Useless assesor- any tips on how to avoid it?

[frogbeastegg]

I hate this vice, I really do. Bad farmer, useless assessor, scarred - nearly every single character I have in any of my 1.2 games gets those three. In 1.1 and 1.0 every single governor I had got useless assessor and bad farmer within a few turns of installation.

Why do I hate them? Easy - it ruins the feel of each character being unique. RTW has a beautiful trait system; it manages to give each and every family member real character, and makes them feel unique rather than a boost to a city or a source of battlefield bonuses. Finding the same couple of traits on almost everyone (and those who don't get the two economic vices are generals who have never captured a city) destroyed that illusion of unique little people with their own personalities.

There has been a lot of comment on the scarred line becoming so predominant now, but I actually find the poor farmer and useless assessor vices to be more harmful towards that feeling of characters with real, individual character because it is so common all my governors have it and many of my generals too. Scarred at least is mostly limited to my generals.

I'm going to mod those 3 traits to make them less frequent, but I would really love to see an official um .... fix is not quite the word but it will have to do, for this at some point. The trait system is one of my favourite aspects of the game, and I would love to see it polished up to remove this tiny spec of dirt.

EDIT: May as well add I always keep taxes to normal to encourage population growth, and I do build farms as a relatively high priority building in every single city.