Skills

Introduction

The mages you can hire in Guilds can spend their time on thaumaturgical research, improving existing magick techniques. All this effort at some point can become useful even to most powerful mages, such as you. When you build Mage Guilds on your land, people working in them can not only help in researching new spells or uncovering ancient artifacts - they will also spend their time on mentioned thaumaturgy. This is reflected by research points income - to simplify things we assume that 1 Guild can generate 10 points per turn. However, only small percentage of inhabitants of you country is talented enough to provide such exceptional science work. It means that your Guilds can only produce maximum amount of points equal to size of your land. For example, with 3500 acres you can have maximum income of 3500 points, so having 350 Guilds is sufficient. All this work becomes useful for you when you gather some amount of research points - this depends on server speed (it will be 250,000 on Guild). When you gather 250,000 points, they turn into one free SKILL POINT. You can spend it to improve your magic skill in one of 10 fields. You can use you free skill point at any time you want, however you can have maximum 5 unused skill points. If you have 5 free skill points and you are going to gain another - it is lost. Spending skill point costs 1 turn.

The 10 skills are divided into two groups: color-specific skills and neutral skills. Color skills are more powerful, but training color-specific skill that has different aligment from your magic specialty takes double amount of skill points.

When you train yourself in one skill, you increase your rank in it. There are 20 ranks in each skill, and attaining each next rank is more expensive (see the table below). Off-color skills take twice the amount of skill points, as mentioned above.

The 10 skills

There are 10 different skills, that a mage can develop slowly over time. You need guilds on your land (the buildings where your population works on developing magic) and then by spending turns you generate skill credits. You can store max 5 credits. You are forced to choose early, what skill to develop. You can switch ofcourse, but you cannot withdraw invested skill credits.

Rank	Investment of Skill credits to proceed
1	1
2	3
3	6
4	10
5	15
6	21
7	28
8	36
9	45
10	55
11	66
12	78
13	91
14	105
15	120
16	136
17	153
18	171
19	190
20	210

You can develop one skill very far (to level 20 over 2-3 months of time), or you can develop a couple of skills to a decent level. The game rounds (resets) last to short to develop all skills to the max. Developing plain and on-color skills is cheap. Developing off-color skills cost double. It is nearly impossible to get an off-color skill to level 20.

Having over 10% of your land guilds, means you generate skillpoints at the maximume rate for your amount of land. Having more land, and building up to 10% guilds on it, will make you generate more skill points.

Details per skill

• Barrier Proficiency [White]
  • Enhances your ability in supporting barriers. You can have higher maximum resistance from building barriers (more then regular 75 maximum).

• Combat Casting [Green]
  • Greately reduces chance to fail casting of any spell (it works for battle spells, it also works for normal spells)
  • At rank 20, it makes you never lose Concentration (assuming that you have that enchanment running), even when under Confuse or similar effect.

• Spell Penetration [Red]
  • Gives you ability to pierce your enemies barriers and creature spell resistance. It decreases target mages barrier resistance (if he has any) and spell resistance of his entire army (in battle).

• Undead Mastery [Black]
  • It greatly empowers all your Undead Units.
  • At rank 10 creates Wraith instead of Zombies with Touch of Necromancy enchantment.
  • At rank 15 creates Liches (with Touch of Necromancy enchantment).
  • At rank 20, all Undead units gain +1 initiative in battle.

• Spell Mastery [Blue]
  • Decreses spell casting cost. The effect is better with off-color spells, and very strong with opposite color spells.
  • At rank 20, spells cost 1 additional turn less to cast (but each spell minimal takes 1 turn to cast).

• Grand Enchanter [Plain]
  • All enchantments you cast have increased effectiveness.
  • At rank 10, any enchantments takes 1 turn less to cast;
  • At rank 20, any enchantment takes 2 turns less to cast (but each spell minimal takes 1 turn to cast).

• God's Favored [Plain]
  • You have better chance to get divine attention.
  • At rank 10, all God relations last double long.
  • At rank 15, you can atone from Hatred.
  • At rank 20 God relations do not expire in time.

• Legendary Commander [Plain]
  • All your armies get permanent bonus to Primary Attack and Counter Attack.

• Augment Summoning [Plain]
  • Simply increases amount of summoned units.

• Grand Conqueror [Plain]
  • With this skill, you capture more more than the normal max. one-third of destroyed land.

Additional Info - random

Q: Legendary Commander Will secondary attacks get boosted?

• A: No.

Q: Grand Conqueror will this affect rules regarding minimum requirements for stealing a fort on siege attacks?

• A: No.

Q: This is really confusing- it is titled "Combat Casting", but says it reduces failure on "Any spell"- will it reduce failure rate for non- battle spells?

• A: Yes. It is indeed confusing :)

Q: like the god favor...with that skill maxed out...is it possible to get favors from all gods then?

• A: i'm still writting it, but i can assure you it will be good enough to be in line with other skills

Q: It would even take more than a month to get 210 skill points at 10k land on s1.

• A: Yes it does. Ranks above 15 are considered very high and take loong to gain. But, i'll adjust skill points income during the reset, this is just a draft.

Q: Barrier Proficiency Does that mean you get benefits from building more than 2.5% barriers or that at 2.5% barriers you will get more than 75% resistance?

• A: You can build to have more then 75%

Q: The peope who are good at the game will increase dramatically faster than people who aren't that good at the game (like me). It will take a longer time for somone in the lower ranks to gain in the ranks cuz the higher ranked people will have more skills.

• A: People who rank fast will be most probably interested in completely different set of skills than people who sit in mid ranks. The worst effect comes to good rankers who intentionally sit low for first month or two, but it's their own decision :)

Besides, I count on general human tendency to MAX one thing instead of mixing various effects. And it is very costy and takes looots of time even for big mages.

(sogrom answers)