What is the purpose of assigning an Assassin to a particular city?

[EbonHawk]

I have been playing this one, AC: Revelations, for awhile now and I just came across something that doesn't make sense. In the menu where you can assign assassins to go on different missions, the first screen lists all the cities alphabetically, then you select a city and you can then see all the missions available for your henchmen.

My question is, if you're still on that main City selection screen, there's an option to hit CTRL and assign an assassin to that particular city (which also removes him from your roster that's available to go on missions again!).

Here's the screenshot showing one of my assassin's "assigned" to a city.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=242945992

And here's one showing him all the way at the end of the assigned assassins, with a new symbol below his pic that looks like the "Citizen in Distress" icon you get on your in-game map showing recruitable citizens to become assassins.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=242945980

Forgive a noob question, but what's the purpose of assigning one of your guys to a city? What advantage does it have/give you? Why would I want to send them away and have to train new ones all over again? Did I miss something? Again, I apologize if I missed something obvious, or a description in the game somewhere, but this has me stumped. :-(

[EbonHawk]

Some cities have two slots that you can assign assassins to, while others just have one slot. I don't see any advantage to assigning them to a particular city. It just takes away from one of your dens you control in Constantinople and you have to recruit more and train them to replace the ones you just sent away.

Am I missing something? Is there some final achievement that you get for filling up all the cities with your best assassins? Guess I'll find out before anyone posts any answers to my questions. :-(

Also, assigning one is a one-way street. Once you select them to go to a city, they're committed with no going back. Although I did see a Recall button pop up when I highlighted one I had sent, it wouldn't let me recall the second one if it was a two-assassin assignment. I can find nothing in the game explaining what this does!!

I just noticed something: there's a lot of A double-SSs in this post!! :-)

[mbutton15]

It's part of what's described as a mini-game, called Mediterranean Defense. There is actually an achievement of controlling all cities at once. You can, however, just ignore this whole mini-game if you wish. As you say, if you assign someone you then need to recruit and retrain another assassin.

But doing the missions can bring you rewards, like money. Some missions also cost you money !! But take and retain control of a city and then you usually get a steady supply of rewards back - not only money, but probably most useful are the bomb making components.

And you can have up to 5 assassins assigned to each city. To be able to assign more assassins to each city look for the 'Add New Den' (or similarly named) missions. The more assassins assigned to a city the easier is it to retain control. Once you have control of a city you need to keep a steady flow of missions active in the city to make sure your city control percentage does not reach 0%. If it does you will stop getting the rewards from that city until you reclaim the city again - which will be the only mission available at that city.

Note that when an assassin is assigned to a city he can still take part in the city missions. At the time you are selecting assassins to go on a mission you have a toggle option which lets you select from the assassins in your maingame guild or from the assassins assigned to that city. When assigning an assassin to a city it's best to select one of each skill (crossbow/dagger/etc) as some missions require certain skills. So if you have a city full of crossbow assassins but need a dagger assassin then you will have to select an assassin from your maingame guild, which of course means he is not available to you in the game until the mission completes.

And you don't need to assign a Master assassin to a city (or maybe just the first at a city, I can't remember). I think I usually trained up an assassin to level 10 and then assigned him to a city. If it's allowed I probably actually assigned someone to a city who was below level 10 and then used the city missions to level him up. And in your screenshot with the assassin with the 'citizen in distress' icon - it's not actually him. It's telling you the assassin slot is available to be filled. I would often assign an assassin to each of several cities at once and then that screen would show 4 or 5 'citizen in distress' slots and my next task when back in the game would be to rescue a whole bunch of citizens to fill the slots and then I'd start retraining then. It's not quite as painful as it sounds as you pick a hign xp mission and select a Master assassin (2 if needed) to give you 100% success rating and then fill the remaining slots with you new trainees so their skill level jumps up really quickly.

OK, that's a lot to throw at you there. Best thing to do is give it a go and see what happens. I didn't really understand what it was all about on my first playthrough and if you do intend to give it a real go then the best tip I found was the one mentioned above about selecting one of each skill (crossbow/dagger/etc) in a city.

P.S. There's a lot of typing assassin and assign right next to each other in this post - hope I got them all correct!!

[EbonHawk]

Ok, that really helps. It seems as if I've been playing it pretty close to how it's supposed to play, I guess, and you gave me a few more details that cleared up the stuff I haven't figured out yet. Thanks for the info, especially the part about assigning different-skilled assassin's to each city; I hadn't thought about that. I remember the first time I attempted to play through Revelations, I just basically sent assassins off on missions, trying to complete every mission in every city until there were no more and I thought I was finished. There are a TON of missions though!

I didn't realize there was a bit of strategy involved, and I actually like the assassins mini-game, so I might experiment some more with it. You've been a big help, thankyou!!

[mbutton15]

Glad to have helped.

And you probably found out that you would not complete all missions as they have to keep regenrating new ones otherwise you lose control of the city !!

Like you, I hadn't really thought about the assassin skills - I read it somewhere so can't really take any credit for that. Once you have 5 assassins in a city you can keep the city in your control just by sending them on missions, without having to use any of your maingame assassins.

Oh, another tip to help get the assassins with the right skills - I remember sending assassins with the skills I wasn't interested in any more on missions that were bound to get them killed just so I could go and get some new recruits. Hopefully they would have the skills I needed, otherwise I'd kill them off, too !!

[EbonHawk]

Ok, cool. I'll implement that as soon as I can get more gaming time available. Thanks!

[EbonHawk]

As a follow-up to this whole mini-game thing:

I finally finished the game but I don't know how much time (what percentage) I spent on this Mediterranean Defense thing, but it was a LOT!! I was right near the end of the game..only had 1 or 2 Story missions left to do, and I could have spent hours and hours more playing this MD part of the game. While fun, and it gives you a good bit of resources, it never really goes anywhere.

I got quite a few of the cities to like 80%, some even to 100%, but it seemed like the more I played, the faster the % would drop. I had quite a few that kept dropping quite low (below 30% and even 20% or lower!) and I just couldn't seem to keep up with all of them. Maybe I wasn't sending enough assassins off to be stationed in each city; I only had about 10 of them stationed "permanently" in about 6 cities total, so I was nowhere near 5 each for all 20 or so cities!!! I was basically sending them off on missions constantly, assigning one to a city every few cycles, and wasn't making a whole lot of headway really. And, I was just running around in the city not doing anything but killing time and killing guards...and not much else.

It was fun though. Enjoyed every minute of it.

[mbutton15]

Yeah, it is a bit labour intensive. But the more assassins at a city the easeir it becomes as the percentage control drops will be slower. That's why I mentioned above that once you have 5 assassins in a city you can keep the city in your control just by sending them on the missions.

If you set off a whole bunch of missions at one time in city you gain a big percentage of control. The down side is the effect of those missions 'wears off' all around the same time so you then lose a lot of control. So, if you stagger the missions then their effect is levelled out and you can keep a slightly lower, but consistant, level of control, if you see what I mean.

[EbonHawk]

Originally posted by mbutton15:

So, if you stagger the missions then their effect is levelled out and you can keep a slightly lower, but consistant, level of control, if you see what I mean.

Aw, man, I wondered if that was the case, because I remember piling on a whole bunch of assassin assignments at one time to try and get the % up really high, really fast, and then it would hold for awhile...then drop like a stone all of a sudden. I went with it being later in the game as the reason. Drat, wish I'd realized that. Would have made it a bit easier I think. Thanks for the info. I will definitely be playing AC again in the future, so that will come in handy.