No More Gods, Only Man – Rebalance for High Skill Values

A script mod to reduce the game-breaking effects of characters with extremely high skill levels in order to keep the late game fun.

It seems that the developers assumed that skill values will rarely go above 25, and balanced the game around that. However, when one plays the game long enough characters tend to accumulate a large number of skill bonuses from genetics, artifacts, traits, perks and special buildings. These allow them to easily reach values above 40 and sometimes even the maximum value of 100. Having such characters in the game world essentially breaks the simulation, giving them almost god-like powers (see the story of Gigaknight Excelsior for an illustration).

This mod modifies the skill values of all high skill characters, assigning them negative skill modifiers in a way to make skill points have diminishing effects above a certain threshold. This adjustment is updated every couple of months.

Skill values are not capped, instead new skill points earned above the skill’s adjustment threshold have diminishing effects. The harshness of this adjustment can be changed in the mod’s settings decision.
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Skill thresholds depends on the education, traits and lifestyle experience of the character, roughly following this formula:
<Skill Threshold> = 6 + <Overall education level>/2 + <Level of corresponding education> + <Number of lifestyle perks>/5 + <Trait effects>
So a character with level 4 diplomacy education who unlocked 5 stewardship perks would have thresholds of 12 for diplomacy, 9 for stewardship and 8 for everything else.

The following traits are currently implemented:

• Education traits (including Leadership and Prowess from More Lifestyles) boost their respective skills
• Physique traits (Delicate – Herculean), Strong, Weak, Male/Female, Age, Giant & Blind have a large effect on Prowess
• Intellect traits (Imbecile – Genius), Dull & Shrewd affect all mental skills (i.e., all except Prowess)
• Beauty traits (Hideous – Beautiful), Disfigured, Lisping, Stuttering: affect Diplomacy
• Maimed, Infirm, Incapable & Inbred have massive effect on all skills
• Some personality traits (Brave, Craven affect Prowess, Gregarious, Shy affect Diplomacy), more will be added later
• AI characters with Conqueror or Greatest of Khans are exempt from skill adjustment (this can be toggled on/off in Settings)

In the first versions of the mod the skill adjustment thresholds were a universal constant (12). This caused late-game characters to have fairly similar levels in all skills (~25), that is why the dynamic thresholds from above were added. If you would like to keep using a universal threshold, switch to "Basic" mode in the settings decision (see screenshot).

Compatible with essentially all mods, but won’t take into account traits and lifestyles added by other mods, except for the education traits and lifestyles added by More Lifestyles . Note that lifestyle mods that only change existing lifestyles (e.g., Additional Lifestyles, Lifestyles Improved) are likely to be compatible.

The mod can be put anywhere in the load order, as long as it is above More Lifestyles.

It is safe to add this mod to an existing game, but I recommend making a backup save. To remove the mod enact the decision to disable skill adjustments (see screenshot). The mod can be re-enabled at any time with the same decision.

This mod is part of my More Late Game Drama & Challenge collection.
I also recommend adding More Lifestyles , since it is fully compatible.

The mod is in English, but Chinese translation is available here .

I have tested this with my mod list and without mods, but there might still be bugs. If you encounter any, please post a comment.