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Lord Specializations

While the skill system of vanilla is generally balanced, I found myself chafing at how few options I had to customize and specialize lords at times; red line and blue line pretty much always beat yellow, half the blue line skills (especially for old world lords) kinda suck, and many lords/factions have little or no meaningful access to replenishment or ability to specialize meaningfully - if you've built one Sisters of Avelorn doomstack, you've built 'em all.

This mod adds 58 new skills to the game, with a few locked to certain lord types and races but most available to all lords, that offer a wide variety of options to make a lord better at specific tasks. Most of them are 3-pointers and most are less efficient than similar vanilla skills so without skill point mods this shouldn't ENORMOUSLY increase power, but if you want to make a lord who really specialized in melee units, or one specializing in artillery, or an incredible duelist, or buff the faction at the cost of their own prowess, there are skills here to do any of those things and more besides.

The first level of each skill unlocks at lord rank 10 and are split into six main categories, from top to bottom;

• Faction utility skills offer factionwide bonuses, from growth bonuses to research speed or hero caps. These skills generally have very high requirements for second and third ranks, so only level 30-40 lords can max them. Some races have access to unique skills, like Wood Elves being able to get Amber, Vampire Counts getting access to a Blood Kiss skill, Tomb Kings being able to get extra armies, etc. There is also a Regiments of Renown cap increase skill. The AI will not acquire these unique skills and if you are concerned about their balance impact you can ignore them too.
  
• Doctrines focus on a single unit type, granting bonuses similar to the redline to "cavalry" or "artillery". While relatively point efficient, they are very targeted and will only benefit a portion of most armies; using them effectively will require very specialized armies. A lord can only specialize in a single doctrine.
  
• Duelist skills enhance the lord directly - bonus vs infantry/large, physical resist, ward save, etc. They exist in addition to normal yellow-line skills, not to replace them, and are very point-inefficient but can make Kholek or Tyrion into an even more unkillable monster.
  
• Magic skills are only accessible to mages, but can increase the Winds of Magic available to you or decrease them for enemies, lower spell cooldowns and costs, or reduce miscast chance. Again, generally not incredibly efficient, but great to make Teclis or Archaon the arcane demigods they are in lore.
  
• Battle skills are roughly split into melee boosts (melee attack, weapon damage, etc), utility/survivability (speed, vigor, armor, etc) and missile buffs (range, damage, ammo, etc). While these bonuses work on ALL units in the army regardless of type, they are only roughly half as efficient as a redline skill, and obviously melee infantry aren't getting much value from a missile damage buff.
  
• Army utility skills involve unit recruitment, campaign map mechanics like replenishment or reinforcement range, and upkeep reduction. Recruit units faster, lower or eventually negate attrition, move further on the map, etc. While the replenishment skill will be the primary draw for many Old World factions desperate for decent replenishment, you can also use this line to replace losses via quick global recruitment or for high level lords, adventure in Norsca without a care in the world.

Most army-focused skills grant around 15% boost to whatever they help with, while faction bonuses tend to be smaller.

I won't BS y'all and pretend this is perfectly balanced, especially if you use mods that grant extra skill points, but I set up the AI to use it as intelligently as possible, considering skill synergies; if they get melee infantry doctrine, they'll be more likely to get more melee buffs, and will consider situational skills like reinforcement range less valuable than universally good stuff like replenishment. From my experience doing several campaigns with it, lords like Archaon, Kholek, Tyrion, Malekith etc. tend to get pretttty scary.

General Compatibility

• These skills will show up to the right of all vanilla skills and to the right of most mod skills.
  
• Should work fine with major overhauls like SFO, Radious, Lucky's, and CTT, though balance may get weird if they limit availability of replenishment or makes 2 melee attack much more valuable than vanilla.
  
• Skill effects SHOULD work with most/all modded units just fine, no compatibility patch needed.

Supported Mods
Mixu's lords, SFO, and most other popular/popular-ish lord mods, there's 20-30 of them now and I don't have the space to list them all here.

I have temporarily ceased taking requests to add mod lords due to life issues.