Suppose you've got a few ranks of Lore. Sharp Mind's 3 CP cost will pay for itself in discounts and potentially refunds very quickly. However, the engine won't let you buy it unless you have 3 CP free, even if buying it would net you an increase in CP.
A similar case could potentially be made for anything with grants, since the right grant might net you an influx of CP from refunds/rebates.
To calculate the real effective cost for items, we would need to:
Make a copy of the current model with the purchase applied.
Jam it into a fresh character controller
Evaluate the new CP balance
Compare that to the actual CP balance
The current controller evaluation cycle is already horribly inefficient, so before we tackle this, we should do at least one of:
Implement the blackboard backend to replace it with something more efficient.
Get the engine running client-side so that the client can determine which features are viable for purchase. The server then only needs to try the applied purchases and validate that they work out when requested.
Suppose you've got a few ranks of Lore. Sharp Mind's 3 CP cost will pay for itself in discounts and potentially refunds very quickly. However, the engine won't let you buy it unless you have 3 CP free, even if buying it would net you an increase in CP.
A similar case could potentially be made for anything with grants, since the right grant might net you an influx of CP from refunds/rebates.
To calculate the real effective cost for items, we would need to:
The current controller evaluation cycle is already horribly inefficient, so before we tackle this, we should do at least one of: