Skills Engine — the player's collection of skill cards

Skills Engine keeps the skills the player has collected and shows them in the Skills panel as cards. A skill can open a possibility in another mechanic (a passive "gate"), hand the player a new action card for battles, and add numbers to the Collection effect — the total of all collected skills.

It is part of Cthangover, where the player starts with one skill, Slave Trader.

The Skills panel

Open it with the skills icon on the toolbar.

Tabs filter by type — Passive, Active, For character — and the rarity row by rarity, from Common to Legendary; the search field and the sort list narrow the grid.
The frame colour and the diamonds show a card's rarity.
Click a card to see it in the Card study: picture, rarity and type badges, description, its effects and, for a skill that grants one, the action card it gives.
Collection effect adds up the effects of all collected skills: two skills of +10% and +5% recruitment chance show +15%.

The Slave Trader card has no picture yet: the game names characters/skills/slave_master as its image, but no mod ships that file, so the frame stays empty.

A skill definition

Skills are JSON files of kind skill, anywhere in a mod. This is Slave Trader from Cthangover — compare it with the panel above:

{
  "Kind": "skill",
  "Items": [
    {
      "Id": "slave_master",
      "Name": "characters/skills/slave_master_name",
      "Description": "characters/skills/slave_master",
      "Image": "characters/skills/slave_master",
      "Type": 1,
      "Rare": 3,
      "Effects": [
        { "Key": "characters/skills/effects/recruit", "Value": 10, "Percent": true }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Name, Description — translation keys.
Image — the card picture.
Type — Active (0), Passive (1) or ForCharacter (2); names or numbers both work. Slave Trader is Passive.
Rare — Common (0), Uncommon, Rare, Epic (3), Legendary. Slave Trader is Epic.
Effects — numbers for the Collection effect: Key is the translation key of what is improved, Value the amount, Percent whether it is shown with %. One key must keep the same unit in every skill, because the values are added up.
GrantsAction (optional) — the id of an action card (see Characters Engine). Getting the skill also puts this card into the action pool of the Character actions panel.

What a skill does in the game

The panel only shows a skill. What it changes is decided by the mods that check for it:

Recruiting offers to enslave a defeated enemy only while the player has slave_master. The chance of success is the enemy's own RecruitmentChance; the +10% on the card is shown in the panel, but recruiting does not add it.
A skill with GrantsAction gives its action card, which the player then puts into a character's slot.

Give a skill from a scenario

action character.add_skill skill_id=slave_master

Giving a skill twice does nothing the second time, so a repeated scene cannot duplicate it or its action card. Cthangover gives Slave Trader when a new game starts.

If something goes wrong

The skill does not appear. The skill_id must match the skill's Id; an unknown id is written to the log as a warning.
The card has no picture. No mod ships an image under the name in Image.
The Collection effect shows a strange total. Two skills use the same effect Key with different Percent values.

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