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Author Topic: Character aptitude points why I don't like them and how I would change them.  (Read 25961 times)

FooF

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I still think the 0.8 re-work is better than the previous version but it still needs some help. I hate over-complicating things but the skill tree probably does need to be deeper.

The more I've played, the more I've come around to clearly delineating campaign skills from fleet-wide bonuses from flagship perks. Secondly, I think you should advance those three trees using XP gained from doing those things. If you're trading, exploring, surveying, salvaging, etc., you get campaign XP. If your fleet makes kills, does damage, etc., you get fleet XP, and if your flagship gets kills, does damage, etc. it gets XP. This way, you can directly influence the direction you want to progress.

Each tree would be independent of one another and I like TJJ's suggestion of keeping choice limited early. Branches in the tree would obviously create choice but to avoid cookie-cutter builds, perhaps RNG prerequisite conditions would apply and which perk branches to which perk could be randomized at the "tier" level. For a flagship perk you might have to "Kill a Sunder." For a fleet perk, "Survey an Ice Giant," etc. I also like the idea of hiding the top tier perks until you get closer to them, just so you can't bee-line a particular skill.

Alternatively, support officers that could give fleet-wide skills would free up a lot of points for flagship power. Instead of gimping the player character, you use an officer slot/ship to progress the support officer so that he/she can provide the fleet-wide bonuses. Maybe you need multiple officers to get to the same degree of fleet power we have now but at least my ship doesn't suffer from wanting Technology skills, etc. Perhaps these officers don't even get attached to ships (but still use officer slots so you're losing combat effectiveness indirectly) to prevent edge cases like "What happens if I throw all my officers in storage and fly away?" This is the simpler solution but it doesn't address some of the things TJJ brought up.

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Megas

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Not thrilled with hiding skills, since in some trees the only thing skills may have in common is they share the same tree.

For example, Industry has one skill useful in a fight, one that gives more combat loot, another that speeds up repairs, and two early-game crutch skills - one for looting abandoned stations and another for surveying planets for cash tokens.

Similarly, Technology has two god skills everyone interested in fighting must take - Electronic Warfare (1) and Loadout Design (3), two of the best direct-combat personal skills, one weird skill (for sensors) and one very, VERY convenient skill that makes campaign travel less obnoxious (but is no good in a fight).

Leadership has a near-god skill (Fleet Logistics), possibly another one depending on your fleet composition and battle map size (Officer Management), one that lets fleet ignore Nav points, four skills for fighters (Fighter Doctrine being almost a god skill, especially for Converted Hangar), and another skill tailor-made for players who want AI minions do all of the fighting.

Combat is probably the most similar, but then, only a few skills are critical for the player.

I know what skills I want.  I do not want to be forced to pick unwanted skills because the game hides skills for the sake of not overwhelming newbies.  Even when 0.8 overhauled the skill system, I spent time studying - looking before I leap.  I want to see all options, then pick what I want.  (Although my first 0.8 game was a no skills game just to see how far I could go.)

Before 0.8, if I took the combat start, and like the game auto-assign skills, it would put them in Combat, which I did not want.  Instead, I did manual and pumped Technology first.

If skills must be picked, like say as an aptitude (like in pre-0.8 ), those skills should be god skills that everyone who wants to be optimal must take.
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FooF

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Potentially long post ahead.

As I've said throughout this thread, from a conceptual level, aptitude points make sense and I support them. They do create meaningful choice and they act as gates to keep the player from outpacing early content. They are also, simultaneously, un-fun and unsatisfying in their current form. From a meta-game perspective, there are few issues I find particularly troubling about aptitude points, less from a technical aspect and more from an ideological one

1.) Officer-piloted ships are almost always more powerful than you.

Because of aptitude points, officers under your command will almost always be more powerful than you. Not only are they able to spend 21 points directly on combat skills, they are not spending aptitude points whatsoever. For the player character to achieve the same result, at minimum they are spending 24 points and at maximum, 30 points. From a pure combat point-of-view, you're spending anywhere between 15-43% more for the same thing. Aptitude points create a massive efficiency disparity between the flagship and officer ships, all other things being equal.

What this means is that I can exploit the system. Pouring points into my flagship means I skip out on many of the fleet-wide bonuses and end up gimping my overall power. So, I turn my flagship into a D-modded junker ship that is totally expendable and transfer command to a Level 20 officer that is piloting the ship I actually want to fly. Instantly, I have a ship that is more powerful in my hands than the AI and has combat perks that are too expensive to get otherwise. I "lose" an additional ship piloted by an officer but it's a fair trade to me. This shouldn't be the case.

Beyond the exploit, there is a bad taste in my mouth regarding officers almost always having more combat perks than me. When I try to balance fleet-wide and player-centered skills, often I wonder if my best ships would be better off in an officer's hands because of my paltry single-ship bonuses. Because the intra-competitiveness of other "god-tier" skills (Loudout Design 3, Fleet Logistics 3, etc.), they almost always "win" over directly increasing my flagship's power. This could be an issue of the Combat Tree not being competitive with fleet-wide Technology or Leadership skills but aptitude plays into it because points I could be spending on direct combat skills are otherwise going to aptitude points. For a game mostly built around combat, something is "off" about my flagship being (on paper) one of the weakest ships I can field. It's not even an intentional handicap: I'm trying to maximize my overall power but because of the inefficiency of aptitude points, it's the player's very ship that tends to suffer! That seems counter-intuitive and incentivizes the exploit above.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, support officers that make fleet-wide skills less player-reliant would go a long way into alleviating this issue. As it is, the player character's skill tree is the only way to unlock these kind of skills currently and that means there is always a "greater good" debate going on within the mind of the player. More often than not, the relative difference in power between a strong flagship, exclusively, and a strong overall fleet is significant so the fleet tends to win. Likewise, if support officers didn't pay the "aptitude tax," they'd likely more efficient than the player character at supporting the fleet (imagine 21 points of aptitude-free support skills)! But this only proves the point: officers are significantly more efficient than the player character at everything they do because they don't require aptitude points.

2.) The Sunk Cost Fallacy

Aptitude points create a sunk-cost fallacy when it comes to picking skills. Because each aptitude point spent could have been spent on a direct skill, there's a certain psychological weight to them that "locks" you into a particular tree. The line of argument goes "I already spent 2 points in Combat Aptitude, I better use it," even if you really wanted to get into Technology for Loudout Design. Not spending points on Level 2/3 perks and placing them into gain-nothing Level 1 Aptitude points becomes a hard sell that perpetuates itself.

Opportunity cost is very real, which is good, but it becomes a bridge too far internally when you've already spent so much to get to Level 3 perks. In essence, the same aptitude points that create meaningful choice also become barriers to branching out once they're chosen. If you're not completely charting your character progression from the beginning, the sunk cost fallacy will tend to steer players toward the path of least resistance (which ends up being singular trees maxed out). Of course, I'm describing a trend toward this kind of behavior, not actual behavior. Aptitude points and their current implementation do feed into the fallacy.

The way of fixing this, also mentioned a lot in this thread, is either making aptitude points inherently better in their own right (via direct bonuses, perks, etc.) so that the mental hill to climb is easier, or to do away with them and work tree progression into picking skills within the tree directly. I.e, all skills are open at the beginning, you need 3 level one skills to unlock level 2, two level 2 skills to unlock level 3, etc. This makes each point immediately impactful while also having longer-term consequences.

Doing the math on that last point, if you were to go straight for a particular Level 3 skill.

Current system:
Level 1 skill : 2 points
Level 2 skill : 4 points
Level 3 skill : 6 points

Result: 1 Level 3 skill. All skill levels unlocked for that tree.

Proposed system:
Level 1 skill : 1 point
Level 2 skill : 4 points (2 Level 1, 1 Level 2)
Level 3 skill : 7 points (2 Level 2, 1 Level 3)

Result: 2 Level 2 skills, 1 level 3 skill, all skill levels unlocked for that tree.

At no point in the proposed system would you ever feel you were "wasting" points. The question becomes whether or not after 7 points a player character is "too strong." In the current system, the same result would require 10 points. If the proposed system were to be put in effect, I'd recommend lowering the initial number of points available from 3 down to 2, as you're losing the necessary aptitude point to pick anything at all.

We also have to take into consideration the number of points available to the player over 40 levels if we lost aptitude. Most players would stand to gain anywhere from 6-9 points, depending on the number of aptitudes they typically max out (I doubt many people max out all the aptitudes, but 12 points is possible). That's an additional 2-3 Level 3 skills or 3-4 level 2 skills. That's a fairly significant increase in player power. You would ultimately be able to get just about whatever you want. Lowering the level cap to 35 would be one solution to create point scarcity and/or removing any bonus points at game start.

Personally, I'd prefer the same number of points but top-tier skills that are mutually exclusive with other trees (i.e. you have to pick one tree at that point). That's the specialization we need to really vary the playstyles. Instead of writing 40 Level 4 skills, just have a few "Peak" skills at the end each tree that can only be unlocked after X number of Level 3 skills are unlocked. They could either be typical Level 1/2/3 progression or one-point wonders. Once you choose one in a tree, though, all the other "Peak" skills in the other trees become inaccessible.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2017, 10:16:18 AM by FooF »
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Megas

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Quote
1.) Officer-piloted ships are almost always more powerful than you.
This sums up my greatest complaint with the skill system, and this is caused by too few skill points, which is caused by empty aptitudes and too many must-have fleetwide skills.

Quote
What this means is that I can exploit the system. Pouring points into my flagship means I skip out on many of the fleet-wide bonuses and end up gimping my overall power. So, I turn my flagship into a D-modded junker ship that is totally expendable and transfer command to a Level 20 officer that is piloting the ship I actually want to fly. Instantly, I have a ship that is more powerful in my hands than the AI and has combat perks that are too expensive to get otherwise. I "lose" an additional ship piloted by an officer but it's a fair trade to me. This shouldn't be the case.
A complaint I have with Combat Endurance 3.  It is cheaper for me to level up Officer Management, which is one of those skills I may sacrifice to get another skill I want more, once and get two officers with Combat Endurance 3 and more than it is to spend two more points in Combat Endurance for 3 for my flagship.  (Combat Endurance 1 is one of the few Combat god-tier perks useful for everyone, especially for carriers.)

Quote
We also have to take into consideration the number of points available to the player over 40 levels if we lost aptitude. Most players would stand to gain anywhere from 6-9 points, depending on the number of aptitudes they typically max out (I doubt many people max out all the aptitudes, but 12 points is possible).
Without empty aptitudes level 40 player has almost as many points for fleetwide/campaign skills as he and level 20 officers have for combat, which sounds fair.  The current way with empty aptitudes are bad (or unfair) because the current way pushes player away from combat and toward leader/campaign skills.  Being reduced to decrepit puppet master like Master in a Master-Blaster symbiosis is unfun.  Being Blaster is much more fun.  Pen may be mightier than the sword, but being the sword in a game that centers on sword is more fun.
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intrinsic_parity

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...act as gates to keep the player from outpacing early content... 

I've seen this argument a couple times but I would argue that the current iteration of the skill system doesn't really do this. As was pointed out, you can have any skill in the game by level 6 (which you can attain before leaving the tutorial system). Instead of gating mid/late-game content, the current system neuters it. The level 3 skills are not all that much better than level one or two. There are plenty of level 3 skills that are objectively worse than some level 1 and 2 skills. In some ways, all the aptitude points really do is slow down the rate that you gain skills which could be achieved just as easily by reducing the rate of xp gain.

The current systems really lacks any late-game content in terms of skills. Player power is increased by adding more skills rather than better skills. I would much prefer a system with fewer but stronger skills that require a lot more xp to unlock.

In the current system, I generally hit the level cap by mid-game (fleet primarily composed of destroyers and a few cruisers), long before I ever buy a capital ship or fight late game bounties and remnant stations. I think my issue with the skill system is more the pacing and significance of the skills rather than the unlocking procedure. My optimal skill system would level up much slower, but the tier 3 skills would be significantly stronger (I would actually probably add a 4th tier and condense the skills into fewer columns). The idea would be that you gain skills slowly but they represent major increases in power, and skill gain would continue into the late game after you reach an end-game fleet. This would create a much more interesting late game dynamic. I think this will become more important as more end game content is added.
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Megas

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It seems most of the personal skills were balanced for officers.  Most such skills are weak if used only by the player, but are good when the fleet has several officers with the same skill.

Another thing that feels bad about empty aptitudes is delay of power.  Early on, you sink points into empty aptitudes for nothing, when you need power most.  Then, later, after aptitudes are filled, you get a power per point.

Someone may have suggested this, but maybe have aptitudes be free after investing enough points in the tree.  2 points (2 level 1 skills) in a tree unlocks level 2 skills and 4 points in a tree unlocks level 3 skills.  Then again, officers do not have prerequisites of any kind, why should we?

@ intrinsic_parity: Yes, I hit level cap before I can afford my first capital or do other endgame stuff, this in itself is not a problem per se, but it feels like I have not powered up enough.  Level 3 skill access is at level 4, not 6.  Player starts with 3 and gets 1 more per level, so level 4.  I have no problem with early access.

P.S. I like stronger skills, but if officers get them too, we go back to the problem of ships without officers irrelevant in a fight and only those ships with officers matter as done in 0.7.x.  This is when fleet commander getting more bonus than officers would be nice, but given current carrier balance, it would make Leadership the strongest tree due to fighter skills (and Helmsmanship 3 for carriers) being the strongest personal skills to take.  Or maybe player can take Combat Endurance 1, grab a relatively fast ship with lots of peak performance, and stall until the enemy runs out of CR first.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2017, 02:43:54 PM by Megas »
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intrinsic_parity

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Another suggestion: go back to the system where aptitude points are separate points. Give the player 2 in the tutorial, and then 1 every 5 levels or something like that. That would mean you would only get a total of 9 which would force the player to make choices. It would also free up some extra skill points. Might be interesting.
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TrashMan

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I still think my suggestion is the best (real humble of me). To repeat and explain it better:

There are no point you put in to Aptitides directly - rather, your aptitude score is equal to the total amount of points spent in a skill branch.

So if you put 2 points in Evasive Manouvers, 1 into Armor, 2 into Missile Specilization, you have a Combat aptitude of 5
If you put 1 point in Salvage, you have Industry Aptitude 1
If you put 3 points in Navigation and 2 in Fleet Logistics, you have Leadership aptitude 5

It's all very natural and makes more sense than the current system - the more points you spend in a specific branch, the higher your aptitude there. As it is now, if you spend 1 point in every combat skill your aptitude will still be 1, while someone who maxes out a single skill will have 3, even tough you spent the same amount (or more) points on combat.

Another reason why this is good is because it adds more granularity. Since Aptitude scores can be far higher, it also allows finer balancing and cross-tree requirements (for example: a skill may require Combat Aptitude 5 and Tech Aptitude 3 to unlock)

This way there are no wasted points.
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Megas

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Given the way skills are done, I would not want to be limited to three trees.  If I want a carrier flagship specialist, Combat 3, Leadership 3, and Technology 3 are non-negotiable.  Combat 3 has Helmsmanship 3, which a carrier must-have to kite.  Leadership has all of the fighter skills (and more).  Technology has god skill Loadout Design, and given that carriers are extremely OP hungry, they need the extra OP.  If I want a generalist, I may be tempted to ignore Combat and use the officer exploit FooF mentioned if I want Industry convenience.

Leadership 3 and Technology 3 are practically required for everyone.  This means Combat or Industry gets the shaft if we only have 9 AP.  For carrier users, that means Industry because Helmsmanship 3 is critical for carriers to kite.  For others, it is either Industry if player wants fighters or Combat if player wants Industry power and steal officers' ships for Combat power.

@ TrashMan:  If you spend one point in a skill, you have aptitude 1 in that tree, then spend another point into the skill and get aptitude 2?  That is the same as no aptitudes at all (which is good because no wasted points)!  Also, Navigation 3 is Technology and Fleet Logistics 2 is Leadership, so that would be Technology 3 and Leadership 2.
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TrashMan

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@Not technically the same, because you still have an Aptitude score than can be used in various ways.
The only difference is that aptitude is something that is calculated from points in spent skills and can have much higher values than 3
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Megas

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But functionally, they are the same, and no skill requires more than three aptitude points.  Just cut out the middleman and remove aptitude entirely.

P.S.  I guess with higher aptitudes, skills can be rebalanced to require more than three points.  Might work, but can get messy really fast if done badly.  Still prefer no aptitudes.  At least with that (and max of 42 or 44 points), player will be roughly on par with officers at max level, at least if player gets a balanced mix of personal and fleetwide/campaign skills.  Even so, if personal skills remain mostly suboptimal, spending most points on fleet/campaign skills may remain the most powerful build and player is still left with wimpy flagship.  This is a reason why I suggested two trees and a pool of points per tree, but that may be too much work.  Removal of aptitudes as a prerequisite should be simple enough, and frees up enough points to compete with officers.
« Last Edit: October 19, 2017, 07:15:33 AM by Megas »
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xenoargh

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I still think that the easiest, cleanest solution is:

1.  Either remove the lost points or use them for something you’ll want that’s Fleet-wide. 

For example, Tech would give Fleet-wide OPs; Combat would give fleet-wide DPS; Command would give Fleet-wide CR degradation or movement or range;  Industry would give damage resistance or % improvement to capture chances.

2.  Make player ship-only skills scale differently than Captains, so they’re heroic; on the code side, call it BossStatMod and be a multiplier... and then we can give really nasty stats to enemy bosses, too.

That would cure a lot of the ills while making it impossible to have it all.

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TrashMan

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I don't see a problem with "not having it all". I think you shouldn't be able to "have it all".

Nor have I noticed the player flagship being weak.
The players ship is better equipped and the player fights smarter
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Igncom1

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I kinda agree with many others in the thread but for me, it's in my play style.

I don't actually know how to pilot these ships, especially not with regards to horizontal thrusting.

With a combinations of building fleets that the AI work well with, and gratuitous save scumming, I essentially play as a fleet commander with my command ship being a big old fuel tanker. I build up my roster of experienced and deadly ship captains and have them follow my commands in battle with a focus on escorting carriers and cruisers.

So I never build any of the personal battle skills because there is little need beyond having my own flagship be auto-piloted with bonuses.

I find that I start with industry, move through technology and end on leadership skills, picking up fleet wide carrier buffs in the process. Buffing the fleet is far more important then buffing myself for the way I play. A buff that improves 2 ships is better then a buff that only improves one and in that instance the combat ability tree is the only one that I'll never visit. It's a waste of points to me because it will only ever buff a single space ship as compared to multiple, or a whole fleet.
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Megas

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Player may fight smarter, but I like to be able to pilot a buffed flagship.  Currently, getting skills for better flagship is worse than better fleet or better campaign QoL.  Some of the personal bonuses are set when a ship enters battle, not constantly updated.  I can partially cheat the system by burning in with a weak ship, then change to a ship with an officer.

Thus, if I want the most power, I get skills officers cannot take.  If I get want I really want (i.e., personal skills to be a champion), my character is significantly weaker than he could be.
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