Making leadership matter

[LDiCesare]

This would also make assassins even more useless than they currently are.

[WraithLord]

regular assassins are pretty worthless anyway.

[LDiCesare]

Not entirely. They are useful to bring in cursed daggers and lycanthropos amulets to enemy thugs. They are useful to kill regular commanders who would be able to lead troops out of a province where the only leader got killed. That's situational, but not a reason to make them even less useful.
They are also useful in forcing opponents to deploy bodyguards instead of fielding the troops where they are more useful.
I don't like making assassins totally useless in order to make commanders more useful.

[WraithLord]

Good point.
They would still be useful for passing cursed items and, if minimally equipped can also deal with normal commanders, even with a few body guards.

Besides, none is saying that if/when assassins become too niche that CBM can't do something about that.

Bear in mind though that the assassination mechanism as implemented in dom is inherently underwhelming.

[JonBrave]

Originally Posted by WraithLord

Bear in mind though that the assassination mechanism as implemented in dom is inherently underwhelming.

If I asked you to kindly explain this statement, but limited you to a single sentence, would you care to do so?

[WraithLord]

It's difficult to explain in a single sentence. Since this conclusion is based on many other concepts, facts and underlying strategic principals. The essence of it is basically an attempt to inspect every possible action/commander/spell-cast as an investment of a resource, be it gems/gold or more subtle (like time) that yields X gain over the next turn, 2 turns, 10 turns etc. So you buy the assassin, equip it and then have it lie in ambush or move towards ambush but most of the time it's idle. This is already bad for ROI. Then there are so many counters to assassinations once your enemy is alert and skillful that you're most likely to lose it.

I'm not saying it's bad. Sometimes you'll score a significant hit and/or make your opponent paranoid (so he will "waste" resources on counters) but I am saying that you could most likely put your money on a better horse. This is my point of view - based on experience and my own judgment, not on pure number crunching.

[JonBrave]

That is a long sentence , but thank you for the explanation!