Barely hitting the animals

[NetherSpawn]

My Spanish character spawned in a wilderness area with violent animals and no well equipped Cantrians in the vicinity. He rose to essential immunity from the animals, although he did drop temporarily as low as 40% health in the process. However, that was in an area with only medium nastiness animals and it was before hunting was massacred for no apparent reason.
The skill system either works very slowly or is insignificant. It's character talent that matters.

[Nixit]

I dub Mortaine, Cantr critiquer! JK.

[mortaine]

And now I'm infamous for speaking my mind and expressing my frustrations with the game. OK, whatever.

[The Industriallist]

I dub Mortaine, Cantr critiquer! JK.

That was a pointless comment...though you should reallize that JK (I think) is meant to indicate that he's joking.

If this is going to be discussed more, I would think it ought to be on the general discussion forum...it's not a support issue.

[The Sociologist]

And the genes don't show regional specifics because that takes time ... Over time, people with bad genes in animal rich areas will die before the others do hence reproduce less, hence we'll get typical local characteristics. But entering that manually was too complicated and also from an evolutionary perspective uninteresting.

I'm really more of an evolutionary psychologist than a sociologist and as such I'm wild for Darwin. So I agree to some extent with the principle you are implementing here. However, Jos, you have perhaps misled yourself in some key issues involved.

(a) In human societies culture leads over any "genetic" principle. The poor hunters will stay indoors and work on machines or otherwise be supported by the community. And in factory and resource towns, a higher value will always be placed on someone who stays awake, irrespective of their skills. That is a Cantr-specific phenomenon which will entirely overwhelm the skills system as such.

(b) You've also seem to me to have missed out on calculating the very long evolutionary time period necessary for such patters to emerge, even with your Lamarckian "evolution" - ie newspawns gaining the skills learned by their "parent" community.

I just don't see these broad patterns emerging in any realistic timeframe in circumstances where (a) skills have been randomized so wildly, and (b) the rate of improvement in skills is so very low, especially at the low end.

Also this implementation has hurt many characters and therefore distressed many players, some of them very good ones. Things you might want to look at:

(1) back out of the wild "genetic" randomization of skills until you have a chance to see whether different towns do indeed develop different patterns starting with uniformly equalized characters.

(2) increase the rate at which skills are gained at the low end to compensate for the rather crude and crass implementation. After all, it's our beloved charries you are trying to kill off!

But apart from that I'm still rooting for you, even though I'll fight you all the way. My threatened charries will fetch and carry, and work tirelessly, and take up juggling, and sing little ditties, and make themselves beloved of the strong hunting types who bring home the meat. Culture will defeat you yet, you evil Darwinist!
.