How to level up agents?

[SnusHead]

I have a lot of assassins that sit at lvl 3 since the start of the game, they have infiltrated many armies but never leveled up and they never managed to kill another agent because the chances are so low.

How do i level up especially asassins?

[Dreadnought]

you could try to sabotage it has a *neutral skill* that also incriese Assassin kill ratio.
but assassins are meh in this game.
or just send all ur assassins to 1 target and see who gets the kill with the RNG

[Eat3n]

Empire definitely sucks when it comes to leveling up agents. My best recommendation is to sabotage, sabotage, sabotage and hope your skill increases and that you can later assassinate when you need to.

[operating1]

To have a successful assassin attack, which hopefully results with a accumulative level up for a rake; first, have all your "other" agents do investigative missions to unoccupied towns, farms and a like, after a number of successful missions (what this does is boost the chances of success), then go for the assassination.

[winged_snail]

What about leveling up the priests? In the beginning Ii kept getting messages saying they were getting bored unless they accomplished something, but they don't seem to have any actions other than hanging out increasnig the religion in a place.

[operating1]

Try moving problem priests to another theater...

[MasterJB]

I think that agents in this total war title are pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ because of the exact same reasons you mentioned. you can't level them up properly without them beeing caught or executed most of the time, thus losing an agent and angering the affected faction by a huge amount. best advice is to position them in key cities to do some counter espionage, but then well, the AI doesn't seem to use their agents either or just very rarely. in my whole vh/vh prussia campaign i got sabotaged maybe 2 or 3 times and never assassinated , not even once.
Generally, the agent feature in total war games is widely discussed and seems be more refused than endorsed, at least in the way they implemented it.
I would really love a balanced and diversified agent feature, but what you get is an nerve killing agent spam in the newer games, which makes it almost unplayable without mods.

Sooo, long story short, there is no way of using agents rational and meaningful in this game. Only limited in other TW titles. Improvements not forseeable.

[winged_snail]

Playing as United Provinces I was almost sent in a death spiral after a rival agent sabotaged the port 90% of my income was coming through and I didn't have enough money to repair it ... and it ♥♥♥♥♥ myself out selling all my techs to other countries to scrape together enough to repair it and then you better believe I kept my rake on that port. But yeah in Rome 2 the agents were almost OP. I feel like in Medieval 2 they were a good balance of fun to mess around with but not overpowered. I liked that there were heretics for the priests to occupy themselves with, and I got an inordinate amount of enjoyment out of the merchants.. which I guess is equivalent to what I do in ETW and Napoleon with the trade nodes. I love me some trade ;)

[Hat8]

Fully committing to just killing the enemy agents is the best way.

[Duke Waterford]

Use them to sabotage buildings that are about 50% likely to succeed whether it random farms or mines at first then move on to bigger targets like ports and barracks

[BIGDOJO]

i dont even bother using agents for more than these reason due to such high likelihood of death: rakes= open map scouting only, no infiltration or anything even no matter what percent. 5% dead rake is 100% not alive anymore lol. priests = open map conversion. gentlemen = research at personally owned schools. sometimes enemy rakes nab my dudes and generals but i dont let it provoke me into wasting my rakes on suicide missions themselves. its not like shogun 2 where its a whole aspect of the game you must aggressively pursue against to prevent disaster.