Character traits may not look as very important part of the game but they provide information which allow the players to make various decisions in the game. Probably the most obvious and important decision is that commanders with more experience and/or more courage get more warriors.


Common traits

The common traits are:

1) Experience
Experience affects battle capability. It increases in battles.

2) Courage
Courage also affects battle capability.

3) Charisma
Charisma affects recruitment time and has a minor effect in battles. This trait is quite unimportant in practice.

There is another kind of common traits which are not presented by numbers. These are traits related to the races or the troop type(infantry or cavalry). These traits are the speed (how fast characters travel), stamina(how fast characters and armies lose energy when traveling), battle attack, battle defense, daily food consumption and hunting ability (maybe I forgot something). The player will need some game-play experience to learn about them but many are logical (e.g. cavalry is faster than infantry, more on plains then on hills, cavalry need more supplies than infantry (well, water for horses also need to be carried, right? :) ), ktirs who live in the rocky land are faster than humans on the rocky terrain etc.


Lore skills

Wizards possess special, magic related traits called lore skills.

I will explain these skills in details with help of the following picture, which shows traits of Nyathif.

The lore skills are:

1) Healing
Magic power which renew strength of characters and armies (they must be in the group with wizard).
There are two numbers here for Nyathif: 26% is the maximum value of magic points and 3% are the magic points still available. Magic points were spent with the HEAL action. Every day the available healing power regenerates to the maximum value. Why the percentages are used as the unit? Well, they show how powerful is actually a wizard in a particular lore skill compared to other wizards. 100% is the maximum possible value and you can see immediately that Nyathif is not very advanced in the healing skill.

2) Strike
Magic power which is used against enemies in battles.
Here we can see values 63%/63%. Like in the case of the healing power, this should mean that Nyathif has available 63 points from maximum value of 63 points. And that is correct. Hoverer there is one little detail about the strike magic - it is used automatically during the battles and the player has now decision in its activation. Because of that I implemented that this magic points are never reduced. They will stay at 63%.

3) Capture
Magic power which is used for capturing wild beasts to become an "army troop" - the captured beasts will fight on your side in battles.
Here we can see... well, nothing. Nyathif has no base capture skill so he can not use that magic at all.
Oh well, I will explain it anyway. Like the healing, it comes in a pair of current value and maximum value. The current value get reduced when you capture beasts - every captured beast require few points. These "capturing points" are released if the captured beasts is killed in a battle.

4) Attack
Magic power which enhance attacking power of warriors in battles.
There is only one value here: +20% What that means? The format +20% is characteristic for magic influences. Which means exactly that - attack is actually an influence (or at least behaves like that). In other words - there is no difference if you have in a group a wizard with the attack skill of +20% or someone wear a magic item with the attack influence of +20%.

5) Defense
Magic power which enhance defending power of warriors in battles.
This skill behaves the same way as the attack.


Magic influences

Magical influences provides a way to change (usually improve) traits of characters and armies. They are mostly caused by magic items.
Lets see again that image which show traits and influences for Nyathif. He is wearing few magic items so there are few influences coming from them. We can see the following influences:

ability +10%
Ok, what is ability? There are no traits for that. Ability describes how good is a character in what he does (commanders command, wizards use magic). It is treated like the experience - I could utilize word "experience +10%" but that would look strange as experience has its own mechanism of growth. Nyathif has experience of 60% and ability +10%. This has the same effect like having experience of 70%.

strike +20%
We can see that magic skills can also be improved by influence. That 63/63 value for the strike skill would be 43/43 without this influence!

attack +20%
This influence is actually the result of his influence based attack lore skill.

defense +30%
This influence come from a magic item (you may recognize a sun shield in the inventory ).
See that skill itself is improved by this influence.

speed +20%
An influence which increase speed of traveling.

You should be aware that displayed values for the traits are actual (influenced) values and you don't have to calculate them!

Some important facts about influences:
1) When you have more items (or influence based skills) with the same influence powers, the biggest influence value is used (they are not summed up)!
2) Group based influences work for all group members and armies, but the effect is smaller when armies are very big! Up to something like 3000 warriors will get the full effect of influences, after that the effect diminish with the size. In battles, all allies are considered as one group (you don't have to group them before battles for the sake of battle influences).
3) Long range magic influences affect over the lands and work a little differently - they do not diminish with the size of armies and they do get summed up! They have its source and their effect diminish with distance. In the game you have to endure the negative long range influences from the Snake Tower.