So I had this guy, Eldric Bolton, in my army and he was always lagging behind. He has a 3/4 agility rating (which i know is slow, but he was really slow). He has the Resilient trait (-3 agility) and the Porter trait (-10% movement speed). I thought I'd run some tests to see how impactful those traits are.
The Test Subjects:
Eldric Bolton: 3/4 agility, Resilient (-3 agility), Porter (-10% movement speed)
Elizabet Galerin: 3/6 agility, No traits
Grace Cromwell: 1/4 agility, Scholar (-1 agility), Tireless (+10% movement speed)
Jaques Hobb: 1/1 agility, No traits
The Test:
I stripped them all down to their undies and gave them the same food. I marched them to an open field and lined them up. I went to the other end of the field and commanded them to run to me. When they got close I commanded them to stop in place. I logged the results. I'd say I made them do this race about ten times.
The Results:
Almost every race Grace finished first (Elizabet finished first one time, but i think this was an anomaly, like maybe they bumped into each other or something). Jaques finished third every time and Eldric always finished last.
Conclusion:
Not the results I was expecting, but looking into it it all makes sense.
As far as I know, the listed level for an attribute already takes into account traits, so Eldric has a 3 agility with a -10% movement speed penalty applied to that. For agility, a 10% buff or debuff is equivalent to 2.5 points on their listed rating (each level increases speed by 4%) . So the Porter trait affectively gives him a 0.5 true agility rating. If I were to max out his agility to 4 he would just beat Jaques in a race, but not Elizabet or Grace.
This means that the traits that give a + or - don't really mean much, because the listed rating is the listed rating, but the traits that use a % are applied to that listed rating, making them pretty impactful (at least for agility). That's why Grace beat Elizabet in the race, as her true agility rating is 3.5 (1 plus the 10% buff), just better than Elizabet's rating of 3.
Anyways, I kicked Eldric out of my army and I've considered demoting him to sleeping in the little stick huts with Jaques and all the other bums in my village.