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Agents are skilled individuals who use their contacts and abilities to ingratiate themselves with organisations, and engage in diplomatic activities. Some of their actions may be trivial, such as gathering Influence with a faction, while others can be considerably more complex. Depending on this complexity, tasks may involve more , or less , time, effort and risk. Travel time, for example, depends on the distance between the Spacelab Headquarters and the Agent's destination. A task's duration may depend on the faction at which it is targeted; some factions may be more open to receiving Agents, or have fewer restrictions in place, allowing swifter completion. Dynamic Relations can also have an impact, and should be taken into account when assigning tasks to Agents.
A number of legal tasks are available to Agents: Gather Influence or Blueprints, Negotiate Discount, Boost Notoriety, Increase Notoriety, Acquire Equipment, and Special Ships. Other tasks, of more questionable legality, are also possible, including: Hack Station, Steal Equipment or Blueprints, and Sabotage Factory. These bear a risk to the Agent's health if they are caught. Finding and recruiting Agents is not easy. They : they can only be hired following the completion of risky missions such as Defend Object or Transport Passenger, which are, themselves, hard to come by.
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The amount of tasks any given Agent has, is randomly defined. Outside of plots Plots this varies between 4 and 8 tasks. Generic Missions that allow Agents to be recruited have them listed in the briefing. This ; this way it should be easy to know which ones will allow players to replace retired Agents or just add additional Agents to the pool, with a limit of 5 Agents at any given time. There are only Hard and Very hard versions of these missions.
Agents can only perform diplomatic and espionage tasks if they have influence to spend, that which has to be gathered beforehand. Influence is gathered per race and can only be spent on tasks aimed at the same that race. All races will have varied bonuses that have an impact on the gathering rate. It is displayed on the right side of the diplomacy menu, and clicking on a a line will open a window breaking down showing the composition of the bonus.
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