Hi there!
I made a suggestion in the "Is EU1 still fun"-topic, and I reworked it a bit and that's the result:
I don't know how much the following idea would go against the principle of cRPG for free character development, but how about changing the character skill system in the following way:
Next to strength and agility you get three more attributes, I will just call them Blue Blood (BB), Hawk Eye (HE) and Heavy Grunt (HG).
Now let's watch the skills (the numbers in the brackets show the relation between the skills and the corresponding attribute)
Agility:- athletics (1/4)
- riding (1/4)
- shield (1/4)
- horse archery (1/4)
- weapon master (1/4)
Strength:- Iron Flesh (1/4)
- Power Strike (1/4)
- Power Draw (1/4)
- Power Throw (1/4)
As you see, except of the relation (One skill point each four attribute points) of the needed skills nothing changes here.
Next to this you have the choice of unlocking ONE of the following skill trees for your character:
Blue Blood- Dressage Riding (1/3) [Riding Skill]
- Jousting (1/3) [Weapon Master]
- Melee training (1/3) [Power Strike]
- Defense (1/3) [Shield Skill]
Hawk Eye- Strong Back (1/3) [Power Draw]
- Strong Shoulders (1/3) [Power Throw]
- Marksman (1/3)[Weapon Master]
Heavy Grunt- Strong Right Arm (1/2) [Power Strike]
- Strong Feet (1/3) [Athletics]
- Strong Body (1/2) [Ironflesh]
- Strong Left Arm (1/2) [Shield Skill]
- Experienced Warrior (1/3) [Weapon Master]
As you can see some skills have received different names, but remain actually the same. Concerning the attributes all new attributes count as "Strength".
Technically it's easy:
The skills ingame remain the same. Only the skill screen on your character page gets some kind of "mask", and you can only change your skills via this mask.
Same skills and attributes get added. This means someone with Strength 6, Heavy Grunt 9, Iron Flesh 2 and Strong Body 4 has 15 stregth (important for weapon difficulties) ingame and Iron Flesh 6.
I don't think that this suggestion would be difficult to implement, as all you need to change for distributing the character points would be a new website. This way it doesn't matter if you have 4 buttons to increase weapon master, once you pressed one of them your ingame character gets one additional point every time, never mind which button you actually press.
The only exception of these rather simple changes would be the "Hawk Eye" attribute. You need two points of HE to get a strength point ingame. This way you prevent archers of using too heavy and powerful melee weapons. And - although I am not sure about this - if it's still the native system that every point in strength grants one hitpoint, archers would be a bit weaker and vulnerable, which fits well into the glass cannon role they should have.
The Idea behind this is to limit the access to skills you class doesn't need really, and also balancing the different amounts of skills some classes need to work properly. But as you can see by the good relation of attribute points to increase some skills in the Heavy Grunt tree, the main idea behind this suggestion is to make infantry more appealing than it is right now. Because I think that archers aren't that OP, but a lot of players are perhaps "intimidated" by the (player-)skills they assume they need to be a good infantryman they choose the "easier" classes ("I need only to aim an shoot/I need only to ride by and stab"). With making infantry a bit tougher and significantly deadlier in melee than the other two classes, you could perhaps increase infantry population. Nerfing the archers a (little!) bit by lowering their strength value will hopefully make more archers than cavalrymen change to infantry.
Please don't hang yourself up on some values I used here, it's just a basic suggestion, which was only meant to show the direction you could go to balance things out on the servers.
Please tell me how you like this, and if you think this could help balancing things out.
P.S.: I know the new skill and attribute names are retarded. I was too lazy to create some proper ones
