Level up mental skills

[Carl94]

I think there should be a small chance of increasing mental skills while doing more activities. For example playing a board game could have a small chance to level inteligence. Hanging out could have a small chance to boost charisma, things like that.

Charisma and awareness play a big part in the game, but outside of levelling them with points or a roll benefitting them, you seem to be given very little chance to raise them.

If I make a character with low strength, I can keep hitting the gym and eventually bring it up. If I make a character with low charisma, I’m going to raise how much troops like me much slower, meaning I’ll not be able to do the better sparring and I’ll end up dying as a result

[flori2412]

I am not sure about this.

On the one hand, I agree with you that it is hard to improve your mental stats by a significant amount, even over the course of an entire playthrough. This is why I usually make sure to start with high mental stats (especially awareness, because low awareness makes you vulnerable to feints in combat).

On the other hand, it feels realistic that physical stats are easier to improve than mental stats. If you want to become stronger or faster in real life, you can do sports. "Training" your intelligence, however, is a different matter. Some people would probably even argue that a person cannot become more intelligent, only acquire more knowledge.
In addition to this, I think the function of leisure activities should be first and foremost to improve your morale, not to increase your stats.

At the moment, mental stats can only be improved by gaining experience in leadership. For example, if you show good leadership by successfully completing a foraging mission or by directing your formation in battle, your mental stats may be increased. I like this concept.

My suggestion is to increase the number of events in which a successful skill check involving leadership may improve your mental stats. For example, during patrols there is a random event in which you are attacked by stone slingers and have to rally your men if you are an officer (i.e. tesserarius, optio or centurion). You could add a chance to improve the mental stats in this event because rallying your men under fire is an example of good leadership.

Events like this could give the player a fairly reliable chance to improve his legionary's mental stats by going on a lot of extra patrols while in camp.

But again, I am not sure. I would really like to know what other players think about this.

[Carl94]

I’m not saying you should have charisma go up every time you hang out or every like 2/3 like most training events. But say 1/10 times you hang out, there should be a random event that boosts charisma.

“One of the soldiers was feeling down and you managed to cheer him up, you feel your charisma has improved”

“You find a book laying on the side with no one around and decide to take a look, ‘How to make friends’, after a brief read you feel your charisma has improved”. You could even make these have a player choice e.g. take or leave the book, leaving gives no charisma improvement, taking could have a +1 charisma or loose 2 troop relations / 10 cash if the book owner turns back up and sees you taking his book