Food for thought – thanks, @P_Tigras and @FairyGodfeather! I’ll consider easy-mode as an IAP. My intent is that when you get your first stat bump in Game 2, there should be meaningful advantages to any way you choose to play it: plug the gap of your greatest weakness (and thus avoid various disasters), keep specializing in your strength, or bring your “average” score up to become a second strength. There are also corresponding sacrifices, of course, which easy mode would partly circumvent.
Sorry, @idnlun, I hadn’t been planning to automatically raise your average score if you choose to keep specializing. Over the course of the Rebels saga, people who specialize in one stat to the point that they end up as Genghis, Merlin, or Buddha should have great glaring weaknesses in both their other stats.
Obviously, whether you specialise or generalise, you’ll need to make use of your genius followers’ skills in the areas where you’re weak or average. The work I’m currently doing on Ch 2 is in part to let you make more use of e.g. Breden’s charisma and Elery’s strategic gifts.
@hahaha, in the next version I post, your prologue choices will move your stats, but only very slightly – enough to give a sense of what the stats mean in practice, but not enough to outweigh the impact of your big defining choices in Ch 1. I see the point of the prologues as informing (rather than determining) the choice of what moves you most. For example, I wouldn’t want you to have to pick the “Carles the jongler” prologue if you want to maximize either your nationalism or cosmopolitanism.
I see your point that much of what’s captured in all three stats is “intelligence.” I deliberately picked “intellect” rather than intelligence as a stat name – there’s a meaningful difference between calling someone intelligent and calling them intellectual. I don’t think “education” quite captures what I’m going for (it implies formal teaching, whereas if you’re an intellectual helot, you’re largely self-taught), but I’m open to being convinced.
@MaraJade and @Jackrabbit, when you make your choice of stats in Ch 1, whatever you pick as your weakness drops to zero (and your strength rises to two). So Mara, I think you’d actually need a negative stat to give you death breath.
And you asked where a noble girl like you would learn to fight… had you picked combat as a strength, you’d know that the answer is “your Keriatou cousins’ blademaster.”