First of all: Thank you for making and maintaining this mod. It has generated quite a few fun, interesting (and at times infuriatingly frustrating) stories in my colonies.


There is however one thing that can be a bit tedious and grindy: Getting pawns some experience outside of battle. Some classes have good auto cast abilities, that allow them to develop their skills organically during the day, which I really appreciate.

However, for many classes the only way to really get them some experience outside of combat would be to manually draft them, spamming all their abilities in quick succession until they run out of mana / stamina, and then letting them get on with their day. It's a lot of tedious micromanagement and you really feel that you're grinding a game mechanic there.

That got me thinking. Study and practice would likely be an important part of a wizards / fighters life. If you wanna be a truly legendary blade dancer, you better spend some time practicing each day. Slinging spells left and right for one minute each day until you run out of juice would not really be the most effective way to earn mastery.

Now, the Loyalty DLC introduced Psycasts, and with that, scheduled meditation. Pawns will seek out designated meditation spots on their own, or when scheduled in the daily schedule. There they will meditate and invest some of their time so that they can later use their powerful psy abilities. It feels immersive and balanced - you wanna teleport a whole group of raiders randomly across the map? You better spend some of your time on preparing for doing that.

Similarly, a practice mechanic for mages and fighters would be great. You could schedule them to practice in certain hours each day, and they would go to a practice range / dummy and practice their craft.

And if I wanted to have a powerful, high-level mage, then that would come with a cost: The pawn would have to spend a bit more of his time studying and practicing instead of doing other jobs. Mages and Fighters in this mod are fairly powerful - so sacrificing a bit of their time for training wouldn't really make them less useful.

Now one way I could imagine how this could be done would be, that you could designate which abilities they should use during training sessions - similarly to how we already designate auto cast abilities. Maybe the pawns could then use the enemy AI (which seems to be able to auto cast ALL abilities, not just the ones that I could manually set to auto cast on my own pawns) to target a training dummy.

Another, simpler way I could imagine would be, that the pawns don't actually visibly use their abilities - instead they could do more generic / abstract practice movements that indicate what they're currently doing:

A mage could sit down at a desk to study, reading an arcane book, and then he might get up and a few generic magical visuals indicate that he's now practicing the things he just read. A fighter might take out his weapon and attack a dummy, or maybe two fighters, who are scheduled to train at the same time, could "fight" each other (like a social fight).

Maybe there could be small incidents during practice for flavour, like a pawn messes up their spell and it starts raining /snowing in summer / turns their skin green / turns them into a chicken for an hour. Or a pawn is inspired by their training, very eager to put their new skills to use and will decrease their cooldowns a little for a day or two.

I think a training feature would not only be a huge quality of life improvement, but it would also add a lot to immersion and storytelling. What do you think about that?