I suggest Way of Life Focus CD to be removed.

[Jaevelklein]

The cooldown, if I'm not wrong, between selecting your focuses is currently 5 years. Choose Business Focus? Wait 5 years then until you can choose the Hunting focus.

The thing is: Aside from the passive benefits, what a focus actually means, is you spending more time on X rather than Y or Z. You devote time to it. You devote 3 months to Business Focus? Yet nothing happens? Too bad. You change your focus. For the good focus benefits to take place you need to devote a huge amount of time towards it. They rarely happen the first or second day.

So it's just natural that you change your focus in life as you please. Gave business 3 months, no success? Feels bad. Time to try some hunting. Didn't catch the white deer on the first hunt? Feels bad as you give up after 7 months of trying. Then you find family and this turns out to be your passion. As such you devote 7 entire years to it.

It's just unnatural that a 5 year cooldown period exists when it's not like you can reap the best benefits anyway after just dedicating a couple of month to it.

 

[Woifee]

It would just be to abusive.

Got hurt? Become a Hunter for a month. All Kids are dead? Become family man till one is born. Need 2 something to join hermetics? Become a scholar for a day.

It’s about making a choice and sticking with it for a while.

 

[technowhiz]

They could just decrease the cool down to two years.

 

[Snow Crystal]

It would just be to abusive.

Got hurt? Become a Hunter for a month. All Kids are dead? Become family man till one is born. Need 2 something to join hermetics? Become a scholar for a day.

It’s about making a choice and sticking with it for a while.

You might as well end the thread with this answer, as it is the right one.

The cooldown is there for game design reasons, and it means there is a certain commitment to the choices you make, as you have to plan 5 years down the line. If you personally don't like it, it's possible to mod it out, but there's no plans to remove it from the game.

 

[Jaevelklein]

You might as well end the thread with this answer, as it is the right one.

The cooldown is there for game design reasons, and it means there is a certain commitment to the choices you make, as you have to plan 5 years down the line. If you personally don't like it, it's possible to mod it out, but there's no plans to remove it from the game.

I respectfully disagree. What do you spend several hours a day on? Business? Hunting? War? There's nothing saying it's your focus for the next 5 years. 3 months and you should probably have gotten something done with all this time dedicated to it. This to me is enough of a justification. To reap the good rewards though such as the brawny trait from hunting or the business contacts from the business focus, you'll have to go through several events over a longer period of time. But you fell ill? Time to take a break from business and focus more on wild-life experiences (hunting) or socialising with close ones (family). You are about to go to war and you have enough gold? Time to focus on warfare instead of business where you got a lucky event filling your treasury. The focus isn't what you do the next 5 years, it's what you spend most of your time doing right now. And what "right now" means isn't 5 years. It can be 1 year or it can be 10 years. But setting an arbitrary 5 years cooldown on changing your focus just seem unnatural to me. Sure, sometimes you have longer goals in mind, but failing and cancelling plans is normal.

But if you still have no intention of changing this mechanic or passing it on for more discussion in terms of what it could mean for the game, then I accept your decision. Feel free to close the thread as nothing more will come out of it.

 

[Rags17]

In my personal options micromod I set the Focus cooldown to 3 years and the Change Councilor Action cooldown to 3 months. Three months is more than enough time to recall a Councilor and repost him to anywhere within diplomatic range, 3 years is my compromise for Focus - 5 years is WAYYYYY too long and anything less does not feel much like a "Focus" to me.

IMO the there is no actual need for a Focus cooldown as most of the event chains are time based, ie the longer you Hunt the greater the chance you will get a Hunting Dog, the longer you stay in Business the greater the chance to Mint Coins for glory etc. What the cooldown does give me though is a feeling that my character is "Focused" on some activity - maybe a good compromise would be that the average cooldown is say 3 years, while Diligent characters stay at 5 and Arbitrary characters reduce that to one ?

There is some advantage to not sticking to anything !

 

[TheDungen]

It may be a tad bit to long. Especially when taking over a character from the AI. But there needs to be some cooldown.

 

[Lord_Bean]

I respectfully disagree. What do you spend several hours a day on? Business? Hunting? War? There's nothing saying it's your focus for the next 5 years. 3 months and you should probably have gotten something done with all this time dedicated to it. This to me is enough of a justification. To reap the good rewards though such as the brawny trait from hunting or the business contacts from the business focus, you'll have to go through several events over a longer period of time. But you fell ill? Time to take a break from business and focus more on wild-life experiences (hunting) or socialising with close ones (family). You are about to go to war and you have enough gold? Time to focus on warfare instead of business where you got a lucky event filling your treasury. The focus isn't what you do the next 5 years, it's what you spend most of your time doing right now. And what "right now" means isn't 5 years. It can be 1 year or it can be 10 years. But setting an arbitrary 5 years cooldown on changing your focus just seem unnatural to me. Sure, sometimes you have longer goals in mind, but failing and cancelling plans is normal.

But if you still have no intention of changing this mechanic or passing it on for more discussion in terms of what it could mean for the game, then I accept your decision. Feel free to close the thread as nothing more will come out of it.

The difference is that you (mainly) argue from the point of real life simulation and it thus ‘not making sense’ for it to be this long. Whereas the counter argument is based on game design reasons, namely that it could give a serious versitality boost, making the game even easier. The argument that sticking to a certain focus gives more benefits, due to the the timed nature of events, is only partially true. For example:
- The observatory event chain (the only point of scholarship besides quickly joining the hermetic) doesn’t take that long.
- Switching to seduction, quickly popping out a few bastards and changing again within a year (or two) is easy.
- Switching to any of the foci that give a health bonus is always good when you are sick (and most of the time you’ll be able to gain a hunting dog without waiting 5 years as well).

And even if that does not weigh enough for you, consider this: yes things can take a while to happen, however when for certain foci they have happened, there is an incentive to switch again. Examples include the hunting dog, the observatory, the business route, becoming brawny. And yes, bad stuff can happen too, but they are not really severe as the good stuff is a boon. This means that you can take a focus, and the moment you’ve gotten what you want you switch again.

 

[Woifee]

You might as well end the thread with this answer, as it is the right one.

The cooldown is there for game design reasons, and it means there is a certain commitment to the choices you make, as you have to plan 5 years down the line. If you personally don't like it, it's possible to mod it out, but there's no plans to remove it from the game.

I am so smart S-M-R-T

 

[Tryvenyal]

Remove the cooldown AND the stat- boost. A boost of plus 2-3 is killing the vanilla improve- low- stat events that only fire if you are below 8. Give basic events that raise it for some time instead when you are "practicing" the skill. More immersion, more use of the features, more flexability.

 

[Sonmi]

Sure, I'd agree with the ability to lower the CD to one or two years, but only if it was tied to the Arbitrary trait.

It wouldn't be too powerful, would make Arbitrary slightly less awful than it is at the moment, and would give impatient players like OP the option to penalize themselves to switch focuses faster.