional to the effort required to improve them, then perhaps it would be a better investment. But when Warlord Tarondor with a 70 morale army is getting knifed while hanging out at a 92 morale Minas Anor, what’s the point?[/QUOTE]
A legitimate concern Diehard! This is caused by the concentration of many agent/stealth artifacts in just a few characters’ hands. In turn, this flows from Harley’s basic misapprehension that this is a ‘team’ game. Back when there were 25 players of unknown or misidentified ID engaged in realpolitik, artifacts were more widely distributed. When you warp the game, naturally there will be warpings down the domino chain. It is called ‘the law of unanticipated consequences’.
If Harley is concerned that this will happen in their KS team game they need only reduce the number of agent and stealth artifacts. A simple solution. Seven percent of 1650 artifacts are agent and stealth. Perhaps Gavin can give us an estimate of the percentage of agent and stealth artifacts in KS.
Ed to answer the question about KS. The current incarnation has a number of small agent artefacts 10A or less and only one A20 artefact. It would therefore be possible to stack but nowhere near as easy as the general level of artefacts are lower than in 1650 and the artefact numbers are randomised as they are in 4th age. The randomisation will mean that it is very difficult to search out large numbers of these artefacts. The percentage of agent/stealth artefacts is roughly the same.
SNAs we’ll be looking at implementing them in 1000 and KS scenarios. I doubt we’ll touch 1650, unless players request it as a variant.
KS - yes it was a delibarate design choice to have lots of lower level items, we also reduce the kid/ass to +10% (and not easily available at game start, you cna pick it up via NPCs) although agents are still capabale of killing from my playtesting… :) (Nod to Sam).
I’ll be putting up some polls shortly (bit busy at present) for KS so that players can vote on what they’d like to see in the game.
No polls Clint. I want you to have the game you always wanted. Accept no compromises. When you have the game you want, you can peel away the accretions to the Stassun/Feild game.
(Nod to Sam).