Strange, I literally don't touch reflexes,tumbling, contortion or endurance (or any other defensive or combative stat) because with a viper you can dodge a ton of assassinations simply by spending a social action with your pet then throwing a party to avoid most encounters which would need them.
I swear the viper is the strongest pet for it's use early game and how safe it can make you
There is a benefit to surviving assassination attempts rather then simply avoiding them - if you thwart them, you get to figure out who was trying to kill you and have their voting ability removed.
(Although this can also be a negative, if you've got a cabinet member who dislikes you and is trying to kill you. They still get auto-removed. I don't care if he tried to kill me, his science skill is insane, let him stayyy.)
I mean I was aware because my preference for high Emotion/Allure has so far let me run into the right checks to stop Vkvy.
I am meaning to branch out more but with the game mostly focusing on winning a lot of the time needed to actually get to know people feels like you are actively harming your chances of getting stuff done by getting the right skills to get a lot of their checks done. Like yes I could spend 3 turns getting the right stats or I could just offer a council seat.
I think that in LLTQ since stuff was coming to you regardless if you were playing as military leader or gifted musician or were rushing Lumen skills as fast as possible or decided to learn all the intrigue etc you had more time to see the other characters you could interact with do stuff and naturally get curious and try and get the skills to learn more about them/try to marry them.
In this game you tend to meet characters once maybe twice if your routing to do other things pulls you through the same area which kills a lot of space to develop a natural curiosity. I find that I sort people into how easy they are to lock a vote down early and people who would take extra time to work on end up being swiftly dropped from plans because I dont have more than 2 turns at most locations to figure out their problems.
On the occasion where you can see the start of an interesting quest you are also very aware that making connections starts a ripple effect for other unsecured votes. This has generally put me off working with Heru because it's something that would take multiple turns to get to the bottom of and it would create enemies where I don't want.
I think it's a pressure caused by knowing the goal from the beginning of the game in LLTQ you had 2 main problems: the war and the final Lumen showdown. If you decided to side quest by going with Briony to the forest and surviving (which is the biggest waste of stats to be able to do that) as long as you maxed out music and persuasion you could survive the final challenge.
In this game it feels like if you side quest (so get the right stats to actually get to know people) you put yourself far behind the main goal/start new problems/loose the game. Like the stats needed to complete a lot of personal quests are often a commitment that doesn't seem to benefit much outside of that specific quest.
I think maybe there needs to be additional downtime unlocks for those more out of the way stats like reach a certain level of intrusion and you can get intrigue lessons on the social turn. Reach certain levels of weapons and gunnery get military lessons on the social turn etc. (Maybe this costs 3 social actions to learn and forces a mood change for balance?)
