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When you perform a ninja action, it tells you what the probability of success is. Are you using the ninja when the probability is low?
Save-scumming will not help you, you will get the same outcome (unless you perform another action prior to the one you are trying to succeed with). You don not need to save scum.
First thing, with any agent, is to get them ready for work. After recruiting them, have the sit in a fort, or in an army until they have gained 1 or 2 levels of experience. If you recruit them from the right place (ninja clans speciality province with Mountain Hideout upgraded to Burakumin Village) they start with experience already and can be used immediately.
The best skills to give your ninja are sabotage and assassination. Retainers should be selected that boost these as well. The other skills are not as useful.
Typically:
1 point - sabotaging buildings
3 points - sabotaging armies
6 points down the assassination line
The ninja should then be used for the following actions:
> Assassinating monks/missionaries and, when he has more experience, generals. Don't use them to assassinate metsuke. Use your monk/missionary to convert the metsuke instead.
> Sabotaging buildings. Sabotage the buildings with the best chance of success and the lowest cost until your ninja is very experienced. Only do this against clans you are at war with, want to be at war with or rebel provinces. When your agent is high level, you can use him to sabotage the buildings that give the enemy the most value and/or allow him to recruit the best units. For buildings outside the Town, (ports, farms, province speciality), it is often better to use light cavalry to sabotage them (it costs nothing) and use the ninja for buildings inside the Town.
> Sabotaging armies. Sabotage small armies to start with to build his skill. Only perform agent actions against clans that you are, or want to be, at war with. The best place to get agent experience without upsetting the other clans is against rebels.
Never try to sabotage an army or assassinate the general if there is a metsuke in the army. First use a monk to convert the metsuke, then the ninja can perform his action.
Always try to use agents in pairs. Even with a 90% chance of success the agent will sometimes fail, so have a plan B available.
Other useful advice.
- Recruit agents early. Get one of each agent type as early as you can. That way your agents will be ahead of the AI and will be able to easily win the agent war.
- Develop provinces that allow you to recruit experienced agents.
- Have a boat in a port. If your agents are in danger because of a high level enemy agent, move them into the boat (leave the boat in the harbour), they will be safe there until the enemy agent has been dealt with/moved away.
Follow this advice and the only risk to your agents is dying from old age (and you can stop save-scumming).
I am sure most people have difficulty with agents when they first play the game, (I know I did). Now I probably lose fewer than 5 in a domination campaign on Legendary difficulty.
[Final point about ninjas: There is an error in the base game that makes the probability of ninja success higher on harder game difficulty. In other words, the easier the game difficulty, the harder it is for the ninja to succeed. There is a mod that fixes this error.]
In any case you really don't need to save scum, you just need to use your agents better. The higher rank an agent is, the better chance of success they have for any action. Put skill points and retainers into specific actions like assassination and they'll get slightly better at those actions. If your agents are low level, just keep spamming actions with decent success chances, like sabotaging gates or sabotaging small armies. Best is if you keep spamming ninja actions against rebel forces because then you're not annoying anyone.
You can get level 3 ninjas from scratch if you have a ninja province, but they're all in the middle of Japan. Easy to get for Hattori and Oda, harder for nearly any other clan.
Otherwise, recruit ninjas early, have them spam those actions to raise up their level, and when they aren't doing anything park them in a town or army so they passively level up slowly.
When they are level 1 or 2, don't expect them to succeed at much. Once they are level 3 or 4 they are much more useful. I would agree that assassination and sabotaging armies are the only thing they should ever be doing, so they are the only things I put points into.
As for success rates for any agent, the game isn't really rolling the dice every time you do an action. When it tells you the success chance it's just giving you an idea of whether it's worth trying or not. A 30 to 40% chance is often worth taking, but comes with a high risk of your agent being executed. Even 95% success chances will fail surprisingly often, but it's way more worth doing and has basically no chance of your agent getting executed.
By he time you get to late game your ninja should have leveled enough and be good at assassinating, i ALSO WOULDN'T go overboard on assassination skill, you often get retainers which also give assassination., I find I only really need the first skill line + retainers. The rest of the points can be experimental.
LOS should not be undervalued, especially if your expanding in another direction you can see armies coming and give you time to prep or take advantage of developing map situation.
I find they're also very useful embedded in armies for the extra movement, especially in FotS with the low campaign movement range of artillery.
Let me guess, are you only using level 1 ninjas and then getting mad when they keep failing success chances of around 10% to 25%?
You've been given lots of advice about how to properly use ninjas, and there's lots more advice out there if you do a bit of googling. If you can't learn from this advice then that's a YOU problem, it's not a problem with the game.
Also it's fine to use higher level ninjas against metsukes if you have lots of points in assassination and the metsuke is level 3 or lower. High level metsukes can be hard to take out by any agent.
For sure ninja can take out metsuke, but they don't have anywhere near the probability that monks have, and the action costs a lot more. But the main reason I only use ninja for assassinating metsuke in an emergency is that if they fail, sure as eggs is eggs, they will be taken out by the metsuke next turn - unless he is a raw recruit. Even with its scatter-gun approach to agent skill assignment, you can bet that the metsuke will have some points in apprehension.
Not that this would be a problem to our friend who would just save-scum his way out of that situation.
Sure but they barely even level up because they nearly always fail even when the chance is about 50%, how am i supposed to level them up if they always fail?
Agents gain experience (more slowly, but safely) from passive actions.
Have your ninja in a fort, or in an army. He will gain 3 points every turn. After 7 turns he will be at the next level.
The best first skill point to give him is probably sabotage buildings (unless you need him to assassinate monks - in which case give him points in assassination). He can now perform these actions with a greater chance of success, but, it is better to leave him for another 13 turns so that he gains a second level. Now he will be ready to use.
Always, when he is not performing an action, leave him in an army or fort, so that he is passively gaining experience.
Performing actions gains 10 or 15 points for the agent so he gets the promotion more quickly. But it carries a big risk when the agent is a new recruit - as you have discovered.
I try to get 1 of each agent type in the first 8 turns or so. Koku for koku, they are the best investment in the game.
I'm pretty sure Shogun 2 also saves current RNG seed, so simple reload will give you exactly the same result as the previous one.
Unless, of course, you change course of your actions (for example do something else which also uses RNG first).
That is correct.
Yep hopefully I explained it ok before.
Let's say you quick save right before you order a ninja to assassinate a monk, and it fails the first time. Then you reload the save, and make the same exact order. Click on the ninja, click on the monk and order the assassination, fail. Over and over.
Then next time instead of just clicking on the ninja then clicking on the monk, have the ninja move to the side a little bit, then try again. You're much more likely to get a success.
However it does seem that there are certain turns where the game will set you up for critical RNG failure no matter what. You will sometimes notice this if you have a bunch of agents together and try having them do the same action.
An example I saw recently was where I had three level 5 metsukes near one another, and a level 3 enemy mestuke wandered into our lands, licking his lips. All my metsukes had something like a 70% chance of success. I tried having them execute him, and all three level 5 metsukes failed and were instantly executed. I have to admit that I save scummed because it was annoying having three high level metsukes dead all at once, but no matter what they kept getting executed every time I'd try to take out that metsuke. So I moved my guys off to the side so they were out of range of the noob metsuke, then the next turn tried again and got instant success. Seems pretty clear to me that the game decided that that previous turn, any agent action I tried was going to fail and lead to instant death no matter what.
Certainly sounds like the game glitched for you on that turn.
Quite possible for three agents to fail with 70% success chance, but with fatal consequences - that's too much of a stretch.
Especially when it is not affected by the reload and alternate move with the same consequences. Something very wrong there.
That actually will change nothing as moving your character on the map doesn't use the RNG seed. In other words - you'll get exactly the same roll of dices with the same result. If you could in the meantime do other action with random % of success then your previous roll of dices will be used, and when you return for your action with ninja you'll get a new different "random" roll of dices.
That might only look at first glance, but as a matter of fact if you trying exactly the same action even using different agents then it's only natural you'll get the same results.
Remember, your rolls of dices are already predetermined (in RNG seed) and even saved in your save file. If rolling a "1" means an assasination failure then it doesn't really matter which metsuke you use for this "1" - you'll get a failure.
And getting "1" three times on the row while is not very probable but it's still possible.
Anyway you moved your metsuke, turn ended and all these "1" were used on other random things (especially battles) and then you get different rolls for you. Case solved :)
The upshot is the AI will have to mirror your choices, so increasing staying power is optimal picks, since its likely the AI won't stack those types of retinues, you will always win at big agent rush by the AI, which can happen the odd time.