Assassin strategies?

[sansanjuan]

Anyone with suggestions for assassin strategies? Including equipment and empowerment tips? If you script the battle spells for an empowered assassin will they cast the spells during an assassination attempt. Had my butt handed to me last night via 5 bodyguards.
Regards,
Sansanjuan

[ano]

Yes, they will cast.
One of the most obvious (and reliable) usages of assassin for the early expansion is giving him a skull talisman with "cast spells" script. An assassin placed at the rearmost corner is capable of killing any simple commander without bodyguards and sometimes even with them.
Later it is a good idea to give an assassin an ability to summon something (Lifelong protection, Skull staff for a mage who has D1, Bottle of living water on so on). If an opponent flees, he is slain:)

[Baalz]

Assassins are generally considered inefficient. Using them for early expansion is usually much slower than recruiting other units to just conquer the provinces, and later game most any investment in items or empowering is cheaply countered by sticking some bodyguards around your commanders. You don't want to invest too much in assassins (or really have an "assassin strategy"), but that said there are a couple situations where assassins are useful.

As a surprise. Several assassins taking out the critical commanders of an invading army before your opponent allocates bodyguards can be worth their weight in gold. Just don't expect that to work more than once. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Seducers can be worthwhile even if they frequently fail. Grabbing an enemy mage which expands your magic diversity is immeasurably valuable.

Mage assassins are often useful not only because they're obviously more effective at killing, but also because they're useful for stuff outside of it. Even most mage assassins are going to have trouble dealing with simple bodyguards so they remain most useful as a surprise, the difference is you can keep several around waiting for an opportunity without feeling wasteful.

[vfb]

If you are playing MP, and assassinate a unit of a nation who has Astral, expect your assassin to be mind hunted mercilessly (unless you have astral magic on your assassin of course).

It's not a great idea to spend too much on an assassin (empowerment or equipment), because it's really easy to lose them to getting caught by armies, rituals, or even bodyguards.

[Sombre]

What are these mage assassins of which you speak Baalz?

[Meglobob]

Ctis has mage assassins (1N 1D, I believe) and any stealthy mage is an assassin with the black heart.

[Shovah32]

Theres an A2 assasin for Tir Na Nog if I recall correctly. Very nice for throwing lightning bolts - or a thunderstrike if you feel like spending a gem to handle those bodyguards.

[vfb]

And LA Rlyeh has the S1 Star Children with astral magic (S1).

To hazard a guess though: Sombre was probably referring to some in joke between him and Baalz, where one or the other of them did some ginormous mage assassin attack or something.

[ano]

Actually any seducer (Oreiad, Rakshasi, Nagini) is an assassin. And also a perfect Tlahuelpuchi of Mictlan. 2B1N1D and flight for 25 slaves.

[Sombre]

No I just wasn't sure which mage assassins people would actually recruit and have hanging around doing research until they're needed.

[Torin]

Assasin spells are best. Like Manifestation and Earth attack.
But sending like 5 or 6 regular assasins to the research center is damaging. You can snatch a couple of clams too. and then move them around.

[Szumo]

One not exactly obvious strategy is using assasins when you are besieged in castle, to take out sieging commanders. Much safer to assasins in questions, as they can't be found by patrolling army.

[ano]

Sombre said:
No I just wasn't sure which mage assassins people would actually recruit and have hanging around doing research until they're needed.


Well, Empoisoner is a decent mage and researcher and I tend to recruit them only from some point. And later they may be very useful.

[NTJedi]

Szumo said:
One not exactly obvious strategy is using assasins when you are besieged in castle, to take out sieging commanders. Much safer to assasins in questions, as they can't be found by patrolling army.



I've done that... once I took out an air queen !

[Baalz]

ano said:
And also a perfect Tlahuelpuchi of Mictlan. 2B1N1D and flight for 25 slaves.



This is actually my very favorite one. Use swarms of them for blood hunting, and with leech you even have a good chance of succeeding despite most bodyguards.

[mathusalem]

LA Ulm as mage / assassin too : Astral, Blood, Stealth +25

[Ewierl]

Shovah32 said:
Theres an A2 assasin for Tir Na Nog if I recall correctly. Very nice for throwing lightning bolts - or a thunderstrike if you feel like spending a gem to handle those bodyguards.



I actually find she's just as good casting Mistform and charging into melee. With a Life Drain weapon and natural Mirror Image, she's pretty solid even with no/minimal gear, and does much better against bodyguards that way than by casting spells.

[Shovah32]

But... but... Thunderstrike!

[MKDELTA]

Shovah32 said:
But... but... Thunderstrike!

THUNDERSTRIKE OOOOOOOOO!

*wanders off*

[sector24]

Lazy P had an interesting post on the subject awhile back.

Hell of a waste of gems (http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=537733&page=&view=&sb=5&o =&fpart=all&vc=1)

[vfb]

mathusalem said:
LA Ulm as mage / assassin too : Astral, Blood, Stealth +25



No, they are spies, not assassins.

[Maraxus]

I just read in the bug thread that someone gave a vampire count a black heart. I totally like this idea, first you have a nice assasin and then, if your opponent manages to kill that assasin on your terrain, you still have the unit and he has a chest wound (that is probably useless to him, unless you accidently attacked a stealthy commander)

[Yrkoon]

It is definitely annoying when a commander gets a cursed item from another dead commander, like the black heart or an eye of aiming. And it makes no sense either - unless these items have a mind of their own, they are not going to jump out of the dead body and into the eye socket or the chest of the new carrier. We are not in an Alien movie ...

[Saulot]

Well,... if you consider Void summons, Doom Horrors, and Daemon Lords, the world of Dominions is certainly as (if not more so) dark and horror-filled as the avp one... But to consider your point, I believe the argument for cursed items is that part of their enchantment is that you're compelled to pick them up.

*shrugs* This makes as much sense as any other theory regarding magical items.

[zlefin]

One thing i mean to try some time, if you're using a bless strategy, is putting shroud of the battle saint on assassins.
shroud is quite inexpensive as items go, and if you have a good dual bless, it should up the assassin's killing quite a bit.

[Agrajag]

With the eyes you can maybe understand that they can insert themselves into the mage's eye without his consent, but the hearts' description explicitly says that the chest wound is the result of "crude surgery"
and not the heart implanting itself into the "victim", so unless the heart is also a surgeon and has appendages and at least some knives and a sewing kit, it's harder to imagine it flying into your chest.

EDIT: manually inserted a linebreak to improve readability since the thread has been stretched by an unruly link.

[sector24]

Sorry about that, should be fixed now. I had to use the awful search function to find the post, and it adds tons of extraneous junk onto the URL.

[Dectilon]

How about a team of stealthy mages casting horror mark? : D

It might not be immediatly effective, but eventually that god (or whatever) is toast!

[Foodstamp]

Agrajag said:
With the eyes you can maybe understand that they can insert themselves into the mage's eye without his consent, but the hearts' description explicitly says that the chest wound is the result of "crude surgery"
and not the heart implanting itself into the "victim", so unless the heart is also a surgeon and has appendages and at least some knives and a sewing kit, it's harder to imagine it flying into your chest.

EDIT: manually inserted a linebreak to improve readability since the thread has been stretched by an unruly link.



Umm, Sombre has already covered how such things happen. A wizard did it.

[Taqwus]

Dectilon said:
How about a team of stealthy mages casting horror mark? : D

It might not be immediatly effective, but eventually that god (or whatever) is toast!



Not particularly efficient, but perhaps an option for R'lyeh -- both through Star Children, and through Dreams of R'lyeh (hmmm, can one do a Returning from the dream? Repeated 'dreams + horror mark (x4) + returning' would be expensive, but it would also be irritating, and deliciously evil).

[Shovah32]

I can see this as a fun(and far too expensive for the effect, most likely) tactic for LA Ulm.
Get a blood economy running, get black hearts on those stealthy astral mages, use them to horror mark commanders in assassination attempts, with returning if possible.
Then comes the fun part: You send horrors at that province. Horrors who can home in on the now horror marked commanders - although marked and scattered bodyguards might distract them for a while.

[Taqwus]

If you really want to get evil with the horror marking, eventually you'd probably want to use Horror Seed. That's evil. :p

[Shovah32]

Its certainly a fun spell. But causing horrors to go straight for enemy commanders is just plain cool.

[Herode]

Last turn in the Victoria MP game, I set 5 ninjas with the assassinate order on a province held by Gath. Reading the messages coming with the new turn, I only see 4 orders computed, no news from the 5th one. Is there any limit on the number of assassinate orders by province ??

[BTW, this turn has also been my bad luck turn :
- earthquake on my capitol
- over the 4 assassinate orders processed above, 2 aimed a single standard commander (att 10, def 13) who defeated the 2 attacking ninjas (att 15, def 14) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif]

[Endoperez]

If an assassin doesn't find a target, there's no message and no battle. Could that be the cause? PD commander's can't be assassinated.

[Herode]

Well, it depends on how targets are searched and found. I suppose all my five assassins could have found a target since the Commander who defeated 2 of my ninjas is still alive.
Is it possible for one single commander to be targeted more than twice in a turn ?

[Endoperez]

I quess so, since you said the same commander defeated two of your ninjas. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

EDIT:
Addition to the above: it's probable that if assassinations can happen more than once, they aren't limited. It'd be extra work, at that point.


I'm not sure how assassins work, especially multiple ones. What if the assassin that did nothing targeted the commander that was successfully assassinated? With his target already dead, he wouldn't have anything left to do. I really doubt it works like that, but that might explain it.

[Gandalf Parker]

There is a helm that casts, armor that casts, weapons that cast, extra items that cast. I love to pile those on assassins (or seducers which I prefer over assassin)