Surviving in a World of Agents

The king sat upon his throne and glowered. Enemy agents had successfully assassinated several of his kin last week along with Masador, the last of his great generals. Worse, Masador's army had scattered with his death, wreaking havoc upon his carefully-laid plans.
"What are we going to do?" asked his chancellor.
"Send out our own agents and retaliate!" hissed the king.
"But our top agent has only a 31 rank, only three of our leaders have agent ability in any case," countered the chancellor.
"Fine," growled the king. "Have our commanders locate agents among the lesser nobility, swear them into service to the Crown, train them, and THEN send them out to retaliate! Hoarmurath and Jí Indûr will be very sorry in fifteen to twenty turns when our agents begin smashing them into rubble . . ."

Sooner or later, everyone finds himself in the unfortunate situation of having large numbers of enemy agents crawling like lice over his population centers. Perhaps your agents aren't good enough to square off against them, or perhaps you just don't have enough agents to protect everyone. Your leaders are threatening to get mowed down like grass, and you're getting frustrated. What are you going to do?

Typically, the solution is to begin mass-producing agents of your own, or start mass-producing them as soon as the game begins. The problem with this is that not everyone can afford to run an agent- rich nation. Having hordes of agents has the consequence of NOT having other character types which may be needed just as badly. (Having great agents doesn't help if a huge army shows up on your capital and burns it to the ground.) But if you don't create the agents, won't your leaders get slaughtered later in the game?

Not necessarily!

First, if you are not going to run an agent-rich power, or perhaps even if you are, you need to resign yourself to losing some characters sooner or later. These suggestions will keep you around in the long-term as a nation when enemy agents begin wiping out your leaders, but they don't help any particular leader very much.

1) Maintain the maximum number of characters at all times.

Attempt to anticipate losses and replace a character the turn on which he dies. As the "Name Character" orders come after challenges, executions, battles, and assassinations; and it doesn't take a whole lot of foresight to guess that Jí Indûr and friends and friends are going to kill off your army commander this turn; go ahead and attempt to name a character now. If you're wrong, and didn't lose a character, then you' re in for a pleasant surprise in any case.

2) Give all new characters agent ability, and most command ability.

There are two reasons for giving a character command skill. First, any character with command, however little, can name new characters and replace those that you lose to enemy agents. Second, if you aren't fighting an agent war against your foes, and you are still a target for their agents, it's probably because you're cranking out armies to throw at them. Even a ten point commander can raise troops!

3) Don't concentrate your characters.

What about army commanders? Don't you want backup commanders? Well, not necessarily. If you don't have thousands of very good agents, and you send an army into enemy territory late in the game, you can almost count on getting killed. I consider this sending a commander on a "suicide-run" and try not to have anybody I care about losing too much in charge. Sticking a backup command/agent with the army generally slows down the death of an army by a single turn--one turn to kill the backup commander, and one to kill the commander, so I generally back-up and army commander only when I absolutely must have the army survive during the extra turn. It's also important to remember that they have to know who's in charge of the army to follow it and kill it. So try to surprise your enemy by having your army "appear out of nowhere" on his population center (and create the army in an out-of-the-way place, off of their maps). Hopefully this will be the first they know of the army, and it'll take two turns for them to wipe out the commander (one to bring agents onto the scene and another to assassinate). During those two turns you can burn the first population center and move to and burn a second population center; which means the army has accomplished its purpose in any case. Besides, they won't know how many backup commanders you have and they may send nine or ten agents to accomplish what a single agent could have, and all those extra agents have wasted an order. Other tactics include transferring command to a new character (so that they cannot "scout and follow" you), moving evasively, and generally running away from the area where they last saw your army.

Note that backup commanders are very useful if you aren't under much agent pressure, such as if the enemy doesn't have more than one or two agents to throw at your army, or earlier in the game, when the assassins aren't quite so good. Putting dozens of characters with an army as backup commanders can sometimes be as useful as none at all, if you have the time and orders to spend this way. Then your backup commanders can scout for characters following your army, guard your commanders, and attempt to assassinate the agents before they assassinate you!

4) Keep companies, characters, and armies moving.

5) Scout for characters.

6) Get agent help from your allies.

7) Other tricks of the trade.

Enemy agents may also attempt to clear you out of your capital. Ways around this include bringing in a horde of agents of your own to clear them out, waiting for them to leave then bringing home one of your many scattered leaders, or to simply move the capital. Note that an ally can transfer by caravans the gold you need to move the capital after any and all gold thefts have taken place. Likewise you can move a character to the current capital and order the capital to relocate on the same turn, before enemy agents get a shot at assassinating your commander. If you do this, it's probably a good idea to have several characters already waiting at your new capital location to create characters immediately.

If your foes are stealing the gold you need to create characters with, consider having your allies transfer a huge sum of gold all at once--the enemy agents will have a difficult time stealing it all before you can create several characters.

Conclusion

The king looked at the report and smiled. Though he was the last of the original leaders of his nation at the war's start, and though most of his current leaders were of the third and fourth generation, the war was at last tilting in his favor. The heroine Narab Kolandu, Masador's granddaughter, had just reported sacking the enemy city and slaughtering its inhabitants. And though she had little of her grandfather's skill, she would grow better with time . . . assuming she lived that long.