Even with investing in 5 focus points in Leadership really early on (started the character with 25 Leadership, first perk unlocked) after a dozen hours and my army now being 100 man strong with high morale around 80 all the time fighting enemy lords - i only got 10 points of Leadership now being around 35. That is ridiculously unfun and grindy.
Same with Roguery, i run around with 50 Forest Bandits, but fighting with them and leading them you don't even get any Roguery Skill.
Village needs manual labor. Give him some slaves. No roguery skill.
5 Forest bandits don't want to die and instead want to join me, I'll accept - no roguery skill.
The only time i get some noticeable roguery skill is when i sell some prisoners at the tavern.
It's all really ridiculously slow and grindy. It's so broken.
Stewardship is one of the only skills that are fun to level up - but the more you level up - the slower it will get for every other skill. That's so stupid.
Exactly... I said this before, leadership should give proper exp for hiring and leading normal troops, and roguery should give proper exp for hiring and leading bandit troops (some exp when you hire, and some exp when you battle with them or just some daily exp)... Sadly it is very slow. Leadership = you only get in decent amounts when leading armies, and I don't like doing that and it makes no sense to be this way... it's an ultra-late-game skill, unenjoyable. I agree with everything you say, including the quest where you give slaves but gain no roguery skill. And even sadder, I don't even think the 'no defection' perk is implemented yet, I'm waiting for what feels like 3 patches now...
And yeah, leveling speed goes down so the skills that you can actually level only make you not able to grind the other slower-attainable skills. It's really, really bad and sad... Even now after my exams I really struggle to enjoy playing the game again, but leveling has the same issues. It's VERY slow later on, and I just can't grind and have fun. I really hope next patch they solve this, it's just not good.
Yeah roguery is very slow and petty (or broken?) with the other ways to get skill besides selling prisoners, which is still slow. I make 10 cunning char for scouting and the roguery and tactics just linger in the low-mid 100s for tactics and 50-75 for roguery, forever and ever until the campaign gets discarded for a new update
With leadership you have to have a big party and/or lead armies. I think it's just an amount for how many units all together but I actually don't know. For instance my big party versus 1/2 and 1/2 in companion party in army with me seems about the same. Only with with full party in army did I get more skill and loading up on as many parties as I could helped more and more. I hate being in faction either my own or as vasal so I often just kinda put leadership on the shelf. I add points when they're spare but it slowly makes it way up after I have a 100+ party all the time. It's very slow if you don't create an army constantly but I think "well maybe someday".
Scouting usually levels okay. however in 1.5.8 I don't think hideouts are spawning properly and so my growth is very stunted as that's a main way of getting scouting is finding hide outs. Once you have 100+ and can see more tracks you get it pretty decently, but until then you don't see tracks much
I'm at 55 when by this time in past games It would be at 150.
I am the same way, I hate being in a faction. I really like being independent and doing my own growing in the world, so I feel the same way about leadership. When am I going to get that extra companion? Probably never... I tried leveling scouting atm too, and indeed seems slower than I remember it
I like the system, but not the learning rates. Different things if you ask me.
I love the fact they added attributes influencing specific sets of skills, and also the focus system, it's a great way to represent one's natural knack for a certain skill(attributes) AND the effort put into it(focus). In order to be truly legendary in a skill, you need both the talent and the effort, and that's reasonably realistic.
That said, i think there are adjustments to be made...first off, they could reconsider your main char initial skills and attributes,since they are very low. We start severely handicapped when you compare to the other lords who are the same age. Also, an interesting option to the character creation would be to increase your skills by starting the game older than default.
The books, as previously mentioned, should definitely be back to help with skills and attributes, and perhaps some special rare artifacts as well.
I suspect that they do not consider it a priority because, pretty much like the current death rates - they're gathering feedback and will fine tune at some point. Would be nice to hear from them though.
Well I kept asking and asking, and a developer answered me finally. They say they are looking into ways of improving it, so I only hope they see all the feedback and really make it better in one of the next patches, then the game will be a lot more enjoyable to play. The system can be good, but it has some major flaws right now... apart from the lack of balance for each skill in particular to be level-able properly, there are some things that just shouldn't be a thing... When you level-up, overall exp earned for ALL the skills goes down, so it becomes extremely slow later on when exp requirements keep increasing. This cannot be made into a consistent system the way it is now... it's climbing a steeper and steeper mountain. My suggestion is increase exp requirements for the start skills (1-100) and severely decrease from 100-300, making it a more consistent progression (of course exp requirements should increase, but not by as much as it increases now... there are many skills - 300+, and it's truly unneeded the way they did it now). Attributes and focus point should also give permanent bonuses to learning rate, there should be no hard-cap to skills (let them level very slowly, but they should still be attainable... that way you feel like you are actually doing something in the world, even if not much). And they should give less exp learning rate bonus just because it's permanent... so something like 10x exp for a skill that has 10 attributes and focus points seems really fair. The system can be improved in many ways, the idea might be good, but the implementation is truly lacking at the moment sadly. I do have hope though