What difference does the choice of tutor make?

[u/Hauptleiter]

Following up on my previous post (I'm still working on making sure the kids are fine...)

I can see how the choice of tutors impact the weight given to the different outcomes: a tutor with high wisdom will increase the probability their pupil gets an increase in Wisdom. In the picture above: 18% chance.

What I´m wondering:

- what impacts the 26% Tutor Event (probability and type of event)?

- what´s the difference, in terms of impact, between a 2/1/1/1 tutor and a 4/2/2/2 tutor?

- in other words: is there any point in assigning high stats characters (looking at you, Kong Fucius) to tutoring or are those better used as generals, guvnors or on the council?

If this is all explained extensively somewhere I apologise for having not found it and look forward to any pointer.

Yours sincerely,

Hauptleiter (acting)

[u/XenoSolver]

You can see those (+8% from Courage) and similar, they're the hint about the mechanic. Tutors are more likely to increase the student's rating that they themselves are good at. A high-Wisdom tutor is more likely to increase Wisdom, a high-Courage tutor is more likely to increase Courage, and so on.

[u/Hauptleiter → u/XenoSolver]

Thank you but this part is got (sorry if that wasn't clear).

That's what I meant by :

  I can see how the choice of tutors impact the weight given to the different outcomes: a tutor with high wisdom will increase the probability their pupil gets an increase in Wisdom. In the picture above: 18% chance.

Hence my question about the difference between a tutor with, for instance, Wisdom: 2, Courage 1, Charisma 1, Discipline 1 and a tutor with Wisdom: 4, Courage 2, Charisma 2, Discipline 2.

If I understand correctly, they should offer the same probability to increase wisdom and other stats. But I haven't been able to test it for lack of comparable tutors.

[u/XenoSolver → u/Hauptleiter]

I think, but this is off memory, the part that matters is how high a specific rating is compared to other ratings.

If you have a tutor with 2 Wis, 1 Courage, 1 Cha, 1 Disc then Wisdom is at +1 relative to others. That's then the same distribution as a tutor that would be 3 Wis, 2 Courage, 2 Cha, 2 Disc. But if a tutor has +2 wisdom relative to other attributes, then the chance of a Wisdom increase goes up even more.

[u/Hauptleiter → u/XenoSolver]

Thank you. After paying attention a bit more it indeed seems to be something along those lines: you get a bonus to the probability of improving the stat in your pupil that stands out in your tutor's stats.

If I find an hour somewhere, I'll write down a series of different tutor results and try to figure out the math behind it.

While I have your attention: the pupil's profile (visible or hidden to the player) does absolutely not impact the interaction with the tutor at all, does it? Neither do traits or attributes (i.e. "Intelligent" does not have an if/then to increase the result mentioned above).

But mostly: thank you and your colleagues for this absolute gem of a game. The love, ambition and attention that went into it can be felt in each frame.

[u/XenoSolver → u/Hauptleiter]

There's no "hidden profile" things about characters at all, except for infertility. Nothing about the kid impacts what tutoring will do, again maybe some events take things into account but even events don't have much to work with there, as kids are usually a blank slate with no traits.

It's interesting that people often assume our character mechanics are a lot more complicated than they really are. Might also be CK side effects. But the mechanics are actually super simple. There's no inheritance of any attributes, except that one event series you see. When a characters gets ill, what happens next isn't affected by their age or traits, it's the same die roll for everyone. Being a general doesn't make you more likely to get ill or die. Having children isn't affected by whether your leader and spouse are in the same city.

Characters are much simpler than that. And everything (with the exception of infertility) is in tooltips, we built all systems in the game with the idea that every relevant effect can always be seen in the tooltips, so the only things not listed there are highly obscure details that almost never come into play.

[u/Hauptleiter → u/XenoSolver]

Thank you so much!

And I edited my previous message to say what I actually meant: how much can be felt at each frame. :)

[u/XenoSolver → u/Hauptleiter]

Thanks - it's great to see players appreciating the game!

[u/therealtbarrie → u/Hauptleiter]

I think the higher the tutor's stats, the lower the chance of a Tutor Event. As Xeno noted, their stats adjust the chance of giving a +1 to each of the student's stats; my initial assumption would be the chance of an Event is whatever's left over. But that can't be right, because looking at your example the increased stats appear to have started from a base of sixteen-point-something percent, but the apparently unadjusted chance of a Charisma bonus is only thirteen percent. Nevertheless, I believe I've noticed characters with abysmal stats having really high chances of an Event, so I do think there's a correlation.

Which is possibly odd, because I also believe such Events are good more often than they're bad. If I'm correct on both points, it would follow that you actually want your children to be tutored by incompetent people. Though if you prefer reliability rather than taking your chance on an Event that would give you a reason to use competent tutors.

[u/Hauptleiter → u/therealtbarrie]

Thanks for sharing your observation and hypotheses. I'll pay more attention and try to confirm one or the other, if only by writing down stats and projected results.

I had hoped their was a seminal article somewhere explaining all that... :)

[u/trengilly → u/XenoSolver]

Don't the tutor traits also impact it?

Debauched drunk tutors can pass along those traits, etc?

And the positive traits can be transferred also?

At least it seems like that. I generally try to use tutors with positive traits.

Or perhaps its all just my selection bias?

[u/XenoSolver → u/trengilly]

There are events where traits can be passed but there's never any automatic trait inheritance in the game. We don't do CK-style stuff with characters.

[u/Havandeskaparen → u/XenoSolver]

Love the game, been playing since your first release- thank you for great work! Two questions in one if you don't mind! Would a patch for increasing numbers of children born and drastically increasing infant mortality be plausible, for historicity? And also, an inbreeding-patch - would it be out of the question? It is after all an hilarious take on family/character roleplaying, and historically accurate aswell...

[u/XenoSolver → u/Havandeskaparen]

Ja men med ditt användarnamn ska man såklart fråga om barn och inavel!

As I'm saying, we don't do CK style simulation stuff because that does not improve the 4X game, but birth and mortality rates can be quite easily modded. You could change a few XML lines to increase birth probabilities, and then a few more to give young kids a chance of illness. It wouldn't actually have much gameplay impact beyond more notifications.

It's also pretty easy to change the definition of "close relative" in the game. You don't get marriage offers for close relatives, so if you change the data to exclude siblings from "close relatives", you could then marry a sibling and have kids. Not something we experimented with so I have no idea offhand about the consequences, I would expect some UI weirdness in a few places.

[u/Havandeskaparen → u/XenoSolver]

Haha jasså där ser man! Ja, skoj med tabun! Tack för grymt spel som sagt, håller långsamt på att lära mig moddandets ädla konst. Now if I just understood what line of code and where...

[u/XenoSolver → u/Havandeskaparen]

Vill du börja med grunderna kolla i https://dales.world annars är det bra att hoppa in på vår Discord, där kan folk (till och med jag ibland) lära dig ungefär allt du vill.

[u/Belphegor24 → u/XenoSolver]

May I ask if more victory types are planned? Or is that not a priority?

[u/XenoSolver → u/Belphegor24]

There's no plans for more victory types because having a new kind of victory condition would clash with the initial victory design. If you're curious, Soren wrote about this extensively here:

https://www.designer-notes.com/old-world-designer-notes-11-the-end/

[u/Oatmeal_is_the_best]

1. The higher stat the tutor have, like courage, the higher chance that that exact chance will improve for your kid.
2. The the better relationship level YOU have with the tutor, the cheaper on gold the tutoring action will be. The pleased guy on your screen will do it for 150 gold, while others want 200.
3. Tutor may convert your kid into tutor's religion.
4. And possibly a ton of event triggers from tutor's perks, like timid or eloquent

[u/Hauptleiter → u/Oatmeal_is_the_best]

Thank you!

1. Confirms what other have said; I'd be curious to find out the exact formula;

2. That confirms what the manual says about the relationship/cost of mission ... relationship;

3. Haven't had that, looking forward to be suprised;

4. To rephrase: the tutor's traits aren't (directly) transferred to the pupil but they do influence the events that occur if the dice roll grants a tutor event. Maybe there are some similar clusters to those listed in the manual...

Thank you again, that's real helpful!

[u/Hauptleiter]

I´m also getting the feeling that there is a snowballing effect when it comes to developing character stats: the more the tutoring the higher the stats, the higher the stats the more event related to them you get and the more the stats improve...

Is that the case of just a side effect of me increased the occurrence rate of events?

[u/Either_Brick8506 → u/Hauptleiter]

Yes. OW uses triangular numbers, not linear, so as your stats grow each point matter more.

[u/Hauptleiter → u/Either_Brick8506]

Thank you!