Just want to chime in, as a new-er-ish player, the most challenging part is the information dump. It takes you time to learn about the world. You need to see how tariffs make trade-based profit difficult, and then how food shortages, etc, provide opportunities to profit anyway. You need to learn from hard experience that unnecessary, reward-less combat is a bad thing. You need to realize how important it is to keep that last 5-10k in the bank and not spend it on a new ship. You'll need it for repairs, fuel, product for trade, etc, before you make more. The tutorial helps massively with teaching you some basics, and for telling you what you can do. And it leaves you in a much better starting place than you'd be in without it. But you still need to learn what you should do on your own. Once you know that, Starsector's start - even sans tutorial - isn't that bad. I've started 6 games now (most haven't gone far), and I'm now quite confident I can get up and running.
So yea, introduce wages if you want; it won't stop me. And for the completely new player, I think a bigger concern is not "how do we avoid intimidating them" but more "how do we help them feel there's something clear and useful they can do to overcome it."
When it comes to skills, I think compressing each branch to six skills will probably help combat, since combat has the most skills to compress down. But may I propose a solution I haven't seen here yet? You could nerf officers. I was really surprised when I saw they could learn up to 7 skills (I was expecting 4 or 5), because with 7 an officer is as good at their job as anyone could be (barring player skill). And you could make an argument that combat skills are more valuable on the player than on officers because player skill acts as a multiplier, but a player comparing the stats of their ship under their command to under their officer's won't feel that way. Besides,
1) As the game goes on, fights tend to get larger. And as fights get larger, the player's ship becomes a smaller part of the overall fleet, and skills that benefit only their ship become less valuable.
and 2) As ships get larger, they become less mobile. Less mobility means less ability to capitalize on an opportunity, and so player skill becomes less important (not worthless, just less important). Personally I think this is a good thing; I like that there's an incentive a player might fly a cruiser or maybe a top-notch destroyer even when a fight has capital ships. However, it does mean that officers become more powerful relative to the player as the game progresses and ships get larger.
As the game goes on, a combat-focused player will probably feel progressively weaker. An officer has seven skills, which is more than just a noticeable improvement over an officer-less ship; it's enough to get everything relevant to the officer's role. Even a player that gets more combat skills than the officer won't feel stronger, because the additional skills they have are ones that wouldn't benefit the officer much anyway. It gets even worse for a player who wants to build half-and-half combat and utility, because if he does want to fight he's still outclassed by officers and if he's never going to fight, he may as well have picked up more utility instead.
By comparison, Fleet Logistics and Fighter Doctrine stay steady in power, no matter how large the fleet. Loadout Design may even become better as ships become more specialized and ordinance points allow that (10% better overall becomes ~20% better at your job & no change in irrelevant stuff). I expect these will keep a non-combat player relevant even if the officer level cap is lower.
But I've gone on longer than I meant to. I just wanted to say that for a combat build (or half-and-half build) to be useful, a player must be able to out-perform an officer at their own job (or tie them, in the case of half-and-half). If we move to a system with 8 combat skills (6 in the combat tree and the 2 currently under technology) I'd be worried if an officer could learn more than 3.
But, believe it or not, that was just preamble because I wanted to talk about colonies and ways to fail. I can think of two ways a colony could fail - emigration and a slow (or not-so-slow) dying out, and conquest. (Also revolution, but I don't think there's going to be enough internal management of the planet to make that fair.)
If you have immigration numbers, and those numbers can be negative, then I'd expect there's a way for a population to fall (or not, that might get tricky). If it can fall, and it falls below 3, it makes sense that the population might just disband and abandon the world. It might be difficult to get immigration numbers that low, but I'd hope that it would happen if the planet had no supply - local, stockpile, or traded - of a basic good (food, fuel, supplies, maybe domestic goods). That alone should doom any colony on the edge of space without waystations, though I could also see it happening if a player went to war with their only supplier of something.
This may not be intended, but I would personally love the challenge of setting up 2 or 3 colonies at the same time in deep space such that they each produce what each other needs. Though I guess it might produce overly-profitable player trade routes since there would be two completely isolated sets of markets. Of course, I expect this to be a non-starter because the player won't be able to produce fuel anywhere. (That all seems to come from dominion-era tech. Though, two-birds-one-stone, a dominion antimatter fuel assembly would be a hell of a thing to loot from a dominion mothership. Also, if you did loot one, there's almost no way the other factions wouldn't take interest in your colony and its valuable, irreplaceable strategic resource.)
Which leads to the next threat: conquest. I'd imagine a new, lightly-equipped colony would be a prime target for small pirate fleets, at least until its first defenses came online. That would mean you could only establish a colony once you had the ability to fight for it. And I'd imagine the fighting is harder the closer you are to the core worlds (and by extension, most pirates). This is the trouble that replaces stretched trade - which is not a problem so close to core worlds. Though I picture pirate raids largely dying out once the colony has some way to defend itself. You wouldn't want to make the player stay there forever.
Of course, other parties might become interested. The Hegemony may want to preempt a strong faction that might side with the Persean League (because that went so well last time.) The Ludds might take issue with heavy industry, doubly so on a Terran or other god-given wonder-world. I think it's just a reality that having a prosperous planet means you'd need to defend it once in a while, even if it can handle any non-noteworthy threat itself. I just hope it's not frequent enough to make the long travel time to go defend remote settlements feel like a drag.
So, how's that for a second comment? Please excuse me while I never type again.
