A perfect 8/8 fleet imported over from the old system will see a slow trend downwards at the beginning. This makes sense. However, I have not once seen a (+) as a result of outstanding performance since the update (talking 400% damage inflicted and at 100% score). Once a ship peaks, there are no trait changes. It has become impossible to 'buff out' bad traits once you have them, whereas with the old system it was difficult and up to RNG to promote the right trait for the negative trait to be demoted.
The config says that RNG is heavily reduced now, but either I'm seeing a pattern of bad luck, or something in the calculations is off. Note that most of these ships are legendary with 6-8 positives, but once they lose some or gain a bad trait, I am not seeing any improvement either. Doesn't a 100% score correspond to 8 positive traits?
If everything is working properly, there should be a minimum of an 8% chance for a bad trait to be removed or demoted on a ship with 7 good traits and 1 bad trait for each battle in which it maintains a score of 100%. I've made some adjustments to increase that likelihood (and generally improve how the rating system works for ships at 100%), but I haven't found any bugs that would prevent it from working as intended.
I have even seen crew loyalty promotions and bad traits being awarded simultaneously.
Loyalty is still based on the old system, so this would be working as intended if the battle rating was above 50% but below the ship's percentage of good traits.
Where before even a low-ish difficulty rating would allow a ship to excel, i.e. a single player-piloted Afflictor helping an ally vs. pirates and doing upwards of 150% damage, now that is not enough to even push beyond 80% score. This seems a bit harsh and results in me not wanting to engage *anything* that's not a difficult battle against overwhelming odds. It also makes me deploy way less than I usually do. Usually resulting in very difficult fights that still end up with a less than great difficulty score.
Yeah, the rating mechanic encourages difficult fights, which isn't a goal of this mod and I'm sure it isn't the preference of all players, but I don't think it's particularly harsh. Fighting easy battles alone can never reduce a ship's score below 50%, which is the (rough) baseline for being the same power as the ship would be without the mod.
Also noticed a bug. Sometimes a score change is shown on the post-combat screen but it doesn't stick.. That last screenshot shows the Afflictor getting to 94%, but now that I look at it it's back to 88%. After a second test: After-battle report. And then checking the ship stats. I have fought half a dozen battles with these two Afflictors to try and get their score up, yet it seems they are stuck on 88% and 81% respectively.
Just found and fixed an issue that could frequently cause this problem. I should've looked into it sooner. There are a few other things I want to add to the next patch, but I should be able to get it out today.
A Heron also went from Legendary down to Well-known without ever dropping below 80% score.
This sounds like an unfortunate and unintended consequence of transitioning to the new system. Did your Heron start with nothing but good traits? If so, the mod is probably trying to balance it's traits toward it's rating by removing good traits, but that never does any good since it hasn't gotten any new bad traits to lower it's percentage of good traits below 100%.
When I set "useRatingFromLastBattleAsBasisForBonusChance":true, I get very different results. Even with low battle difficulty.
Yep. That setting should revert back to the old system. Your screenshots reminded me that I need to make it so the rating column shows the ship's rating for the battle instead of it's persistent rating when that setting is true.
btw, thanks once again for your in-depth feedback!