As far as how realistic it is that nobles gain skill in swordfighting/jousting by being in battle, I am not sure it is really all that important. Though I feel it is historically feasibly, the truly important part is how it fit's into the game. I think that having a roughly 90% chance that a noble will gain a skill (swordfighting, jousting or leadershipp) just for having their unit engage another unit in battle would be a positive change and make for better game play.
I think 90% is going to be far too much. In a week just fighting rogues that means I might be able to gain 5% or more. That would completely destroy the achievement of high skills. I assume that this is also supposed to scale with skill level, just as skill gain does currently throughout the game.
I even think that the odds I proposed in a prior post (with a few adjustments listed below) would make for a good starting point. I went ahead and wrote them out again with said adjustments and would like to hear what others think of the system.
I personally think that it would make participating in battle a more attractive option that going to the academy is, especially at higher levels.
I think that it will make battles more important to characters as they would be a great way to develop your character.
I think that it will help ensure that the best warriors (in terms of weapon skill) and leaders are the nobles that participated most in battles.
My problem with this is not so much the concept, as the fact that the game lumps weapon skill into one category. The skill in using a blade in combat, and the skill of high proficiency with a blade in 1 v 1 noble combat are related, but especially at high levels extremely divergent. Being supreme at general melee should not automatically make you supreme at 1 v 1 duels.
I think it will decrease the likely hood of nobles sitting in the capital spending mountains of gold at the academy instead of joining the rest of the realm in war (not saying that this is a real problem but will admit that I have had the temptation to do so myself on occasion).
Its not a real problem. You see some people do it, particularly those training towards a infiltrator, but it is in no way so prevalent that it requires a fix. If people are wasting time training when you are at war, their are already player based mechanics to influence that.
I think that the progression rate is good. The chances of skill increase would raise dramatically but is still low enough that the academy still retains some value and that it is unlikely that someone could "game" the system. In a scenario in which a player tries his best to optimize his characters skill gain in a single skill (hero, leading infantry, trying to up his swordsmanship), that it would take an average of 143+ battles to max out their swordsmanship assuming their unit engaged another unit in every battle (167+ battles for non Heroes). A character participating that many battles deserves a maxed out skill in my opinion.
I think that it also models the idea that training + experience leads to the best warriors as training at the academy would still be lucrative in the beginning while real world battles might prove more, or at least equally, profitable as skill levels become high.
This is not really accurate. No amount of training will make you excel in real combat, just as no amount of training with wooden training dummies will make you excel in a real duel. However basic training + experience will likewise in all but exceptional cases never make you a master of the art either. Real progression would be closer to a training then experience cycle, putting what you have learnt into practical application to master that aspect, before studying further finesse or other aspects and then going out to learn the practical application of that.
Also don't look at how many battles it takes to "max" a skill, because by default we want very few people to max the skill, we probably want only a small percentage of the characters to even have "high" skill, otherwise it devalues the entire point of calling them skilled. Look at the amount of battles required to gain whatever is deemed to be the "Average" skill.
