Skill info

This page describes player skill points. For worker skills, see Stats.

Overview

 * Skill points are used to improve the performance of player actions, worker actions, and in-game events.
 * Every time the store levels up, the player receives 1 skill point.
 * Skill points may also be awarded for quests.
 * Skill points are spent on the daily report screen.
 * Existing skill points must be spent at the end of each day. They cannot be saved for future use.
 * Skill points can be reset and redistributed, but only at the cost of tokens, choose them wisely.

General tips

 * Skill points are more effective when spent on the same skill or set of skills. E.g., 1 point in all 8 skills is less effective than 8 points in 1 skill or 4 points in 2 skills.  *Debated: likely false in general but true for a small subset when there is a synergy/anti-synergy; and on the fact that some skills have no impact on your measurement of "effectiveness". In short:"it depends on the skills you choose, and what you want".
 * Some skills work better together than other skills.
 * Not every skill is worthwhile depending on your level and situation.
 * If you have them, you may want to keep your 100 starting tokens in order to reset your skill choices in the future.
 * At low levels, Silver-Tongue and Mercantile are smart not to be taken together. Specialize!

Famous
More Info
 * Increases number of customers
 * Increases the number of customers that will visit your store every day.
 * Good in the beginning so you can spam small items and make a profit multiplied by the number of customers! The number of customers is directly multiplicative of the numbers of sales and at the very beginning you want all the customers you can get! This is always one of the great skills if you are not high-level AND specialized in something very specific like Adventurer. Famous pays off right away in money and EXP. Unlike anything else it involves you having to click faster because of having more customers.
 * This skill adds to bonuses of ingame shop improvements. However, fame is also based on the amount of satisfied customers. Haggling and suggesting therefore are a great part of shop sales.
 * Fame seems to be based on an increasing scale based on shop level and therefore seems to become less over time. (At level 1350, I decided to put some points here, I was surprised that it worked and my sales have doubled)
 * High sales and satisfied customers seem to influence fame as well.
 * There is a video (notice: bad language) available which shows famous skill not to have any noticable effect when increased in a very high amount (500+ points). It is uncertain if that has been changed in updates over time.

Silver-Tongue
More Info
 * Increases power of suggestion
 * Increases haggling ability
 * Allows you to haggle harder (change the price higher) and make suggestions (to a different item). Each point provides 1% success rate to a haggle or suggestion  [Effect on suggestion may have been true in the past and capped at 100 but it is confirmed to be false as of 2013-01-19].The rating appears after a haggle is attempted) --- (ADD IN)( Suggestion Seems to be a scale effect from higher quality goods to lower quality goods. The scale effect must be on the base of the computer side and not your skill effect. I always seem to get above 10% besides with No-Use items. All No-Use items are always 0%. Also, this skill seems to lose effectiveness later on, but it's still very useful to put points into) OUTDATED, client no longer allows to suggest no-use items.
 * There is very strong evidence the suggestion success rate varies as a function of the square-root of the silvertongue level. Note that this is not the only variable in the suggestion success formula!
 * Suggestion success given an item requested and item suggested appears to be constant for a constant silvertongue (ie if you suggest a brightest rod every time a customer requests a pyramid lace and your silver-tongue doesn't change [nor improvements], you will have the same success rate), This would mean the success rate depends on: silvertongue, value-of-item-requested-by-customer, value-of-item-suggested.
 * With enough points: imagine you can make ALL your customers that want something be convinced to buy the most expensive/profitable item they can use in the store with almost certain success? And if they want something expensive enough you can haggle them up always? Then your profit is only capped by your worker productivity and you can even buy stuff off customers more often as you can always risk the haggle! Of course it takes about 60 points to get them to accept a similar enough item to their request, after that put your points elsewhere. If you want to have Silver-Tongued at best effectiveness : skill points used ratio, then 20-30 Silver-Tongued together with proper draperies should help.
 * Using haggling first makes chance on suggesting right after drop by 50%.

Leader
More Info
 * Increases all workers' basic work skill
 * Increases all workers' advanced work skill
 * Slightly increases each of your worker's stats. (Provides 1.0 boost for all crafting stats per point for each worker, including thug).
 * It is a slight increase to the item-creation-speed stats.
 * This skill increases your speed of production and thus your ability to flexible change your production when demand changes (which happens regularly).
 * If you manage to get too many customers, you might want to consider getting all 4 workshops and production-speed/ learning speed improvements before considering putting points in Leader.
 * Investing in this skill might increase number of customers offering recipes (research needed, but would be too much hassle for one to undergo, so take this statement with caution)

Innovator
More Info
 * Increases all workers' research ability
 * Reduces the amount of time required to research a new recipe.
 * Each point in Innovator will boost your workers' innovation skill by 2. This will not show up in the worker stat screen, but it will show in hourly pop-up stats. The time it takes to research a recipe is a certain (hidden) amount of points divided by innovation skill. This means that if your worker has 30 innovation points, 15 points in this skill will halve research times. However, once you research everything it is useless, so you might want to change your skills to some permanent high-level-optimized style since this is a beginner's skill. Or if you're filthy rich, have high level workers, and are willing to spend 100 tokens, put all points in reseach, research everything, then put points elsewhere.

Adventurer
More Info
 * Increases quest success rate
 * Increases number of questing adventurers
 * At higher skill levels, this makes adventurer success rate very high, even when giving cheaper items (preferably in the same category), gives you lots of adventurers in your shop, and it is one of the biggest high level player item/money makers in the game according to many players. Keep in mind that the item drop rate goes down very strongly after shop level 100, raw materials however drop more often and are increased up to 20 pieces. (Not sure if this is still true in regards to item drop rate; after reaching level 115, I haven't noticed any sort of change in the amount of items recieved from quest rewards - rather, I've been recieving fewer rare resources or more items than previously. Obviously, the deeper you are in the city districts, the better are the quest rewards.)

''Needs more research by a high-level player who has the tokens to do it. What's a good breaking point to start putting some points elsewhere for a 100-300 level player? Are there any noticeable differences between putting a lot of points in it, and at which point are (nearly) all quests a success? Do you put 20, 50, 100 or 2000 points in it? ''

Even if no one knows exactly, a nice estimate could be good for players so they don't risk putting an unnecessary amount of focus onto this skill when they could use it more elsewhere.

Max is at 750. At level 100, skill point focus should be on Adventurer only with occasional Mercantile points when offers drop too low. Noticeable difference when pushing adventurer is higher value returns for lower value items, steadily increasing value of returns, xp earned for shop.

Mercantile
More Info To clarify, players with 600+ points in this skill can easily haggle max offers although the game displays a mere 0~3% success chance.
 * Increases market affinity
 * Customers offer higher prices for items they are trying to buy. E.g., a customer may offer to buy an item for 70% of market price instead of 60%.
 * This skill also influences the prices asked for items sold to your shop.
 * Appears to increase the range of items that customers will request, resulting in higher chance to match something in inventory, reducing need to suggest alternatives.
 * Some players notice that it also make it easier to haggle. Actually, customers' offers are still low but the Mercantile skill adds to that value. The haggling success chance seems to be calculated on the initial amount the customer would have offered, although the %age displayed on your screen will match what the chance would have been on the current offer.

Ruthless
More Info
 * Increases thug's thieving skill
 * Increases thug's violence
 * Thieving is related to the thug action Burglary while violence is related to Vandalizing and Intimidating.
 * Makes your thugs more effective at their tasks. If your shopkeeper level is under 15, this skill is useless. Thugs can get you more customers at the expense of another store and so on, but only the higher level players know if it is worthwhile. There are always enough guildless players to target even at higher levels as people eventually get kicked off guilds for quitting or being absent 2 days. Still not a favorite.
 * This skill does not increase length of the vandalizing or intimidation actions (stays 4 game days)

Protector
More Info
 * Protector_skill_bonus.jpgases thug's defensive ability
 * Your thug provides better protection from other thugs that attempt to spy on, vandalize, intimidate, and burglarize your store.
 * Usefulness depends on how often you see thugs annoy you. Getting a large guild ( relatively inexpensive at higher levels changed after the update in november 2011) or being too low level to be a worthy target is perhaps a better option. The defensive help from a guild however is currently unknown.