Assassination and Seduction.

[Maerlande]

This is a part of the game that generates much discussion on Discord. It deserves a clear analysis and a plan to improve.

The core issues I have read are:
1) Dryads are too easy to mass and dominate. Illwinter attempted to solve this by changing seduction from Dom 4 to 5 and reduce seduction. The result is they are now mainly just swarm assassins. Not much of an improvement.
2) People find it hard to defend against assassins.
3) Auto summon items are the meme in any assassination. Lifelong or acorns or water bottles.
4) Bodyguards are generally junk
5) You can't script a defense.


Any other core issues? I would like posters to start with the core issues, debate them, and then we can propose solutions.

I hope you can stop the classic response of X is better than Y stuff. Let's start with the core issues. Please.

[Grey Hat]

Instead of making seduction harder, let's make it very unlikely to trigger an assasination. This way high-morale commanders won't get assasinated, but simply resist the seduction tentative. Otherwise it is a win-win for the seducer to either kill or seduce the target.

[mergele]

May be subsumed under 2) "Hard to defend against", but I think it should be specially mentioned that on the offense when siegeing a fort the only possible "defense" (Combined with "Bodyguards are almost worthless most of the time") is to bring dozens of indi commanders to take the hit as you can't patrol in any way.

[Althaea]

I'd say, beyond absolutely everything else, the biggest issue is that you cannot defend against assassins while besieging a fortress. As mentioned, bodyguards tend to be ineffectual, and they are the only kind of defense you have.

There may be other issues with assassins, but I really think that's the single most frustrating and unfair part of current assassination mechanics.

The easiest fix might be to simply have besieging units count as patrollers, with a halved patrol strength. Of course, even then, assassination occurs before patrolling in the turn order. But at least you'd be able to punish the assassination attempt, this way.

[Grey Hat]

- Assassins might not always find an opportunity to assasinate/seduce: maybe they should need to pass a morale or perception check, modified by their patience and the number of bodyguards of the target to find an opportunity to assasinate/seduce
- Maybe an assasination that takes too much time should turn into a battle with the whole army, as the noise must attrack the allies of the victim
- An assassin that does the assassinate action might have an higher trouble keeping low profile, and have reduced stealth/or some percentage to be caught as if the army was patrolling

[Eerywax]

Originally posted by Grey Hat:

- Maybe an assasination that takes too much time should turn into a battle with the whole army, as the noise must attrack the allies of the victim

This would be an added penalty to the target player in potentially causing gem burn/friendly fire just to get rid of one unit. If there's a chance to fail I'd prefer if it led to fleeing, and then at least it's the assassin that is penalized, in having been displaced and potentially dying by retreating to an enemy territory. Just my view on that.

[Dast]

Putting the assassin on a timer (either directly or with "more guards turn up after some amount of time") makes a lot of theme sense. It also makes the problem assassins (ones casting swarm, skeletons, or armed with that pendant of longdead making) worse, while not really effecting the assassins' that already seem (to me) balanced. (The ones with a sword or dagger or both).


On seduction. I assume that the point of the assassin battles seduction sometimes triggers is supposed to make seduction slightly dangerous to the seducing unit (they can get into a fight, and then die). If this is the purpose of this happening it should probably be rarer. Right now a battle will fairly reliably follow from attempted seduction, which means you plan FOR the assassin fight, rather than it being something that catches you sometimes.

On point (3). It is true that living water bottles and acorns are really, really strong in assassin fights. I don't think this is really a problem myself. It makes perfect theme sense that these would be powerful assassination tools.

[Nebulosa]

As a variant of the "besiegers count as patrollers" idea, what about giving a commander's troops an automatic patrol roll against an assassin before the assassination battle? This represents requiring the assassin to sneak past the troops that commander leads before trying to assassinate the commander themselves. (This isn't all troops in the province, but all troops led by that one specific commander).

If the patrol roll succeeds, the assassin fights the commander and *all* of their troops (or all of their troops who pass a bodyguard roll).

This still requires counterplay to assassins -- it's going to take an awful lot of troops to provide patrol coverage for all your commanders, and Ld 10 mages may have trouble getting enough patrol strength to catch assassins. (There are of course ways to fix this.) If the assassin is strong (bottle assassin), the troops may all just die to the elemental etc. But it means you can at least do *something*.

[terve886]

Other than just assassination and seduction, I would like stealth overall somewhat tuned, because currently it is extremely strong and for example trying to chase and catch stealthy armies or thugs is extremely hard task.

List of few problems:

• Patrolling armies are too "slow" to chase stealthy armies as by the time they get to the province that was captured by stealthy thug/army, the enemy could have disappeared pretty much anywhere, especially with the new movement rules that lets stealthy enemy armies easily cross 2 to 3 provinces in enemy control.
  
• Most ritual phase attacks do not work against stealthy units that decide to hide. This includes also units that decided to start hiding the turn you was still able to see them on the map and order the attack, whether it was sending teleported thug in or couple seeking arrows.

Now, few ideas to help the situation:

• Patrol and stealth check should be done in both provinces, the one the stealthy army is moving away from and the one the stealthy army is moving to. This would make it much more dangerous for enemy units to move between two hostile provinces and most importantly make it possible to try to catch assassins that try to leave after assassinating someone and revealing their location.
  
• The Patrol Strength value of PD could be doubled. Currently PD is extremely weak source of patrol strength for extremely high price. Doubling the current patrol strength value would still keep PD as expensive source of patrol strength, but at least it would have some use when it comes to high PD values.
  
• stealthy units should be vulnerable to magic phase attacks if they were not hiding the turn the magic phase attacks were ordered. It is also extremely frustrating to have scenarios where you saw enemy thug take a province and you ordered seeking arrow only for it to not even hit a target you knew was there. 10 gems wasted.

As for the main topic, assassins and seducers, the biggest problems are definitely: 1.Assassinations and seduction under siege with no way to seek the assassins or seducers out 2.Assassin defender being offscript, often casting self defence buffs which the caster has no time to take advantage of because of the short distance between the assassin and target where it would be just better to cast evocation to kill the assassin rather than tripping with 4 different layers of self buffs. It kinda feels like all assasination battles should have both sides with special "target enemy commander" where they try to prioritise killing the enemy commander over summons or self buffs. Well, since the priority to kill enemy commander is already with the attacking side due to access to script that generally do just that, the casting AI should have special mode for assasinations where offensive evocatins that do damage should be prioritised if they can deliver enough damage to kill the assassin.

[Zonk]

For Dryads, my suggestion was to make them spellsinger, which is somewhat thematic (Pangea has magic songs and music, and apparently sacred songs are sung in the groves) and would give the target's bodyguards more time to act. However I'm not sure the longer casting time for Swarm would actually be enough for most bodyguards to reach the dryad.

[Legowarrior]

If you always had your 5 body guards, would it weaken swarm and other assassins enough to be worth it?

[Zonk]

Originally posted by Legowarrior:

If you always had your 5 body guards, would it weaken swarm and other assassins enough to be worth it?

Maybe, but it would also weaken assassination strategies based on something other than summons. I don't think that would necessarily be good.

Also, thematically, seduction attempts always happening when the target has all their bodyguards around feels weird.

[Emphyrio]

I have never personally found assassinations to be a balance issue and do not support any changes to them.

The game is supposed to be unbalanced. Also, assassination helps balance some OP nations.

Balancing assassinations would reduce the number of options, and nobody wants less options.

You can defend against assassins by just bringing more commanders. Or, choose not to bring commanders you wouldn't want assassinated at all.

Assassins are expensive and suffer attrition. Why would I want to risk losing a 70g assassin? I would prefer to win without losing any units.

;^]

[terve886]

[quote=Emphyrio 👌;2997669078621690919
Assassins are expensive and suffer attrition. Why would I want to risk losing a 70g assassin? I would prefer to win without losing any units.

;^] [/quote]
I could not help but read this as sarcasm. 70gold is barely nothing and you can kill enemy mages that are usually twice the cost with that investment, not to mention 70g assassins are usually 1 commander point compared to the 2 that mages have.

Of course 70g assassins aren't even close to 100% reliable when it comes to assassination succes, at least if without magical items, but magical assassins (empoisoners or dryads for example) on the other hand can just murder huge amount of commanders with little to no risk due to the poor assassination offscript AI.

[Silence]

With the improved AI mods, mages tend to fare much better during assassinations. However, swarm is still something difficult to overcome for a naked mage without efficient bodyguards ...

[Emphyrio]

Originally posted by terve886:

I could not help but read this as sarcasm. 70gold is barely nothing and you can kill enemy mages that are usually twice the cost with that investment, not to mention 70g assassins are usually 1 commander point compared to the 2 that mages have.

Of course 70g assassins aren't even close to 100% reliable when it comes to assassination succes, at least if without magical items, but magical assassins (empoisoners or dryads for example) on the other hand can just murder huge amount of commanders with little to no risk due to the poor assassination offscript AI.

50% facetious, because the same points used to defend MD are just as or more relevant to assassins.

But also 50% serious.

Is any nation with non-mage assassins considered top tier? That's a serious question.

EA
Ermor, Abyssia, Mekone

MA
Sceleria, pythium, abyssia, marignon, machaka, shinu. Xibalba

LA
Marignon, pythium, abyssia, jomon