Why is the Administrator Trait so Hard to Get?

[Heavenly Serpent]

Seriously, there is a poorer chance of getting the Administrator Lifestyle Trait than any other trait in the game. It is easier to become immortal than it is to become an Administrator - I have become Immortal 3 times in my 1000 hours of playing Crusader Kings, and have never become an administrator. I am trying to get the Wise Guy achievement right now, and the balance on this is so wonky! I can't get over how long I've been trying for this, and it's like the game is just dangling it in front of my face!

I've been digging in the code, and through guides, and people have literally had an easier time save scumming by crashing their game to get immortality than they have to get this frustrating Lifestyle trait! I want answers! Why is this balanced like this?!

 

[Evangeline]

The Bey of Daylam in 1066 starts with the administrator trait, which should make it much easier to get the achievement.

You could also take a look at this for ideas/tips: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/3e0j79/a_question_about_the_rulership_focus_event/

If you don't want to be the Bey of Daylam, play as someone with many many vassals (and direct mayor vassals), the quick/genius trait, the diligent trait and the rulership focus. I managed to become an administrator this way once but died a few days later, lol. You can do it!! Being Jain might possibly also give you an advantage (?) not sure (I was Jain when it worked for me).

But yes, dear Paradox, please make becoming an administrator easier - it's a great lifestyle trait and I want to have a better chance of achieving it.

 

[eastcoastceojam]

I just got my first Immortal character a few weeks ago, Matilda of Tuscany in 1066. Maybe if I leave her on the Rulership focus for a century+, I can get the Administrator trait, and (finally) the "Wise Guy" achievement?

I have played Bey of Daylam 7 different times, he usually lives between 10 - 25 years, still no Wise Guy achievement. I wonder if he needs count/duke vassals for these "level up" events to fire, but unfortunately he starts with only Baron vassals.

 

[Dragatus]

You just need Administrator and 12 Stewardship. It's a yearly pulse event, which just means that every game year you'll have a small chance to get the event that gives you the legendary wisdom modifier and the Wise Guy achievement.

 

[Heavenly Serpent]

You just need Administrator and 12 Stewardship. It's a yearly pulse event, which just means that every game year you'll have a small chance to get the event that gives you the legendary wisdom modifier and the Wise Guy achievement.

I did finally get the Chievo, by loading up Bey of Daylam 1066, setting his focus to hunting, and just leaving the damn thing running. As said, he starts with Administrator.

 

[Thrake]

The Bey of Daylam in 1066 starts with the administrator trait, which should make it much easier to get the achievement.

You could also take a look at this for ideas/tips: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/3e0j79/a_question_about_the_rulership_focus_event/

If you don't want to be the Bey of Daylam, play as someone with many many vassals (and direct mayor vassals), the quick/genius trait, the diligent trait and the rulership focus. I managed to become an administrator this way once but died a few days later, lol. You can do it!! Being Jain might possibly also give you an advantage (?) not sure (I was Jain when it worked for me).

But yes, dear Paradox, please make becoming an administrator easier - it's a great lifestyle trait and I want to have a better chance of achieving it.

Let me guess: you died from stress from the focus right after you get the trait

You just need Administrator and 12 Stewardship. It's a yearly pulse event, which just means that every game year you'll have a small chance to get the event that gives you the legendary wisdom modifier and the Wise Guy achievement.

I think it has to do with other lifestyles giving benefits much more easily, like if you get trade route, statue, tower, garden,... event chains you're pretty much guaranteed to get a modifier from the focus, while with administrator there's a lot of events that are not part of chain and don't seem to trigger anything outside of their direct effect (get stressed, just,...). And if you do get the event chain, then it will only conclude a looong time after (if ever!) and then there's 1/3 that you picked the right choice.

This and tactician lifestyle trait are hard to get, but I least I once got tactician. The others are distributed like candies and can reliably be gotten in 5 years (even if you're a disfigured leper low diplo seducer!).

 

[Heavenly Serpent]

Let me guess: you died from stress from the focus right after you get the trait



I think it has to do with other lifestyles giving benefits much more easily, like if you get trade route, statue, tower, garden,... event chains you're pretty much guaranteed to get a modifier from the focus, while with administrator there's a lot of events that are not part of chain and don't seem to trigger anything outside of their direct effect (get stressed, just,...). And if you do get the event chain, then it will only conclude a looong time after (if ever!) and then there's 1/3 that you picked the right choice.

This and tactician lifestyle trait are hard to get, but I least I once got tactician. The others are distributed like candies and can reliably be gotten in 5 years (even if you're a disfigured leper low diplo seducer!).

Architect is a little hard to get because the Business Focus practically harasses you with pops for the Maze event, but rarely does the Architect one.

 

[Rokh]

Yeah, it's super weird. It bothers me how Gardener is incredibly easy to get but Administrator isn't. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Seems more realistic to me.

 

[eastcoastceojam]

I did finally get the Chievo, by loading up Bey of Daylam 1066, setting his focus to hunting, and just leaving the damn thing running. As said, he starts with Administrator.

Really? Congrats! I thought you needed to have Rulership Focus to get the “legendary wisdom” modifier?

Maybe you just need Rulership to get the Administrator trait, which then leads to the legendary wisdom? I wonder if any of the other Focuses give you a better chance at getting it, instead of just letting you live longer.

 

[fall back]

Architect is a little hard to get because the Business Focus practically harasses you with pops for the Maze event, but rarely does the Architect one.

I find it’s the other way around the tower pops to often I think I’ve had the maze once but after the trade route is set up I switch to hunting or theology

 

[Heavenly Serpent]

I find it’s the other way around the tower pops to often I think I’ve had the maze once but after the trade route is set up I switch to hunting or theology

Weird! I almost always get the Gardener chain, and rarely get the tower. I bet it's because I often play as Tribals though! I think I have read that they are not allowed to get the Tower.

 

[Dragatus]

Really? Congrats! I thought you needed to have Rulership Focus to get the “legendary wisdom” modifier?

Maybe you just need Rulership to get the Administrator trait, which then leads to the legendary wisdom? I wonder if any of the other Focuses give you a better chance at getting it, instead of just letting you live longer.

To quote myself from earlier:

"You just need Administrator and 12 Stewardship. It's a yearly pulse event, which just means that every game year you'll have a small chance to get the event that gives you the legendary wisdom modifier and the Wise Guy achievement."

How you get the Administrator trait doesn't matter. You can obtain it through Rulership focus or just start with it, as far as the achievement is concerned it's all the same.

 

[DPS]

FWIW, I've only gotten the Administrator trait once in over 6000 hours of gameplay.

 

[Heavenly Serpent]

I've spoken to Snow Crystal about it, and looked over the code for how Rulership Focus works pretty extensively.

The problem, in essence, is that all of the opportunities from the Rulership Focus have a Weight Multiplier of 1, meaning that each has an average chance of firing once in about twentyfive years - and if you're at war, or part of a society or religion that has a lot of unique events, this is lowered further. The number of total events means you'll get about one rulership event every four years, not adjusted for the ones which fire more often under certain circumstances - if you have a Drunkard Vassal, if you have Feuding Vassals, etc.

So all in all, you only have a chance to get Stewardship bonuses from Rulership once every four years. No matter what, when you complete an opportunity, event 12500 (I believe is the correct id) fires, which has several possible outcomes - each of which has a 15% chance of firing (and luckily, two can even fire at once, so you can improve rulership, and gain a positive trait etc). There's a twofold problem that makes it so tough to get Administrator.

The first is that there are oodles of possible benefits to get. You can lose a poor trait or gain a good trait (and there are three total trait pairs that Rulership looks for - Slothful/Diligent, Arbitrary/Just, and Content/Ambitious). You can level up your Rulership (three levels, and the third level up will earn you the Administrator trait). And finally, if you have a Stewardship Education that is less than Midas Touched, you have a chance of leveling it up by one stage.

The second is that earning one of those possible benefits doesn't then increase the chance of getting the others. Already being Just, or Ambitious, or Diligent doesn't actually get you any closer to being an Administrator - the Focus has diminishing returns, so it's just genuinely not worth keeping for a long time unless you like the Stewardship Bonus. Each one always has a 15% chance of firing.

All in all, this means earning Administrator takes a very *very* long time. Your chance of getting it in just 12 years is about 0.3375% assuming one event pops every 4 years, and it is basically impossible to get it within the 5 years that would be typical to earn a Lifestyle Trait (except Hunter, another trait for which there's no way to speed up your earning time.) Someone more arithmetically skilled can do the math, but the number I've read is that it would take one character an average of 86 sustained years of using the Rulership Focus in order to get Administrator - longer than vast majority of character lifetimes.

For bonus points, see how many Random Nobles you have to invite before you see one who has the Administrator Trait. Randomly generated characters somehow have pretty good odds at just having something it would take a player character or even a normally generated character almost an 8th of a Charlemagne Start Game's Full Duration to earn.

EDIT: Did the math on this by think about Dice Probabilities. The odds of getting the Administrator Trait within the minimum number of rolls is about 1/296. The average number of events you'll need to get one Rulership Level increase is about 7. Since it takes about 4 years for one to pop during peace time, it'll take about 28 years to get one Rulership increase. Mutliplied by 3, it should take right around 84/85 years for one character to earn Administrator, and that's rounding down generously.

 

[eastcoastceojam]

^ Thanks for sharing, Serpent. It seems that getting the Administrator trait on anyone other than an Immortal character is an extreme longshot.

Which brings me back to the 1066 Bey of Daylam. 3 more tries, still no Wise Guy. Once, I used just the Hunting Focus (he lived for 13 years), or the Scholarship focus for 5 years to get Learning up for the Hermetics, then switched to Hunting (he lived 21 years one time, and 12 years the other). In the previous 7 runs, I exclusively used the Rulership focus. So 10 runs now for me with Daylam (140+ total years of play), but still lacking Legendary Wisdom. Guess it is just bad RNG for me.

 

[afrodius]

I remember the rulership focus events used to fire a lot more often, but I guess they thought it was too op and nerfed it

 

[Heavenly Serpent]

I remember the rulership focus events used to fire a lot more often, but I guess they thought it was too op and nerfed it

Interesting. What does "OP" even mean in the context of Way of Life Focuses? The influence that traits have is comparatively pretty minor - your own traits have far less influence on your vassals' opinions I've found than simply whether your vassals' have one or both of Ambitious and Envious. That said, Rulership certainly offers the best combination of traits - you can get Just from Business, Diligent from Hunting (and several other focuses all much faster than from Rulership) but only Rulership offers The chance to get both *and* Ambitious for something like a net 6 stewardship possible from personality traits.

I would argue that in general there should be more chances to get traits from Way of Life in guaranteed ways, rather than relying on probabilities, if only because it is fun and interesting, and not everybody has the same ideal character. On the other hand, it can be rewarding, over several generations, to improve your rulers by picking the right focuses and educations, and idk what the devs want.

 

[Larva]

Well, tell this to Theologian trait without Hermetics - I have Wise Man, but still hunting for By the Gods

 

[Karlington]

Interesting. What does "OP" even mean in the context of Way of Life Focuses? The influence that traits have is comparatively pretty minor - your own traits have far less influence on your vassals' opinions I've found than simply whether your vassals' have one or both of Ambitious and Envious. That said, Rulership certainly offers the best combination of traits - you can get Just from Business, Diligent from Hunting (and several other focuses all much faster than from Rulership) but only Rulership offers The chance to get both *and* Ambitious for something like a net 6 stewardship possible from personality traits.

Traits actually have a huge effect on players as well, far more than one can learn just from playing the game itself.

Many events will have an increased chance of occurring with the appropriate trait. Some events cannot even occur at all without the right trait, and sometimes when events do occur, the results are improved, or your odds on random rolls are improved (sometimes by quite a large amount). Plus just as traits influence how AI characters behave, your traits can sometimes influence how AI behave toward you, and I don't just mean opinion modifiers. Unfortunately most of this can only be learned from looking at the game files. All we get to see in-game is sometimes an option in a window saying something like "This is available to you because you have the <x> trait." but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Incidentally, Diligent happens to be one of the better traits in this way.

I would argue that in general there should be more chances to get traits from Way of Life in guaranteed ways, rather than relying on probabilities, if only because it is fun and interesting, and not everybody has the same ideal character. On the other hand, it can be rewarding, over several generations, to improve your rulers by picking the right focuses and educations, and idk what the devs want.

Amen. The system as it is today leaves much to be desired! It's better than playing without Way of Life, but it's definitely both too restrictive and random in my opinion.

 

[knppel]

I remember the rulership focus events used to fire a lot more often, but I guess they thought it was too op and nerfed it

Don't nail me on the exact developement history of rulership focus, but the problem outlined in the calculation is not as much caused by a nerf, but by the simple fact that the amount of events with higher weighting was massively increased with follow-up dlc's and patches, and thus makes rulership events less likely to trigger than they might have in the original WoL-patch game version.

I've tried a bit in practice recently (That agree-hook under DPS' post is from me), and on a douzen rulers with in some cases long reigns, totalling to over 1000 years, I got exactly one event for upgrading stewardship education (granted, I had not many steward mains), two stewardship-bonus-events from rulership (those we are aiming for), and once I got ambitious after 28 years of nonstop rulership focus and nothing else triggering, only to have it removed the very day after due to me "becoming a better christian" as member of the Order of St. Benedict right away overwriting my ambitions.
Praise Jesus.