Hi Jerry,
You raise a good point about the conjuring mounts, but it does take a lot of organization to have the leather on hand in several popcenters, combine the troops of armies raised in several popcenters, create the economy to sustain them, and when all that is said and done, to deploy them effectively. And there are many effective ways to deal with them, including fortifications, blocking armies, blocking armies from multiple nations to pin them down, challenges, island popcenters, and of course opposing troops, nations set in forest or mountain hexes hard to reach, and so on. And even falling back – more than once I’ve allowed enemy cavalry to take over my homeland while I rebuild elsewhere, when my homeland isn’t located in a tactically important area and where my allies are offsetting that attack by going after tactically important areas.
On the other side of things, deploying assassins is child’s play, and there’s very little anyone can do about assassins, even mid-rank agents are only middling effective as guards, and getting your high ranking emissary into a hex with an enemy agent to double him takes a lot of guesswork and chasing around during which the emmy is useless, and still only protects one nation. So assassins pretty much romp around and it takes little effort or skill to use them effectively. Hey, assassins can even take out characters in hidden capitals, how does that work?? And worst of all, they pretty much limit all FA games to 20-25 turns, like terminating a chess game 3 moves into the mid-game, just as it starts to get interesting and really fun. My most fun games are the ones the last 40-90 turns, and they seem few and far between these days.
(As a side note, it’s frankly ridiculous even within the “suspension of disbelief” that we do have to have in order to play within any gaming system, that one agent can disperse, say, thousands of troops, especially FP troops, by dispatching its commander, or that it would be even possible for an orcish assassin to penetrate the forces of elves.)
For 1650 the system as a whole seems to balance out, somehow, but for FA what I would prefer to resorting to NKA would be a system where both hostile popcenters-in-proportion-to-size-and-loyalty and armies-in-proportion-to-size-and-morale have extremely negative effects on the success chances of 615/620 orders, with correspondingly more severe penalties for failing, as well as boosting the popcenter loyalty or army morale when an agent does fail, and where the guard order is more effective.
Thanks for listening<g>
