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.

[Baiae]

Couldn't agree with Frogbeastegg more, as far as the game goes I usually make so much money it doesn't bother me but it does ruin the atmosphere somewhat

[Sinner]

BadFarmer and BadTrader are the 2 worst vices in the game and your governors almost can't avoid getting them simply for doing their job!

Every time you complete a non-farm building you have a chance of gaining a point towards BadFarmer. The same holds true for BadTrader and trade buildings, eg. Trader, Market, etc. I haven't checked to see if this occurs in v1.2, but pre-patch these triggers would be checked even if you'd already built the farm/trade building for that level of settlement, which turns it into a bug IMO.

The simple way to avoid them is for your governor to leave the settlement the turn before a non-farm/trade building is completed, but even if you stayed around when a farm was completed, you'd still run the risk of getting BadTrader and vice versa.

You do have some hope if you have a temple of farming available since every turn your governor sits still in that settlement he has a 10% chance of getting 6 points towards GoodFarmer - if you get a total of 24 points then you've got to the 3rd level, which is a 'no going back' threshold and so you're then safe from ever getting BadFarmer.

Again, there's a similar chance to get GoodTrader via a temple of trade, although you can also gain some vices such as Embezzler at the same time.

[Camp Freddie]

The scarred traits can be fixed by changing the triggers to GeneralHPLostRatioinBattle (less than) 0.7 instead of (greater than) 0.3. I found that the game was checking the remaining hitpoints and not the hitpoints lost, thus giving scars to people who didn't fight.

Bad taxman traits can be avoided by (on the turn that a building is completed) keeping taxes high. If taxes need to be normal/low, then try and get 'blue face' loyalty, since this will also prevent you getting the traits.
You can get good taxman traits by setting taxes v.high and having "blue face" loyalty.

The bad farmer traits are a bit sucky, since the only way to avoid them is building farms (which you may not want).

[nokem]

'blue face' loyalty

I should RTFM... but what does this 'blue face' business mean?

[Cassius]

It means that you can shout at them till you're blue in the face, but they still won't be loyal....

No, actually, I think he means the icon that appears on the little information strip below the city name. Loyalty is reresented there by a face icon which is coloured (lowest to highest) red, blue, yellow and green.

[The Stranger]

bleu is like yellow in MTW they can revolt but are unlikely to. the changed 3 steps to 4 it's way better now.

[nokem]

bleu... they can revolt but are unlikely to

Aha. Thanks. And I like your French intonation. Is your name Emperor Emue in English? ;-)

[hrvojej]

I also hate badtaxman, badfarmer, and badtrader vices. Not so much because of the roleplay, but rather because in a way the game penalizes you for something you could be doing right.

Another way to change this is to change the number of instances needed to advance to the next level of the trait. So, e.g. in the following code in export_descr_character_traits:

;------------------------------------------
Trait BadTaxman
    Characters family
    ExcludeCultures barbarian
    AntiTraits GoodTaxman

    Level Useless_Assessor
        Description Useless_Assessor_desc
        EffectsDescription Useless_Assessor_effects_desc
        Threshold  1 

        Effect TaxCollection -10

change threshold to 5. This means it will take 5 successful checks to advance to the first level of the trait instead of just a single one. Alter the thresholds for subsequent levels of the trait accordingly. This is another way to decrease the frequency of the trait.

[nokem]

Indeed. But what makes the little faces turn blue?