You could remove assigned civil points entirely and make the skills derived from stats (leave them as skills instead of just making actions straight stat derived, so you can have items that boost the skills still)
Sneaking could be based on fin
Thievery could be split into pickpocket(fin) and lockpicking (fin+int/2)
Loremaster and telekenesis could be based on int
Barter based on wit+int/2
Persuasions based on str+int+wit/3, with speech checks (intimidate, reason, charm) based wholly on those specific stats.
Lucky charm could be removed and made item only. its effect could be increased some to compensate, maybe only certain unique items have it
Con should be changed to give +5% vit, PA, MA instead of its current +7% vit, to compensate for the other stats becoming more useful.
I like this idea, less points to manage. But it does give less flexibility to building your characters the way you feel like it.
Also is crafting gonna be added in civil?
Oh, they are re-adding a crafting skill? I had hoped they were just going to leave it as it is where you can craft freely. They better add more civil points if they dont change things but add crafting too.
The main complaint i had with crafting skill in the last game, and this may have changed at some point (i played it right at release mostly) was that if you wanted to be optimal you ended up never taking crafting on a main character and just had a hired crafting slave you used for crafting and never even took with you anywhere. Id preffer for the party to feel more self sufficient with just the 4 people.
A note on the concept of freedom. Free choice just leads to a hand full of optimal outcomes. If you want actual diversity in playstyle you want restrictions. In a more restrictive system you have as many choices as you have restrictions, in a free system you have one choice, the 'best one'.
If this game used a fixed class based system instead and had say, 10 classes to pick from, you would end up with vastly wider array of party configurations. Sure some of the nuance might be flexible right now, but right now you will have certain abilities on 'someone' in the party, so in essence the 4 characters are just 4 parts of a single party unit and you assign capabilities to someone and in the end you have very similar looking parties even if the specifics are altered. Give people only a choice of restrictions however and they will have to play around them, focus on strengths and weaknesses of their party instead of just min/maxing the weakness into irrelevancy. It causes people to experiment with what is possible rather than building a gimmick party to exploit what is optimal. People would pick their party and then figure out how to use them, instead of figuring out how to game the system and then building a party to do it.
So, with all that said, something that 'limits freedom' in a game that already dictates to you your party composition, but just gives you the illusion of freedom in how you divide them up among 4 parts isn't really a bad thing. It would mean that you just wouldnt have a thief if you wanted to make a party of nothing but strength warriors. That would result in a much different playthough, one where you couldn't lockpick or pickpocket anything! Imagine!
