Apologies if what I'll write below gonna be a bit rambly. Either way, I'd wanted to leave a bit of feedback on the agents system - as I both love it and hate it. Here's why. (Impressions made on an independent playthrough for 99% of time, so not on a commission)
So, first - the good things? Well, there's a few that's for sure. They're a great asset in curbing down the hostilities and managing the constant expeditions as it gives us an option to improve the relations with the raiding party. Meaning that if we're at war, we may finally be able to get peaceful with a faction without having to either doing missions for them or coming to the core systems to spent "tokens" (by which I mean gamma cores or VIP's we captured). To say that's convenient it's an understatement truly, as with a bit of time and some money we're spared the hassle of trying to get some respite for our colonies through direct interaction. Furthermore, we can always set the agents to work so we have a bit of rep to spent (instead of credits) to avert the expeditions and such. I'd say that's a very good thing for early and mid-game as using agents is more cost effective than spending cash. Of course this changes if we're earning over a million in one tick a month, but then that's late game for you.
Furthermore, since currently there's no way to view the planet side industries and defenses of the planet that does interest us - being able to sent an agent to the market is really useful. As we can conduct some espionage on site by exploring the possible missions without actually giving 'em out to execute. Thanks to this I was able to do a quick list of industrial targets like orbital works and fuel production facilities - with associated information like are there nanoforges installed and what kind. Really useful stuff, since I plan to 'equal the playing field' and sell some to the AI
Speaking of industrial targets, it is of course helpful that we can play a "pather card" and mess with AI's industries too. Not to mention the fact that we can always try to toss some sand into eyes of ai faction's ally - and break their alliance given enough time and money. Quite useful if we find one alliance starting to dominate the sector. I had heg and TT almost wiping out sindria - but with agents I had managed to break that unholy union (those who saw my screens on discord know what I talk about haha) apart and set against each other.
And oh, being able to scout up pather bases is great. I'd wish the same could be done about pirates?
So, in other words there's a lot of positives to talk about when it comes to agents. If I'll be starting a new playthrough, I'll definitively gonna try a more aggressive AI setting since agents are really making it possible to curb the "constant tournament cheating" that sets off everybody against you in just a matter of month from a full cooperative relationship. I'm exaggerating of course for comedic effect.
Not all is good however. As on normal settings, the properly employed agents make the game ridiculously easy to be honest. Not to mention that their success chances are too high as well. I'll try to explain what I mean by that of course.
Unless someone will start throwing a level 1 agent onto industrial sabotage missions, they'll find themselves with a maxed out agent in no time really. The raising/lowering relation missions are stupidly easy (AND USEFUL so you'll want your agents to do these things after all!) with base chance of 70. And it only gets better as the agent improves, providing for a really easy and fast way to level 'em up. Not to mention that even if unsuccessful, I never had any of my agents in trouble. Even if the security was on alert (I'll touch on them in a bit), they had no problem repeating their mission and exping in the process.
Not that industrial sabotage (and other activities) need a lot in terms of leveling up either, as level 3's have already a good success chance for blowing orbital works up for instance. So I'd would argue that though base success chances are considerably lower for these kind of activities (industrial sabotage, market destabilization and stockpile sabotage) - a midtier agent have no trouble of succeeding at them. And even if they won't, they won't be in trouble either (literally never had any attempt blowing up in my face) apparently.
The fact that "security alert" is kinda artificial doesn't help? Nor it does make much sense really. If the mission goes sour for our spy, all we need to do is to give him an easy task of rising/lowering relations (which they can do in circa 20 days if high level - so quite quickly) and the security alert will cease to exist. Giving us another safe try to do some nefarious and potentially explosive stuff. It does make sense if our first attempt was unsuccessful and there's nothing "disrupted" on the market. That however makes very little sense if we're trying to blow another thing up (for instance in my current game I've blew up Kazeron's OB and then megaport and followed it up market destabilization as well as sabotage of stockpiled hulls - all in span of just few months with either OB or MP disrupted - at one point at the same time) while our first target is still repairing the damages. What I'm trying to say that there's no difficulty curve to this, as all we need to do is to sent the agent off world or give him an easy and quick task of rising/lowering rep to just reset the security settings to null again before our next strike.
Which makes it too easy to be honest.
And that'd be my main gripe with it as of now honestly. Once you're floating with money, you can just keep playing with dynamite without increased difficulty nor risk factor. At least that's how it does feel.