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« on: November 29, 2018, 01:34:06 AM »
I suggested this many times:
You could easily remove all combat skills (piloted ship bonuses, but not only) from the player skills and use officers in place of those. The player will only have fleet wide, general bonuses; optimally not related to combat. The ship you 'drive' should have an officer like all other ships, that officer will give your ship the combat skill.
The advantage of this is that the skills you choose will not lock you into using a optimal subset of ships. You can easily switch your ship because the bonus related to combat are defined only by the officer assigned to that ship.
E.G. You will never use a Gryphon without missile specialization with the current system. But if the combat skill came from an officer you could easily assign a missile specialized officer to the Gryphon and inherit his combat skills when you drive it.
With this system you can even create very specialized officer (combat) skills only useful to a small number of ships (e.g. phase ship specific skills, a skill that give a bonus only to bombers and so on or even non combat skills that give bonus to salvage) without affecting the player skills priority. You can always get a new officer and specialize it for that specific ship even in the late game, in some way it is a respec system.
With this system it will also becomes obsolete also to have Colony related skills on the player, in the same way, leave those skills to administrators.
A good example of player skill would be one that increases the number of available officer AND administrator, both should count towards the same limit so the skill would be a good choice regardless of the fact that you specialize into colonies or combat and you can always change idea later.
Another example would be a skill that increase the ship limit in the fleet (based on number or supply, whatever) like in the old system. A skill like this is agnostic to your fleet composition.
The player skills should generally be non related to specific combat things (e.g. missiles, fighters ) because this will 'lock' you into using a subset of the available ships.
Basically I think it is a bad idea to force the player to make choices which will probably regret later. Either make it possible to change those choices (respec, get a new officer) or minimize the probability that the player will regret that choice (make the skill bonus agnostic to future choices)
PS: I'm also against the randomness of the officer skills.. It is very annoying imo when you are trying to raise an officer for an Onsalught and you get the options to choose between 2 carrier skills.
