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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Skills and Story Points  (Read 91051 times)

Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #120 on: July 09, 2019, 11:02:26 AM »

I'm confused by your early answer Alex, are AI officers strictly for automated ships?
Yes. They need to have the "automated" hull mod for you to be able to use AI Cores as officers
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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #121 on: July 09, 2019, 11:48:22 AM »

I am not sure that forcing the player to progress through skill tiers is a good thing. Are you sure that new players are really having a problem picking skills and that this problem is so bad it justifies removing choices from experienced players? Players will be able to reallocate their skill points with story points so it's not really a problem if they make some bad decisions with their skills.

Like I mentioned in the blog post, this isn't a new-player-only change. Would be kind of silly if it was! I think it's a very much superior system for experienced players as well. When the choices are more pronounced and clear-cut, it's a benefit to everyone.

I mean, let's look at just the current combat skills - which ones would one pick and why? A couple do stand out (Impact Mitigation level 1, Missile Specialization, maybe Helmsmanship) but a lot of them are kind of a generic mass of bonuses where if you want to make an optimal choice, you have to do a lot of math and be very sure of under-the-hood mechanics. Which, 99% of people aren't going to do, so they'll probably just pick a couple because it doesn't matter too much and be ok with it. I mean, it *works*, but it's hard to even articulate the choices it presents, they're so fuzzy at times. And if you do the math, it's not like the situation is better - at that point, you just know what the optimal option is, instead of having a choice.

With the new tier system, picking one skill vs one other skill, it's much easier to set things up so that the choices are clear - generally speaking, the bonuses each tier offers will affect entirely different things, so there's not a case of one or the other being mathematically better and you "just" needing to work it out by spending a few hours with a spreadsheet. E.G. tier 1 combat is a choice between Helmsmanship and Strike Commander - do you want to go faster, or have stronger bombers? Level 3 is Impact Mitigation (which works about as before) vs Ranged Specialization (which gives your weapons bonus damage at longer range). And so on.

It's near impossible to do this sort of thing if you can pick anything at any time - it'd be much harder to avoid having several skills where they're really hard to meaninfully compare. Also, being able to present things as "this OR that" lets you have skills that would be too strong - or just a no-brainer choice - if they could be combined easily.


Story points sound interesting but I worry that there could be a balance problem if some uses for story points grant permanent, or long lasting benefits (like making an officer's skill elite) while other uses are "frivolous". I don't think the bonus experience thing addresses this. If the more frivolous uses are effectively free, then using story points becomes a no brainer. Obviously they will not be free, and then I will probably decide that I should invest all story points into permanent or long lasting things, such as creating the best possible officers and giving them ships with permanent hullmods. In the long run this should give much more power to the player, which means that the game might become too easy, or that the higher difficulty will be balanced around this sort of powerplay with little room for frivolous things. So I think story points should be mostly about frivolous and fun things, convenient things like allowing skill point reallocation.

Bonus experience does address this, by making the "frivolous" choices free in the long term, but not in the short term. Or, at least, that's how it's supposed to address this.


I'm confused by your early answer Alex, are AI officers strictly for automated ships?
Yes. They need to have the "automated" hull mod for you to be able to use AI Cores as officers

(Correct!)
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Goumindong

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #122 on: July 09, 2019, 01:02:46 PM »

I love basically everything in this blog post and as far as i can tell everything works mechanically and thematically.

If you want a different name tor story points(SP) to differentiate btweeen skill points (SP) you might consider them “plot points” (pp*). They represent the heroes uniqueness that effects the plot. Maybe they have a ship (or ships) that are special and unique. Maybe theyre lucky with smuggling. Maybe they command unique loyalty from their subordinates and push them to exquisite heights. Each of these might not change the “story” but they definitely effect the plot.

*then everyone can talk about how much plat they have.
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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #123 on: July 09, 2019, 01:06:45 PM »

Hmm, I kind of like that - let me think about this!
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Dexy

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #124 on: July 09, 2019, 01:39:54 PM »

I am not sure that forcing the player to progress through skill tiers is a good thing. Are you sure that new players are really having a problem picking skills and that this problem is so bad it justifies removing choices from experienced players? Players will be able to reallocate their skill points with story points so it's not really a problem if they make some bad decisions with their skills.

Like I mentioned in the blog post, this isn't a new-player-only change. Would be kind of silly if it was! I think it's a very much superior system for experienced players as well. When the choices are more pronounced and clear-cut, it's a benefit to everyone.

I mean, let's look at just the current combat skills - which ones would one pick and why? A couple do stand out (Impact Mitigation level 1, Missile Specialization, maybe Helmsmanship) but a lot of them are kind of a generic mass of bonuses where if you want to make an optimal choice, you have to do a lot of math and be very sure of under-the-hood mechanics. Which, 99% of people aren't going to do, so they'll probably just pick a couple because it doesn't matter too much and be ok with it. I mean, it *works*, but it's hard to even articulate the choices it presents, they're so fuzzy at times. And if you do the math, it's not like the situation is better - at that point, you just know what the optimal option is, instead of having a choice.

With the new tier system, picking one skill vs one other skill, it's much easier to set things up so that the choices are clear - generally speaking, the bonuses each tier offers will affect entirely different things, so there's not a case of one or the other being mathematically better and you "just" needing to work it out by spending a few hours with a spreadsheet. E.G. tier 1 combat is a choice between Helmsmanship and Strike Commander - do you want to go faster, or have stronger bombers? Level 3 is Impact Mitigation (which works about as before) vs Ranged Specialization (which gives your weapons bonus damage at longer range). And so on.

It's near impossible to do this sort of thing if you can pick anything at any time - it'd be much harder to avoid having several skills where they're really hard to meaninfully compare. Also, being able to present things as "this OR that" lets you have skills that would be too strong - or just a no-brainer choice - if they could be combined easily.

I think players will get 0-1 specialization skills for each category (combat, tech, leadership, industry). The remaining skills will be the generalist skills which are always the same ones. I don't think this system is worse than what we have now, I think it's better for the reasons you're giving but I don't think it will do much to create variety in character builds. Admittedly it depends a lot on how many skills points we will have and what the actual skills will do.

Have you considered a system where skills are organized in rows (representing the skill category) and columns, and a player can never pick more than 2 skills from the same column? I'm assuming 14 level ups here.

Code
Combat:     1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Tech:       1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Leadership: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Industry:   1 2 3 4 5 6 7

If balancing all columns against each other is too difficult, then you could make it so that at the first level up, only skills from column 1 could be chosen, at the second level up only skills from column 2, and so on. After 7 levels ups it would start against in column 1. Then you only have to balance skills in each column against each other.


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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #125 on: July 09, 2019, 02:05:54 PM »

Wait so is the designed gameplay to rarely deploy more than 8 ships? Or are you expecting AI ships to fill out the fleet a lot? Also, if the game is balanced around essentially all combat ships having these built in hull mods, it sort of cheapens the decision to put them on. I liked the idea of a big investment to make your flagship special. Instead, I have to allocate a certain number of my story points to keeping my combat ships 'up to par.' It doesn't feel like a decision, more like an obligation.
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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #126 on: July 09, 2019, 02:16:34 PM »

I think players will get 0-1 specialization skills for each category (combat, tech, leadership, industry). The remaining skills will be the generalist skills which are always the same ones. I don't think this system is worse than what we have now, I think it's better for the reasons you're giving but I don't think it will do much to create variety in character builds. Admittedly it depends a lot on how many skills points we will have and what the actual skills will do.

Let's say it's one specialization per aptitude, and let's say there are 4 "general vs spec" skills in each aptitude, and the player invests into 3 aptitudes. That's 4x4x4x4 possible "builds"; if you end up picking 2 spec skills, the number goes up quite a lot.

The thing is, though, the number of possible builds doesn't matter all that much. What really counts is changes that make enough of a difference to make another playthrough feel significantly different. If there's even only 3 or 4 of those, that's already huge as far as improving replay variety. The current skill system certainly allows for more possible combinations, but the new skill system gives us more meaningful combinations, as far as actually improving variety goes.


Have you considered a system where skills are organized in rows (representing the skill category) and columns, and a player can never pick more than 2 skills from the same column? I'm assuming 14 level ups here.

Code
Combat:     1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Tech:       1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Leadership: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Industry:   1 2 3 4 5 6 7

If balancing all columns against each other is too difficult, then you could make it so that at the first level up, only skills from column 1 could be chosen, at the second level up only skills from column 2, and so on. After 7 levels ups it would start against in column 1. Then you only have to balance skills in each column against each other.

I did consider this, actually! "pick one out of 4" makes the choices harder to balance against each other. Also, since they aptitudes are conceptually different, you'd more often put the player into a position of picking between wildly different skills - i.e. improved combat vs, say, improved salvaging or sensors. Those kinds of choices feel worse, imo, as there's more room for "less fun but more optimal" selections to be made.

Fundamentally, this is changing the structure from "4 tracks with 5 tiers of 2 choices each" to "1 track with X tiers of 4 choices each". (Where in your case X is 7; if it were 10 we'd have 40 skills.) I wouldn't say that's a completely unworkable option or even *that* different from the one I ended up choosing; I just prefer the current setup to this, it was a lot easier to work with.

(Edit: to clarify, I hadn't considered picking 2 out of the 4 skills, iirc.)


Wait so is the designed gameplay to rarely deploy more than 8 ships? Or are you expecting AI ships to fill out the fleet a lot?

"AI ships" - you mean on the player's side, right? I think ideally the majority of the ships you deploy should be the ones with officers. The more ships there are in the fleet, the more busywork there is with loadouts etc; managing around 10ish or so ships like that is what seems about right to me. But the way things are set up you'd have a lot of flexibility about what you want to do. But that's the sweet spot I'd like to aim for.

Also, if the game is balanced around essentially all combat ships having these built in hull mods, it sort of cheapens the decision to put them on. I liked the idea of a big investment to make your flagship special. Instead, I have to allocate a certain number of my story points to keeping my combat ships 'up to par.' It doesn't feel like a decision, more like an obligation.

I'm not sure I understand. If a player can do things to increase their power, then of course the game would be balanced around that? That's... just how it works, right? ("It" being "games in general".)
« Last Edit: July 09, 2019, 02:34:34 PM by Alex »
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Megas

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #127 on: July 09, 2019, 02:19:18 PM »

Hopefully, fights are smaller, or at least finish faster.  Unless my fleet is fully optimized for combat by endgame, I can easily use about twenty or so ships per endgame fight (when my fleet is not quite endgame level) because of how big fights have become in 0.9.x.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #128 on: July 09, 2019, 02:43:26 PM »

Also, if the game is balanced around essentially all combat ships having these built in hull mods, it sort of cheapens the decision to put them on. I liked the idea of a big investment to make your flagship special. Instead, I have to allocate a certain number of my story points to keeping my combat ships 'up to par.' It doesn't feel like a decision, more like an obligation.

I'm not sure I understand. If a player can do things to increase their power, then of course the game would be balanced around that? That's... just how it works, right? ("It" being "games in general".)
I say 'balanced around' meaning the ships themselves are balanced around some expected strength/course of action that the player takes. If the ships are designed so that if you have two built in hull mods, then you will have enough OP for some interesting loadouts then I would say the ships are balanced with the expectation that the player will spend story points to buff every ship, and that the game is not balanced around ships not having those hull mods (i.e. you probably won't be able to fit anything more than super basic loadouts on ships without those story points. So if the player chooses not to buff ships with story points, he is losing access to a lot of the game because the ship wasn't balanced to be able to use a variety of loadouts without those extra hull mods. Obviously you also want to make sure that ships that do use the buffs aren't too strong which is 'balancing' them, but I'm talking about whether they are the 'default' or not.

I don't think it has to be given that the player will do this on all ships he plans to deploy? There are plenty of other ways to spend story points that seem very important. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like the idea of spending story points to buff your ship being a big investment (i.e. not the default course of action) that makes your flagship better than the baseline of ship power like a hero/custom ship, rather than spending story points to buff ships being the default course of action that all ships are expected to have in order to use anything more than a super basic loadout. I guess that's more what I thought of when I read it, rather than what it has to be, but it seems more interesting to me.
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Goumindong

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #129 on: July 09, 2019, 02:47:18 PM »

Wait so is the designed gameplay to rarely deploy more than 8 ships? Or are you expecting AI ships to fill out the fleet a lot? Also, if the game is balanced around essentially all combat ships having these built in hull mods, it sort of cheapens the decision to put them on. I liked the idea of a big investment to make your flagship special. Instead, I have to allocate a certain number of my story points to keeping my combat ships 'up to par.' It doesn't feel like a decision, more like an obligation.

1) No the designed gameplay is to not make "having lots of ships an obvious benefit".

Currently the bonus is Minimum(Value, Bonus/ships). I.E. if you have 6 ships you get 50% and 7 ships you get 6/7th of 50%.

As such the total value of ships is (1+effective bonus) * Ships And since effective bonus = Value/Ships then we have Ships + Bonus = total combat strength. d(total combat strength)/d(ships) therefore equals 1. Adding a ship produces the same value regardless of what the bonus is. Adding bonus effects the fleet in the same absolute way regardless of the number of ships you have.

This does mean that the bonus is less valuable in a percentage function as you get more ships. But its never zero and and the marginal value* of the bonus or adding more ships is never negative. Its a pretty construction really.

2) Well story points are unlimited at the moment.  So you're not really obligated to keep your combat ships up to par. You're able to at the expense of being able to do less things in the immediate term. Does this mean that you will probably have a fully plot armored fleet later in the game? Yea, it might... But Obligated to? Well what if you want to make some of your combat skills elite? What if you want to make your officiers special?


*or the marginal logarithmic value which may be a better metric in many situations.
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ottodeluxe

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #130 on: July 09, 2019, 02:52:33 PM »

Since I am a creature of habit, I have very mixed feelings about some of the new mechanics:

There are certain playstyles that I like, and others I strongly dislike. I never liked phase ships, for example, so for me personally, there won't be a choice in that specific skill tier. I'm sure others also have their preferences. What I am mostly worried about is exclusive skils that feel relevant to certain playstyles. For example, making a choice between decent colonies, decent fleet logistics and better specialists. In the current system, if you completely opt to ignore the conbat tree and gimp yourself incombat a bit, you can get a lot of fleetwide skills and all the colony stuff. If all those skills move to tiers 4 and 5, you "have" to pick 80% skills that are "nice to have", but ultimatey you don't care about. And you can only ever get maybe three out of 5 skills you consider "core" to your playstyle. (I guess we can remedy this by setting the max level to 30 in the options, but then banlancing completely goes haywire)

With the skills scaling with OP/recovery cost/etc., the player is even more incentivised to keep their fleet small. I see the benefits of performance, less micro and others, but ultimately, I love massive endgame fleets clashing, where some 4-7k OP are fielded by both sides, respectively. It seems that this kind of playstyle will be totally gimped by the new system, and you might not want to use any buff skills in the first place, if you get 0.7% better flux management or 2% top speed. Maybe such skills should scale with player level (or better, story points earned). Those skills should have a minimum effectiveness (maybe floored at 50%) and should obviously not scale above 100%. For example, a skil gives +20% top speed, for 30 OP per story point earned. It would always give at least 10%, but even huge lategame fleets could get the full 20%, given enough time.
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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #131 on: July 09, 2019, 03:05:37 PM »

I say 'balanced around' meaning the ships themselves are balanced around some expected strength/course of action that the player takes. If the ships are designed so that if you have two built in hull mods, then you will have enough OP for some interesting loadouts then I would say the ships are balanced with the expectation that the player will spend story points to buff every ship, and that the game is not balanced around ships not having those hull mods (i.e. you probably won't be able to fit anything more than super basic loadouts on ships without those story points. So if the player chooses not to buff ships with story points, he is losing access to a lot of the game because the ship wasn't balanced to be able to use a variety of loadouts without those extra hull mods. Obviously you also want to make sure that ships that do use the buffs aren't too strong which is 'balancing' them, but I'm talking about whether they are the 'default' or not.

Ah, I see what you mean. Well, I didn't go and nerf the OP on all ships across the board! Plus, most NPC ships wouldn't have perma-mods. So it wouldn't make sense to balance ships around in this sense.


I don't think it has to be given that the player will do this on all ships he plans to deploy? There are plenty of other ways to spend story points that seem very important. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like the idea of spending story points to buff your ship being a big investment (i.e. not the default course of action) that makes your flagship better than the baseline of ship power like a hero/custom ship, rather than spending story points to buff ships being the default course of action that all ships are expected to have in order to use anything more than a super basic loadout. I guess that's more what I thought of when I read it, rather than what it has to be, but it seems more interesting to me.

I think long-term it probably would be, though. There's lots of stuff to spend story points on, but a lot of the uses "give them back" via bonus XP, so as far as sinks, building hullmods into ships is a big one. Elite skills is one too, but that's pretty limited - even if you picked up every single combat skill you could, that'd be 12 story points total to make them all elite.

(This is actually a current concern/something I'm thinking through - I think it'd make sense to have another story point "sink", but haven't sorted out what it would be, exactly.  Perhaps toning story points down to 2 per level would be enough, though; at 4 right now it feels like you'd be drowning in them in short order.

If there *was* an additional sink - a sink being something that doesn't give bonus XP but that you'd still want to spend the points on - that'd take "built in" mods a few steps away from being expected.)


There are certain playstyles that I like, and others I strongly dislike. I never liked phase ships, for example, so for me personally, there won't be a choice in that specific skill tier. I'm sure others also have their preferences. What I am mostly worried about is exclusive skils that feel relevant to certain playstyles. For example, making a choice between decent colonies, decent fleet logistics and better specialists. In the current system, if you completely opt to ignore the conbat tree and gimp yourself incombat a bit, you can get a lot of fleetwide skills and all the colony stuff. If all those skills move to tiers 4 and 5, you "have" to pick 80% skills that are "nice to have", but ultimatey you don't care about. And you can only ever get maybe three out of 5 skills you consider "core" to your playstyle. (I guess we can remedy this by setting the max level to 30 in the options, but then banlancing completely goes haywire)

Hmm - I think it's kind of a question of calibrating your expectations. If you consider 5 skills "core" to your playstyle, but it's not possible to get more than 3 of them, then they're probably not actually "core", if you know what I mean :) And, well, the skill update is certainly a change, so things will change as a result! Ahem.

With the skills scaling with OP/recovery cost/etc., the player is even more incentivised to keep their fleet small. I see the benefits of performance, less micro and others, but ultimately, I love massive endgame fleets clashing, where some 4-7k OP are fielded by both sides, respectively. It seems that this kind of playstyle will be totally gimped by the new system, and you might not want to use any buff skills in the first place, if you get 0.7% better flux management or 2% top speed. Maybe such skills should scale with player level (or better, story points earned). Those skills should have a minimum effectiveness (maybe floored at 50%) and should obviously not scale above 100%. For example, a skil gives +20% top speed, for 30 OP per story point earned. It would always give at least 10%, but even huge lategame fleets could get the full 20%, given enough time.

Interesting thought as far as tying story points in! Going to mull that over.

As far as having a minimum, I don't think that'd work. If you add in a minimum, then instead of encouraging smaller fleets, you're very close to encouraging larger ones because the total magnitude of the bonuses goes up.
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Megas

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #132 on: July 09, 2019, 03:07:47 PM »

Hopefully, story points will not be too hard to accumulate.  Right now, I am kind of worried that I may need to hoard points or reload games to preserve my special ships (instead of discard-and-draw that I do today), but if story points easy to come by at a steady rate, maybe player can afford to lose built-in ships or spend them frivolously.

In seems blueprints will be most useful for your patrols' composition and to obtain your first few ships.
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SCC

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #133 on: July 09, 2019, 03:21:58 PM »

I think that you don't need to fret yourself so much with bigger fleets, Alex. For people who like to play with loadouts, the tedium will stop them, and for those who do just one pass for every ship... Well, if it works for them, who cares? They have maintenance and fuel to worry about.
How many carrier skills for officers are there now? I can see just one for certain at the moment. Hey, there are no leadership skills anymore... It's nice that I won't be forced to get personal carrier skills just to get to the ones I want.

Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #134 on: July 09, 2019, 04:06:13 PM »

How many carrier skills for officers are there now? I can see just one for certain at the moment. Hey, there are no leadership skills anymore... It's nice that I won't be forced to get personal carrier skills just to get to the ones I want.

Two, although "Point Defense" boosts both the ship and its fighters. And, yeah, both of them are "specializations", so you wouldn't be forced to pick them on the way up through Combat, either.
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