14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest changes that Creative Assembly has made in Empire: Total War is related to agents. In the previous games in the series, the player had the command of diplomats, who were needed to contact other nations; spies, who were handy in scouting ahead of the army; assassins, who were good at taking out generals before you assaulted a position; and religious figures, used to spread faith in different areas in order to induce happiness.
Now, all this plethora of agents has been reduced to just three. You have: the missionaries, who spread faith again; the rakes, who are a combination between spies and assassins, capable of sabotage, infiltration and duels; and the gentlemen, who are capable of boosting research in your schools and colleges while stealing knowledge from other countries while also engaging in duels to take out other gentlemen. The mechanics are coherent and the game benefits from the elimination of diplomats and the fact that you can contact any country at any time. The only agent that I sorely miss and would like to see return to Empire: Total War is the princess.
The daughters of kings were privileged. They could go to cities and get a bit of information on them, being well received even by the keenest on war adversaries. They could get the hand of a foreign prince in marriage, allowing solid alliances to form between states. And they could marry one of your own generals, making sure that his loyalty to the crown was rock solid. They were precious in gameplay terms and served as an interesting distraction, in a series of wars focused on warfare and destruction.
In Empire: Total War, princesses could be even more interesting. They should only be available for kingdoms and constitutional monarchies. They should boost the loyalty of all the people they can marry, from rakes to generals. They should be able to improve relations with other nations, by marrying to someone loyal to them and improve the happiness of the nobility in the region in which they reside. Creative Assembly could have also built an additional mechanic around them, allowing them to lead characters from other factions astray and into joining your nation. Imagine using your daughter as bait in order to get Voltaire to join the Austrian. Wouldn't that be awesome?