Assassinating priests and astral mags

[ExitJudas]

I think an "information about commanders in province" scouting skill should be part of the assassin skillset.

If you balance the assassin so that the chances of him killing a highpowered commander with bodyguards is extremely small anyway, then the job of the assassin should be to seek out, identify and kill lesser commanders and unprotected commanders, i.e. idenityfing weaknesses in the opposing players command structure and exploiting this weakness.

What if an assassin could report back from its province what commanders where there, including his bodyguards and maybe a general description of his target viability? On top of this you could allow for the assassin to select his target directly, instead of choosing it randomly. As long as you make sure assassins cannot be constructed to be powerful enough to have more than a, say 25% chance of killing a strong commander with bodyguards.

this would make assassins more interesting imo, and less random.

[Sombre]

I think assassins would be fun if they could just choose which commander to go after, displaying the name and unit type, when you gave them the order. That way you could consistently go for easier targets, but still not be sure the opponent hadn't 'mined' one of his weak commanders with an anti assassin item or some bodyguards.

[VedalkenBear]

From what I've seen on Assassins...

1) Jomon's Ninjas are among the best, IMO. Excellent stats and with Poisoned Shuriken.

2) Empoisoners (C'tis) come with Skele-Spam built in.

3) Any seducer is most likely worth it. I am astonished that the Serpent Cult's seducer is so very cheap.

In answer to your specific questions, like Konming said, almost all the spells you talk about can be avoided through high MR.

[jimkehn]

What I have fun doing with assassins is Indie provinces. Go in the province, kill off the leaders until he can't find anymore. Then attack the province the next turn. The indie army is leaderless and routes.

[Humakty]

I think that to hire some assassins can always be usefull in MP, to make your ennemy react. He won't know exactly how many you use, so he could be tempted to protect all his leaders. The same can be said of spies, who can divert many pounds of gold he could use elsewhere.

[KissBlade]

The problem is assassins is they're easily out performed by cheaper investments into remote spells.

[Ironhawk]

jimkehn said:
What I have fun doing with assassins is Indie provinces. Go in the province, kill off the leaders until he can't find anymore. Then attack the province the next turn. The indie army is leaderless and routes.

This does work, but its very time-intensive. You might take 3 turns to kill all the leaders of an indy province and then a 4th to take it. By that time you could probably have recruited an army that could cap the province and then continue on to cap more at 1/turn.

[thejeff]

Well, yeah. But you can do both.

Build some assassins and recruit troops. Now you've got an army taking a province a turn and assassins taking one every 2-3 turns. Some types of indies, especially with higher indy strength are easier to take by killing the leaders anyway.

[Burnsaber]

My favourite starting strategy when playing MA Abyssia is to prophet the Assasin you get at beginning on the first turn, and then move him into the toughest neighbouring province to assasinate the commanders. It's like extra province every 4-5fth turn. Not that awesome, but not that shabby either.

Just put him way back in the battlefield and script: Smite, Smite, Smite. It works, and if you get lucky, he gets awesome Heroic Ability when he eventually makes it into HoF.