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[Lucax]

Hi everyone,

Felt like bringing this up, this was something Alex briefly mentioned at the end of a blog post : staff officers, i.e. officers who learn non combat skills. I was just going to ask if it's still planned for future updates, but I'll throw my opinion about it here anyway.

What would staff officers accomplish in Starsector ?
- Roleplay and realism. Not everyone you can hire should absolutely be all about fighting.
- No more worrying about having an underpowered fleet when taking combat skills as player character. Be as badass as you want.
- If you want to be a skill monkey while delegating combat to your officers, you can still do that.

Some thoughts to implement it :
- If the player character and an officer, or two or more officers have the same skill, the skill with the highest level is applied (no stacking).
- Have staff officers count towards the same cap as combat officers. Choices !
- At least Industry and Tech (except Gunnery Implants) should be covered by staff officers.
- Not sure if Leadership skills should be covered. I'd say most of the current ones (0.7.2a) should. Fleet Logistics makes perfect sense for an officer to have. Command Experience ? Not that much. Don't know much about the new skills in the next release, but the one that increases the officer cap shoud probably be off limits to officers.
- There could be 3 types of staff officers, one for each skill tree.

A couple of potential issues to be aware of :
- Soloing whole fleets with a capital ship is currently a thing. With no other changes, staff officers would make that even easier, since you don't need combat officers to do that, but you would need staff officers because of the level cap and the usefulness of non combat skills. Personally, I think of the combination of a capital ship and combat skills for the purpose of fleet soloing as a separate problem that needs solving.
- Since non combat skills apply to the whole fleet, staff officers could be difficult to balance against having non combat skills as a player character. Considering the current limitation of ten officers, and depending on the total amount of skills, the whole skill tree could be covered with an optimal number of officers, while still having plenty of room for combat officers and all combat skills on the main character. Making officers able to learn only one tree at a time as stated above would partialy solve this, I guess. I can't think of a solution for this that doesn't involve hard limits.

Thanks for reading !

[Alex]

I was just going to ask if it's still planned for future updates ...

I'll just answer anyway Probably not, for the sorts of reasons you get into in the last paragraph. There's a lot of stuff around that that's hard to solve, and it incentivizes all sorts of weird and un-fun play.

IF staff officers were to become a thing - and that's a big if, because there's plenty of other stuff to do, and it's not clear what design problems they'd be solving - they'd probably grant entirely unique bonuses that you can't get from your own skills, just to get around these issues entirely.

[Lucax]

IMO the point is not to solve anything, just to open up more skill options (right now if you want a powerful fleet, the only option is pretty much to level up Tech first which gives the most benefits no matter the fleet, then grab all other skills, but that last part will change in 0. and to have some sense in the roleplay between the player and NPCs. Why would only one person know about navigation in a crew of 500 and 11 officers ?

Which makes me think, this could also include non player fleets, at least I doubt they already have fleet wide skills.

Officers with unique bonuses sounds interesting, it would probably be easier to balance. Can't wait to see it, as well as the next update, thank you for answering and best of luck to you !

[Histidine]

I was just going to ask if it's still planned for future updates ...

I'll just answer anyway Probably not, for the sorts of reasons you get into in the last paragraph. There's a lot of stuff around that that's hard to solve, and it incentivizes all sorts of weird and un-fun play.

IF staff officers were to become a thing - and that's a big if, because there's plenty of other stuff to do, and it's not clear what design problems they'd be solving - they'd probably grant entirely unique bonuses that you can't get from your own skills, just to get around these issues entirely.

Outlandish, non-serious counter-proposal: Player cannot unlock combat skills, but a combat officer can share the flagship with the player.
So the player is a dedicated staff officer (and the only staff officer in the fleet), with indirect access to combat skills that don't compete with fleetwide skills for points.

[Alex]

IMO the point is not to solve anything, just to open up more skill options (right now if you want a powerful fleet, the only option is pretty much to level up Tech first which gives the most benefits no matter the fleet, then grab all other skills, but that last part will change in 0.

Right, but hopefully there'll be more viable approaches now even without that, just due to the skill re-design.

And at that point, why add it? At best, it's somewhat redundant design-wise, and at worst it'll bring with it a bunch of problems.

Which makes me think, this could also include non player fleets, at least I doubt they already have fleet wide skills.

They can - and in 0.8a, they do

Outlandish, non-serious counter-proposal: Player cannot unlock combat skills, but a combat officer can share the flagship with the player.
So the player is a dedicated staff officer (and the only staff officer in the fleet), with indirect access to combat skills that don't compete with fleetwide skills for points.

Hah, yeah. Kind of thought about this, believe it or not. (A super early design even had slots for a captain and a second-in-command on a ship, though that never made it into actual code.)

It's a good idea, I think. Depends on how many non-combat campaign skills there are, whether it's enough to provide interesting choices etc. Currently there very much aren't.

[Wyvern]

Outlandish, non-serious counter-proposal: Player cannot unlock combat skills, but a combat officer can share the flagship with the player.
So the player is a dedicated staff officer (and the only staff officer in the fleet), with indirect access to combat skills that don't compete with fleetwide skills for points.

I like this idea too; it's an excellent thematic fit for the naval command structure where the flagship is the one with the commanding admiral on it - and that admiral is -not- the captain of that ship.

It would also fix the occasional annoyance of not being able to participate in battles because you're trying to give XP to your captains, and the ships whose captains need XP are sufficient to win the fight without losses, so deploying the ship you're personally piloting would just cost extra supplies... but you're then left just watching a battle instead of participating, which is less fun.

And it'd open up some interesting design space in terms of skill respecs: because the combat skills would be on your flag captain rather than your character, you could experiment with things like "How much does missile specialization improve performance for this specific hull?" without locking down your own permanent skill points; if it doesn't work out, reassign that captain to a different vessel.

As a corollary to the above, it'd enforce requiring tradeoffs between combat skills; I'm not sure how important that will be in .8, but in .7.2... well, yes, there are combat skills that are higher priority than others, but in the end I get all of them.

For UI, I'd use the existing portrait space for the assigned captain, and have the choice of flagship made during deployment - since it would no longer matter outside of combat situations.

...That all said, I don't think this should be implemented for .8.  Let us see how the new skill system works before shaking things up further.  (Plus, of course, implementing a major change like this would add extra dev time, and I'd like to see .8 come out sooner rather than later.)

(Edit: And, as a nice side effect, this would make it much more feasible to introduce situations where a particular officer is locked to a particular ship - for example, escort missions where you need to help someone else get somewhere / do something, or prototype AI vessels that run themselves and have a built-in "officer", or etc.)

[Inventor Raccoon]

prototype AI vessels that run themselves and have a built-in "officer"

Ooo. I like this idea. Right now, you usually want to have officers in your biggest and strongest ships (with the player in their absolute strongest one), since their bonuses are more useful and they contribute more than a frigate. Having special ships with officers that can't be moved makes the ship more unique and makes them somewhat more unique. Even if said ships aren't in the actual game, it'd be cool to have them as a possibility for modders.