Acolyte Skills

Acolytes have **skills** in the game, and the ideal skills depend on the player.

## At the beginning

you have ~ 10 acolytes of (very) poor quality.

As you cannot gain much by leveling them (total 8-10 Skill points) and most missions are level 1 - 5, so a skill far beyond 4 is unlikely to help.

Traits are extremely strong in the beginning, so rotate unexperienced Acolytes until you get some with positive traits.
A single +2/+2 or a +3 trait is probably as good as the 'next quality level' of follower.
a very poor Acolyte could still be trained 4/4/2/2 or 3/3/3/3 with a single +2/+2 trait.

Also I think you want to have 1 Dot in retail and 1 Dot in Empathy for any follower at that level.
Making money early on is limiting.

## Early mid game

By the time you get 'average' acolytes to appear simply "rotate up" as they get up to 14 skill points.
Any of them beats a 'very poor' one unles that 'very poor' one has a ton of positive traits.

You are likely to encounter missions on level 3 - 8.

You still want focus in your acolytes, but go a bit broader. All those new rooms pile up.
Also Influence becomes more important.

Try 5/3/3/2/1 where you do: <1st>/<2nd>/<3rd>/Empathy/Retail or <1st>/<2nd>/<3rd>/Retail/Empathy
or 4/4/4/2 for some other cases eg. when you do a "pure therapist" or a "pure module room" acolyte.

## Drawn out mid-game (since v0.4.069)

You have it much harder to recruit good or very good followers.
I assume that is unless you spec a few followers "all in" into "sales" and "hireing".

So with a lot more "average" followers being around for a longer time perk management becomes a thing with every follower of "average" or better quality.

Generally you also will find quite a point in the "Sermon Trait" gains or actually a mandatate to use the "Ministry of Alterations" to prevent all your followers from becoming incompetent by leveling up.

I had as much as 15 attributes on some followers and just removing all the bad ones when leveling up becomes quite an effort.

## Actual late game followers

These are your 'good' acolytes. Every now and then you may even find a 'Very Good' one.

Your missions will be 8 to 12 in level and sometimes one Acolyte has to do them alone having 2 solid skills, and one "near zero".

So skill ratings of 8 or 9 should exist even though you may only have 18 - 22 Skill points.

Anyway on these acolytes it gets interesting to remove "bad traits" and gain traits using sermons.
All these little "+2/+2" or even "+4/+4" abilities will give your Acolytes NON-Mission skills.

Also Influence gets a rare currency, so do NOT forget 'empathy' as the 'catch all' thing for all 'therapy rooms'.
The sermon boost +1 to your retail is probably sufficient to keep the money coming.

## Rare flowers of the late game

Late in the game you will get characters eg. from Divine Intervention that have a rating of Very Good, Incredible or God Like.

These are GEMS and given you face often Missions with a Level of 9 to 12 ... yeah 12 Points in a skill may not be a bad choice.

A very good Follower has 22 points, so 11/11 is possible, but maybe you want 10/8/4 and "amp it up" with some "trained" benefits to exceed that norm and/or have more "breadth".

Anyway at this level any skill at a +1 is almost meaningless on missions, the +1 thing Still helps making money