Traits that are bugged in 1.2 with fixes. Part 1: Scarred, Farmer, Trader

[hrvojej]

I really do hate the way this is currently working; my people are getting the same few repetitive vices over and over, and quite harmful ones too. I am actually far more bothered about the harm this does to the immersion factor provided by the otherwise excellent trait system; having so many people with the same few traits harms the feeling of individual characters, it reduces them to clones.

The problem mostly lies in the fact that it takes several (as in 8 or even 24) instances of triggers to get the good trait up one level, whereas it usually takes way fewer (read: a single one) instances to get one level of the corresponding bad trait. Or the triggers are set up in such a way that it's hard to avoid the annoying VnVs. That's why the game gets this punishing feeling, even if it appears that you're doing everything right.

For example, you'll always get useless assessors for having taxes lower than high. Simply, the trigger is set that if loyalty is greater than disillusioned (the blue face, i.e. 75-80%) and taxes are less than high, you have a chance to get badtaxman vice. You'll never be able to get goodtaxman virtue with the setup you described above (taxes on medium) since you have to have blue face loyalty and very high taxes, and not only that but also you'll never be able to counter the badtaxman progression (it's like a + - scale, one point in positive direction decreases the badtaxman). Another example is goodfarmer vs. badfarmer, where you need to build 6 farm buildings to get the first level of goodfarmer, whereas only a single non-farm building will net you a level in badfarmer. Although each farm building increase the goodfarmer with a 100% probability and the probability of getting a badfarmer from building anything else is 8%, I find that I'm way more likely to build "anything else" despite the apparently low probability than to build 6 farms under the same governor - and hence all the poor farmers out there.
Since I find this imbalance detrimental to my gaming experience, I have modified both the triggers and the thresholds for certain vices (farmer, trader, taxman...) to at least neutralize the effects you were talking about. In other words, it's not just the triggers IMO: you would have to build *24* bleeping farm buildings under the same governor to get the third level of goodfarmer virtue!! I'm tempted to say that most governors don't live that long, not even in 1.2. Of course, that's assuming you never build anything other than farms... or that you always pass the badfarmer check. Naturally, it only takes 3 failed checks (if you haven't build any farms and hence have no positive increase) to get the third level of badfarmer...

Sorry, a bit long and a bit of a rant, but you hit the nail on the head with one of the biggest things that (used to) bother me with the strategic map.

edit:
And from reading the posts after yours I see that I'm not the only one in this feeling. Sorry for the repeats, folks, I went straight to writing without reading on.