I've been trying to increase the Civil ability points cap, so as to avoid playing dress-up every time I'm in town, and have run into an issue that seems to have also plagued many other authors tackling this idea.
When you change the Civil ability point cap (ExtraData -> Data -> CivilAbilityCap), it has an effect on target pickpocketing requirements, even if you haven't changed your Thievery level at all. Because of the scaling, this makes it impractical to have the Civil ability cap at anything other than 5 (the default) or 6, depending on how aggressively you stack points in a single Civil ability as you level (e.g. getting more points quicker via CivilAbilityLevelGrowth).
I've done a bit of testing, and I think the formula for pickpocket requirements on a target is:
pickpocket_requirement = target_level * 5 * CivilAbilityCap / 100
(result gets rounded up, so e.g. 4.2 still needs 5 Thievery)
There seems to be no impact from Finesse, despite PickpocketRequirementDecreaseFromFinesse existing in Data.
My first thought is that the above formula seems a bit of an odd way to scale up the difficulty of pickpocketing. I'd have thought it might be something a bit more complex, like some multiplier of target level plus their Finesse (dexterous people might be harder to pickpocket) and Attitude (people that dislike you are more wary) or something along those lines.
On the other hand, I can see that if Larian were tinkering during development with the cap & feed rate per level for civil points, that's not a bad way to go if you want a consistent experience for the player across the length of the campaign, regardless of the cap they ended up deciding on.
However, there is still a point where the formula hits a 'hard cap' for being able to rely on passive Thievery for pickpocketing. If you bump up the cap to 10, and feed 1ap per level (via CivilAbilityLevelGrowth) you won't hit the passive wall until you are trying to pickpocket level 20 enemies late in the game. That's not too bad, but is still a wall you can't get past without gear.
So we're essentially wedded to "civil gear". I guess that's not a bad thing if you want to force people to RP a character that prioritises its thievery skill on gear over other skills / attributes on gear that may keep him alive, but that doesn't seem particularly realistic. In most cases, players do the dress-up game where they carry around civil gear and equip it opportunistically. That's really what I was trying to avoid :)
For now, to get around this issue, I've created two simple mods. The first sets CivilAbilityLevelGrowth to 2, which means by the end of the game (around level 20) my characters have 10ish civil points. I leave this mod enabled all the time.
Why did I choose 10? Because you can easily get +5 Thievery from gear by the time you're partway through Driftwood, with 4 from Base. I don't think there is a value for how many civil points you actually get in a "growth" level, so presumably the max you could do is set CivilAbilityLevelGrowth to 1, which would give you around 20-22 by the time you finish the game.
The second mod sets CivilAbilityCap to 10. This is used exclusively when assigning points, either from level up or at the respec mirror. Again, this could be set to any number, it's just so the GUI allows clicks on the + button beyond the default of 5 :) To use this, I just save, toggle on this second mod, do my point assignments, save again and toggle the mod off again. Not a big deal, really.
Note for anyone interested: setting CivilAbilityCap to -1 removes Pickpocketing level requirements altogether (although the tiered limits for gold and weight still remain). You could use that in the "always on" mod if you wanted.
I thought other people, especially modders, might be interested in this approach.
P.S. My apologies for having no formatting in this long post - I can't use BB or HTML until my account gets approved.
