Avatar Skills
As your avatar gains experience, he will be awarded skill points to spend. There are four skills branches each of which focuses on improving a specific aspect of your avatar's skills: physical, leadership, bow mastery, and melee combat. Each branch includes a variety of skills, with more powerful abilities appearing toward the top of each to reward specialisation. Points can be spent in any of the branches at any stage, so your avatar can choose to be a jack of all trades or to focus on mastering one. If you choose to, you can use the reset skill points button to unlearn all learned skills. This will cost you several clan tokens. All skills points will be refunded and can then be reallocated. Players who create a new Fall of the Samurai avatar will have access to a new skill tree with three branches to learn: gunpowder, command and bushido.
Click here to view a video tutorial about this subject.
Avatar Traits
As an avatar learns skills, he will acquire various traits that loosely reflect the extent to which he has developed in each of the avatar skill tree branches. Your avatar will also gain a reputation based on the balance of armies he tends to field, and this will also be reflected in a trait. The 'Dishonourable Coward' trait is awarded if you disconnect from too many battles before they are completed. This trait will disappear if your ratio of completed battles improves. You can click on another player's avatar on the pre-battle screen to examine his traits and gain an insight into the kind of skills he has and the type of army balance he tends to favour.