Royality and social skill.

[Fitcher]

So i been trying to find out by searching around but so hard to find any info on it.

What i am wondering is, how much impact does the social skill have for pawns holding the leader or moral guide role?

I imagine its important for those roles to have a high social skill because they have unique abilities mostly effecting social interaction with other pawns.

[glass zebra]

The wiki has an entry for conversion power at least: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Conversion_Power

The throne speech and leader speech both show the social skill impact in the ritual window and you can check the social impact formula of a pawn in their info page. Royal pawns also get the ability to trade with various empire traders and leaders get a 2% faction base trade bonus, so those trade boni combo well with high social skill. Speeches and ritual opening talks also skill social skill quite well, so it's also a good combo the other way around.

From memory the impact on speeches is much less than what you are used from super high skills, but it's there and the the conversion power scales a lot. Don't hold back to make a super good psy pawn a royal just because they do not have a social passion. They have multiple uses. Having social disabled totally is bad though, since then you can't even interact with the tribute collectors anymore.

[Fitcher]

I see the thing is i got a pawn with burning passion for melee and socials with also interested passion on medical and intellectual.

traits are beautiful and optimist but incapable of dumb and skilled labor.

So im trying to decide if he should get the moral guide role or the melee specialist role.

[Malthar]

Originally posted by Fitcher:

I see the thing is i got a pawn with burning passion for melee and socials with also interested passion on medical and intellectual.

traits are beautiful and optimist but incapable of dumb and skilled labor.

So im trying to decide if he should get the moral guide role or the melee specialist role.

if his social is the highest, go with moral guide tbh. usually slap my highest social on that, second highest usually gets leader
just wait for another decent melee guy to show up since your pawns wont get pissy while missing the melee specialist role but will have a mood penalty when missing a moral guide

[Fitcher]

Ohh yeah good point i totally forgot about the moon penalty. Cheers for reminding me

[glass zebra]

Melee specialist is probably one of the worst long term specialist right now if you are not planing on sacrificing your melees. They are a nice boost for people with really low melee skill, but as soon as you have it higher, the flat boni you get hardly do anything and the pain pain reduction + loss on control is just a worse than just using the pain suppression psy skill.

They are good for a certain play style, if you just rush in and don't want to micro anything, but if you play a bit more planed then the beserker skill is just a liability and unless you constantly replace your dying beserkers with low skilled recruits, the extra skill is more of a "nice to have" but pales against other specialist, especially the range specialist who has a multiplicative bonus instead of just flat boni and an aura (also with multiplicative bonus) instead of another cooldowned flat bonus with a downside. If I can't give anything else to a pawn and they won't lose essential work, I make them melee specialists. If I have any other choice, I do not.

Also keep in mind that the moral guide will have expectations raised by 2, which translates to -12 mood for that pawn (instead of -5 for everybody in your colony of that ideology). I usually have "a problem" with people with melee + medical passion, since my melees are more often the only ones taking damage. Sometimes this also removes the beautiful trait. Less important later on though.

[Fitcher]

i try to keep my melee recruits limited to pawns with the "though" trait, i feel like it helps alot.

Also i try to keep my pawns to 1 melee for every 4 ranged, or if i get good pawns i might for for a 2 to 4 ration.

Mostly melee attackers die before they even reach my pawns and i try to use the terrain to my advantage so i can move my melee to engage ranged attackers before they get to shot at them

So far this works for me pretty well.

[glass zebra]

If the beserker specialist would give dmg resistance instead of pain reduction, it would definitely be more useful, even if that would be like 20% or less. The tough trait is imo way too high and often overshadows every other thing a pawns could bring to my colonists. 50% is just ridiculous. It might also feel like that because there is nothing like "hard worker" which brings the lower variant. You just have the strong one and it sticks out a lot.

[Fitcher]

Well i got pretty lucky with my current run with naked brutality start in dessert, my starting pawn was a 61 year old with burning passion in melee and social. Other skill was "okeyish"

But the traits he had was brawler, nimble and though, damn he is strong even in the early game he would barely take any damage from killing animals or raiders.

[glass zebra]

Yeah especially brawler and nimble are good early one, though when your skill get higher those also lose their strength a bit (nimble not so much though). Though just stays strong forever. At level 10 brawler already only boosts hit chance from 80% to 84%. Those 3 together are still probably the best combo for a melee and at 61 melee skill was probably also quite high.