Backgrounds Are Hero Skills
This mod makes 67 of the 73 background character traits into hero skills. The remaining 6 (all of which grant affinity bonuses) have been effectively removed so that all recruitable heroes start with no background character traits. In this way, there is no RNG. Be aware that recruitable heroes over level 1 may already have a background hero skill, but it can be respecced.
There are a couple of things this mod effectively allows for:
- All heroes can have meaningful backgrounds. Since it is difficult to refresh the recruitable hero pool, you will not be forced to recruit heroes with useless backgrounds (i.e. a hero with a stability boost background when you have Dark culture.)
- Ruler heroes get access to background character trait modifiers. Since ruler heroes do not have access to these in vanilla, it is optimal to put all of your best gear on some recruited hero. By making background character traits into hero skills, rulers can be just as strong as recruited heroes.
While making this mod, I realized that there are a lot of potentially abusable background traits. To solve some of the balance problems (especially from the lack of RNG,) I made a handful of choices:
- Each hero can only have 1 background hero skill. (I believe heroes can have up to 2 background character traits in vanilla.)
- Each background hero skill requires 1 skill point.
- For each player, any 2 heroes cannot have the same background hero skill.
Some of these choices may change if I feel like they are too oppressive. If you do not want any of my balance changes, check out Backgrounds Are Hero Skills – Unrestricted (other than these changes, it is the same.)
I would like for heroes to have more than 1 background skill but it could be too strong. Here are some ideas I am considering (there can be a mix of ideas:)
- Current
- Having a background skill in 1 category will not limit you from having a background skill in another category.
- More powerful background skills require more skill points.
- Heroes can select another background skill at certain level intervals.
- Background skills are divided into tiers based on strength. You must select a lower tier skill before obtaining a higher tier skill.
- Background skills can be respecced (there is no way to prevent players from abusing temporary unit unlocks.)
- Players can get the same background skills on different heroes.
- Definitions_HeroSkills.rpk
- SharedModifiers_UnitProperties.rpk
- Traits_Background_Characters.rpk (MODIFIED!)
- Lords.rpk (MODIFIED!)
- Gameplay_Icons.clb
- 1 vanilla language file (i.e. EN.mo)
