Revamp Educational Traits

[A1vin]

A couple of days ago I replied to a post about altering the traits system, so that they could be scalable. While writing I remembered an older idea of mine, and I am wondering what other people think about it.

With the current education traits, you can be "Master of one" (or not event a master) but there are no possibility of "Jack of all traits". It seemed logical that someone would get educated in more than one subject, and if they were educated in stewardship they shouldn't have the chance of just ending up with a bottom tier marshal skill (people don't just have one subject at school, and if they only had math they'd probably not have a chance of ending up with a PE degree and no math skills).

My solution would be to give every one all five educational traits, and rebalance them so that you would average at about the same (maybe even have negative or no benefit at lowest rank).

Also children should have their own version of the educational traits with tiers that advanced over time (eg. unremarkable / adequate / promising martial). This way the player would have a feedback on how they were doing.

If the child isn't progressing fast enough or unbalanced, you would have the ability replace their educator so that they might reach higher tiers before adulthood. Following up on children could be easier, more predictable, and more beneficial as you could optimize them for their purpose and needs.

Upon coming of age the child educational traits will be replaced by their adult counterparts, but there's always the chance of going a bit up or down in each of them. The highest rank of each education should be hard to get and possibly even unobtainable from child traits, but rather unlocked over time with experience.

This would hopefully result characters having a more "natural variation", and not like a factory pushing out a series of characters, most of which with the max level and same education. You should never expect having a "perfect" character, and it would also leave some opportunity of continuing the development of the character after reaching adulthood.

What do you think?

 

[PK_AZ]

My solution would be to give every one all five educational traits, and rebalance them so that you would average at about the same (maybe even have negative or no benefit at lowest rank).

Thats what attributes are for.

 

[A1vin]

Thats what attributes are for.

Sure, the educational traits are primarily a boost in attributes, but with the current system the education is down to a dice roll at their 16th birthday, and when you get a trait you are stuck with it. You might groom an heir selecting the best tutor you can get and still get the worst possible trait, even if the trait was improved in rank, it might never be useful for your heirs purpose.

With the changes, you might still get a lower tier of your desired trait, but you would have the ability to see that the child wasn't developing properly, and you could intervene. The only way to get garbage traits would be if you neglected them, moving the control from the RNG gods to the players actions.

If you see that you have a mediocre education, there is a clear opportunity for improvement, even as adult. Do you need more combat skills you could choose to focus martial training, or go for stewardship if you are a bit low on income.

Also the educational traits do have benefits other than attributes (like health, fertility and combat skills), and there aren't really any way to try to get them in the game. They could even move the education from basic attribute increase to more specific bonuses (tax, construction, religious conversion, tech increase, military tactics, personal combat, etc.)

 

[Tryvenyal]

There could be a mix! The Childhood focus wheel could have a mix between each of them. Starting 12 o´clock turning clockvice: Stewardship -> Mix <- Intrigue -> Mix <- Martial -> Mix <- Diplomacy -> Mix <- Learning -> Mix <- Stewardship.

The mixes should be hard to optain in the first place and the higher tiers are not unlocked untill later, as a experienced adult.

 

[TheRealRemus]

Personaly I feel like the Education System is verry poor, but I think the devs kept it that simple for a good reason. Maybe it would end up with to much micromamagement etc.

Extending the System like you suggested seems verry elaborate due to its complexity.

There could be a mix! The Childhood focus wheel could have a mix between each of them. Starting 12 o´clock turning clockvice: Stewardship -> Mix <- Intrigue -> Mix <- Martial -> Mix <- Diplomacy -> Mix <- Learning -> Mix <- Stewardship.

The mixes should be hard to optain in the first place and the higher tiers are not unlocked untill later, as a experienced adult.

Whereas this is something that everybody could appreciate and it realy would bring some variety into gameplay and Education.

EDIT:
but I would suggest that The learning Attribut should not be mixable but instead be a infependent trait which determens how good a child progresses in its Educations.

 

[A1vin]

Making hybrid traits and making it so that if you educate someone in stewardship, you would either get the pure stewardship, or one of the stewardship hybrids would help in making it less random, but it would possibly also make some issues.
If you made 2 hybrids for each trait there would be a total of 10 educational traits in the game. If you made every possible combination, it would end up at 15 traits in total.
Personally I think having 10 to 15 educational traits would bloat the game when it could be resolved by letting people have multiple educations.

I can see 3 main arguments against the idea I purposed:
1) People would be too OP.
Not if the traits were balanced. If you are afraid of an attribute explosion, you could reduce the number of points gained from the traits, or replace some with secondary stats that you can't get in the game. Also I think the progression should be slow. If you focused at getting one trait to the max, others should be mediocre.

2) There would be too much micro management.
The education would be slow and gradual. Even if you only chose a decent tutor and left your children there, they should be fine, but if you wanted to min-max you could look at them at the age of 14 or so to determine if another educator would be better suited. There should be no need to constantly watch them.

3) We don't need any more traits, the trait panel is stuffed as it is.
Sure, you might get a lot of character traits over a characters life, but I think the flexibility, increased player control and possibility to improve your character through game-play is worth it.

 

[Tryvenyal]

Personally I think having 10 to 15 educational traits would bloat the game when it could be resolved by letting people have multiple educations.

Yes it probably would. But imagine the amount of work needed to be done to the game to support 5 education traits, how much time that whould have to be invested to balance the dynamics in there. I mean, they have not fully managed to balance 1 education trait after 6 year. There should be other ways and there are. It´s the stats that counts, not the edu trait so we have WoL focuses. Expand on them, increase the cap to 11 for the old style pre WOL ambition- events that boosted base value in selected stat if its 8 or below. Or 15! Ofc the MTTH has to increase as the stat grows. This would enable having a decent stat also when the focus later is abandoned.

You would likely have to add a tier 0 for each education with your idea. A terrible trait only giving -1 or -2 to the attribute in question, just to not blow the roof and inflate stats again! To keep the balance in the game, you would have to exceptional to exceed a total of 4-5 stars combined.

 

[A1vin]

To balance I would suggest removing any secondary attributes, take 1 to 2 points off the primary attribute (or more if they were replaced with other bonuses), and reduce the character base stats a bit.

Currently you get 12 points from a tier 4 education (9 + 2 + 2 - 1), tier 3 is 7 (6 + 1 + 1 - 1).
By removing the secondary points tier 1 would be 1 point, T2 3, T3 6, and 9 points at tier 4.
If you take off 1 point at the top end, it would be [ 1, 3, 5, 8 ].
Alternatively it could be [0, 2, 4, 6] which on average would probably be a nerf compared to current, or adding one negative [-1, 1, 3, 5 (8)] if you wanted a negative too.

If you only let the character get up to a tier 3 from childhood and assume that the median would be around tier 2, then they might get about 15 points.
15 Is a bit more than the 12 you might get now, so some points would have to be removed somewhere, but it should not be too difficult to adjust for that. Even if you somehow got max in every trait (25 points at tier 3, same as genius), would still not be a problem.
I started a new game and looked at the stats of different characters, finding 16 year olds with 40-50 points was surprisingly common (even when adjusting for other traits), among the older you could find a lot with 70+.

When it comes to changes to the game-mechanics, it would probably not be that hard.
Adding 5x3 child traits (15 very generic traits, name + stat points), change how you get the education trait at 16. If there are things that is unlocked by having an education, then it would have to be changed to a specific tier of that education instead. There would also have to be some method to further your education as an adult, but it should not be too efficient.

You would not need a tier 0, but if you want it, having no trait could do the same.