Note:Summary at endRegarding skill nerf / drawbacks / sidegrades etcSkills that are sidegrades probably feel bad. I would not want them. What is the point of skills if the sum power of my character is zero due to power-up letdowns, sidegrades, or poison mushrooms?
This is just another way of balancing the opportunity cost of skills. It's a pretty good idea but ultimately the goal is still to ensure that all the skills have the same opportunity cost. This method just avoids nerfing skills and chooses to add a separate drawback instead.
Seems my intentions have not been on point, let me discuss this idea more in detail. Remember System overdrive? Increasing flux venting but at the cost of shields, this is a good mod to demonstrate the reward-consequence and decision making that takes place when an amazing power-up is bonded with a consequence that must be taken into account before usage. On a ship by ship basis, some will outshine others with these mods but others will lose their appeal to the player.
Now lets put this framework onto skills, like my pre-mentioned:
Officer Management: gives you the ability to have more officers but for every officer above x number your entire fleet suffer from increasing a%/b%/c%...(Supply usage) and non-officer-helmed ships suffer x%/y%/z%...(peak performance time and top speed penalty) as a consequence of officer personality quirks and envy. (This change keeps the small elite fleets more supply hungry while making their support/backup ships weaker as a consequence)
Instead of a direct upgrade to officer size and making a fleet much more capable, my intended consequence is to make an elite few ships with officers and support ships appeal more than a fleet with the same amount of officers but in a larger fleet. Unlike a Nerf or drawback that hinders a skill, this would be giving a choice to the player to further enhance their play-style at the cost of less effective officer-helmed ships. I would go further to say that as the player invests more into the skill they will not be forcing themselves into a specific play style, because the downsides should not be made to force the player. If anything, my example would encourage a a band of large ships with officers while all other ships would be high-speed chasers/ harassers/ support/ fodder to the meat grinder
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This shouldn't be making all skills into a zero-sum gain, it should be a way to counter mechanic-wise better selections by keeping their advantages while tweaking other parameters to maintain game balance, nor should it be game-play restricting that forces one play-style, rather it should only enhance one while leaving others as an option.
Stacking bonuses / "perks"As long as there are skills that are so good that every character needs to take them (to be the best), it does not matter if there are skills that curve out different paths because there will not be enough skill points left. Currently, the player can be a solo combat flagship junkie (weak), CP micro-commander, carrier master, jack, or gimp his combat power to play explorer. Currently, Leadership and Technology have those universal must-take skills. Combat has few critical skills for various builds. Industry is required for exploration, but exploration is optional since they only yield one-time cash rewards.
Solution b would be much simpler. Similar to what you suggested, it could be as simple as a % bonus for each skill taken in a tree. So each skill in tech might add 2 OP or 2% OP or something like that. You could also do a non-linearly scaling bonus so there is more benefit for each skill taken. This could ensure that focusing on one tree was more viable by giving substantially larger bonuses for large investments and create several distinct and very powerful play styles with little intersection.
Megas seems to have misinterpreted my intentions but his great review of the current meta makes this topic much easier to explain. What I meant was this:
Lets say every 5 levels starting from level 5 you get to select a feat of your liking. Lets also say that there are a few general feats that include skills you can use on the map, but some are only available if you invested enough points into a particular tree.
These would be the general ideas behind skills gained by investing into a particular tree
-Combat: perks that make pilot only skills influence non-player ships. eg, a perk / staking bonus that gives non-player ships 10%/20%/30% of what the player gains from this skill tree, a perk that gives 2 personal officers that have 50% of your skills and doesn't take up the normal officer space (but can die with no way or revival), a final perk for fully investing in the skill tree: Faction wide bonuses equal to 20% of your skills in this tree.
This should make solo combat flagships a viable option, mainly for people new to this game who want to be the hero of the show. By sacrificing tech/leader skills
they directly gain combat focused skills while improving his entire fleet passively at the same time, simple.
-Leadership: should have some carrier-based perks and mainly stay a support based skill tree, but should have perks that lower drawbacks of some skills and something like the 'aura' concept someone mentioned earlier. Maybe the final perk would change store prices and relations with other factions.
-Technology: A singe upgrade-able perk that allows more skill points at the cost of all other perks. This should balance out how this tech tree appeals more than to others.
-Industry: Allows the ability to learn/find other skills when salvaging as the final perk. Like the go-to option for all achievers, making salvaging a alternative way to gain skills at late game (and motivation to salvage more). Not sure how colonies will change this so this is for the current version.
-Because of the gated industry, there should be universal perks that includes weaker versions of level 3 industry skills granting access to salvaging.
(More perks must be thought up too so that there are more perks than what is possible to select.)
This is just my exploration of the possibilities of perks, as they can address problems like how leadership and technology have many universal must take skills. It should provide every play-style a reasonable way to include otherwise lost opportunity that the current skill tree doesn't provide. In the end, it should be both a tech tree balancing tool as well as a way to ramp up the current skill tree to be much more involving and interesting.
Faction access to game skillsDo not want skill access tied to factions. Do not like the idea that character requires training at Tri-Tachyon to level up (for a bunch of dangerous sidegrades). I should not need to pay someone to teach me how to breathe. Tri-Tachyon or Persean League are already no-brainers to join due to the nearly exclusive access to various hullmods. Hullmods already fill the book learning aspect.
Exactly, right? Who wants skills that are tied to a specific faction. I was my bad to under-explain this, but now that you have addressed the problem, let me put some more thought into this. What if the opposite of what you said was true? What if you joined the Luddic path, they dislike tech and have some of the worst stocks of weapons. Really, a bad choice. But, what if, you grew in their ranks and gained faction specific skills that uses these downsides to your advantage? A spy network that keeps track of the world economy or ship finding resource networks and other terrorist like activities. (Now think of adding stupidly unfair mods that allow extreme burst damage by suicidal bombs and doubling missile ammo sizes, etc (Just stupid ideas, don't mind me))
So, what is the current tool to balance different factions? By balancing hull-mods? Different types of ship tech? The cost of supplies in different star sectors? There isn't much that directly impacts one faction at a time, and there are yet to be faction specific quests to flesh out the background of each faction. I believe Alex will address these problems in the far future, or maybe not b/c of his sandbox focus. Anyway, this is my far stretching idea on how factions could pan out different end games and give further diversity to the game's challenges (faction quests), better not discuss this here
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So a brief summary for those who don't want to read the specifics:
skill nerf / drawbacks / sidegrades etcSkill drawbacks shouldn't be making all skills into a zero-sum gain, it should be a way to counter mechanic-wise better selections by keeping their advantages while tweaking other parameters to maintain game balance, nor should it be game-play restricting that forces one play-style, rather it should only enhance one while leaving others as an option.
Stacking bonuses / "perks"It should provide every play-style/tech tree a reasonable way to include otherwise lost opportunity that the current skill tree doesn't provide. It should be both a tech tree balancing tool as well as a way to ramp up the current skill tree to be much more involving, interesting and rewarding.
Everyone intrested? Now, let's discuss the flaws of these ideas and get Alex's attention
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