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Author Topic: Skills and Story Points  (Read 91062 times)

Cyan Leader

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #30 on: July 08, 2019, 12:15:46 PM »

Also noticed Colony Management and Industrial Planning both are Industry tier 5.  If I do not want to rely on cores (to avoid Pathers and Hegemony), that is 10 out of 15 just for babysitting mitigation.  I guess time to farm alphas for unlimited colonies and save 10 skill points.  Pathers will be a royal pain, though, and I need to stay vigilant for inspection alerts.

I think it's pointless to speculate on the effects specific to the next version on the current patch since we're most likely getting adjustments to how that part of the game works and will most likely get ways to control our faction fleets which will do a lot to mitigate those problems.
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Igncom1

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #31 on: July 08, 2019, 12:19:11 PM »

Also noticed Colony Management and Industrial Planning both are Industry tier 5.  If I do not want to rely on cores (to avoid Pathers and Hegemony), that is 10 out of 15 just for babysitting mitigation.  I guess time to farm alphas for unlimited colonies and save 10 skill points.  Pathers will be a royal pain, though, and I need to stay vigilant for inspection alerts.

It never felt like to me that you were supposed to have more then 1 or 2 colonies anyway. Just 1 or two good ones and then to import whatever else you need from the independents.

Needing to farm for that kinda stuff seems fair game to me, as it's a little beyond the general use of the colonies anyway (A piggy bank/shipyard.)
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Wyvern

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #32 on: July 08, 2019, 12:19:25 PM »

If i were a guard on patrol duty and had to scan a ship, i would accept a credits bride because we all need credits, not some magical "you're immune to 1 scan" pass.
Considering that the AI smuggler fleets can wander around with their transponders off without faction patrols so much as looking at them, I, for one, will be quite pleased to have an option to do something even vaguely similar.
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bowman

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #33 on: July 08, 2019, 12:24:59 PM »

Are we able to refit the AI ships or are they limited to set variants? If we're able to refit them I assume we can use the simulator... I'll pilot a drone vessel some day yet!

The skill changes are looking great, the quote used for the Energy Weapon Mastery skill is very nice. The Gunnery Implants skill has a typo on "psych" being "pysch".

I realize the skills themselves are likely still in heavy development so balance comments are potentially moot but I figure it can't hurt to mention my thoughts anyway.

Should phase mastery perhaps lower phase activation flux cost by a % to allow the player to use the -50% cooldown more easily(I definitely don't just miss blink dodging I swear)? As well, I hope the leadership skill that increases your maximum captains gives decent other bonuses because being only a +2 on an initial 8 cap seems rather weak. I suppose it might be far stronger than it seems given how many player skills might be tied to the ship having a captain.

Is the +% OP skill still in or did that get snapped? As much as I love it, it probably breaks the game balance- especially now that we can put two hullmods on a ship for no OP cost. Speaking of, the current limit is two "Non-built-in" logistics hullmods does this mean we can now put four logistics hullmods on a single ship? EDIT: It just occurred to me that only 3 hullmods were even in the list for the image showing applying permanent ones, so maybe logistic ones aren't allowed? Makes sense.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2019, 12:26:39 PM by bowman »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #34 on: July 08, 2019, 12:29:26 PM »

I really like the structure of the tree, and I feel like it will be much easier to balance than the current system and will create more interesting choices. 

I have a couple thoughts on story points:
- the name feels weird. I feel like the name of something should convey how it is meant to be used, but this name doesn't do that for me.
- they may be too broad. With so many different ways to spend them, I can already feel the decision paralysis and the massive stack of unused points
- free hull mods could really throw off ship balance on some ships

Speaking of ship balance, is this going to be accompanied by a major balance pass? It seems like a lot of these changes (particularly the changes to skills and how they can have smaller/larger effects based on the number of ships etc) will affect ship balance in a major way which will likely require rebalancing. Or is the plan to make the changes and then patch balance problems as they arise.

Finally, there are some mechanics like the inverse scaling of skill bonuses with the number of ships that are cool but feel a bit counterintuitive and really hard to communicate to the player. not sure what to do about that. My instinct when I get a skill that buffs carriers is to get a more carriers to take advantage of my investment, but I might actually be hurting myself by doing that.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2019, 12:34:53 PM by intrinsic_parity »
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xenoargh

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #35 on: July 08, 2019, 12:33:30 PM »

Quote
some mechanics like the inverse scaling of skill bonuses with the number of ships that are cool but feel a bit counterintuitive
More to the point... won't that be forcing players into yet-another pigeonhole? 

Honestly, the last thing this game needs is more caps that make play even more about threading the Skill needle some specific way and playing some specific way.
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Megas

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #36 on: July 08, 2019, 12:47:56 PM »

Also noticed Colony Management and Industrial Planning both are Industry tier 5.  If I do not want to rely on cores (to avoid Pathers and Hegemony), that is 10 out of 15 just for babysitting mitigation.  I guess time to farm alphas for unlimited colonies and save 10 skill points.  Pathers will be a royal pain, though, and I need to stay vigilant for inspection alerts.

It never felt like to me that you were supposed to have more then 1 or 2 colonies anyway. Just 1 or two good ones and then to import whatever else you need from the independents.

Needing to farm for that kinda stuff seems fair game to me, as it's a little beyond the general use of the colonies anyway (A piggy bank/shipyard.)
With industry limits, player needs at least three colonies to be self-sufficient.  More likely four or five.  If player wants to avoid Pather cells, he probably needs four.  (If he does not care about that and inspections, he has as many colonies as he has alpha cores.)

But, if the limits and skills are the same (I hope not), unlike officers, then it seems like alpha core abuse is the way to go, and player will have to put up with more babysitting madness.
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Drackogon

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #37 on: July 08, 2019, 12:49:24 PM »

If i were a guard on patrol duty and had to scan a ship, i would accept a credits bride because we all need credits, not some magical "you're immune to 1 scan" pass.
Considering that the AI smuggler fleets can wander around with their transponders off without faction patrols so much as looking at them, I, for one, will be quite pleased to have an option to do something even vaguely similar.

why would the faction patrols look at us so much and not smugglers then? maybe we're not doing as well of a work, unlike smugglers.
Remember, if you're a known smuggler, you're doing something wrong
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #38 on: July 08, 2019, 12:49:34 PM »

Hellllo Modpocalypse number... 3? 4? I've lost count by now. I can see this massively effecting mod balance across the modiverse. Stuff like built in weapons.
Oh and what about ships with mods already built in? Do they lose a perma mod slot? And are there ways to remove the perma mods, maybe even at the cost of an StP?
I also second the question of whether the OP boost skill is still in the game.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #39 on: July 08, 2019, 12:52:37 PM »

Quote
some mechanics like the inverse scaling of skill bonuses with the number of ships that are cool but feel a bit counterintuitive
More to the point... won't that be forcing players into yet-another pigeonhole? 

Honestly, the last thing this game needs is more caps that make play even more about threading the Skill needle some specific way and playing some specific way.

The scaling mechanics mean you can go above the cap and still get benefit. The bonuses don't turn off if you have 1 carrier above the optimal, they just get slightly worse - that prevents it from pigeonholing players.

If being a single flightdeck above the allowed number just straight up turned off the benefit of the skill, then yes that would have been awful, but that's clearly not the case. Numbers not being final and all that in mind, in the example the player has almost three times the number of flight decks the skill is perfect for and he still gets a 20% (out of 50% max) benefit. That's huge considering how far out of the zone that is. Clearly not being pigeonholed there.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2019, 12:54:47 PM by DatonKallandor »
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Eji1700

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #40 on: July 08, 2019, 12:53:35 PM »

Quote
some mechanics like the inverse scaling of skill bonuses with the number of ships that are cool but feel a bit counterintuitive
More to the point... won't that be forcing players into yet-another pigeonhole? 

Honestly, the last thing this game needs is more caps that make play even more about threading the Skill needle some specific way and playing some specific way.
That was my initial reaction but i'm not sure it'll work that way in practice.

Lets do something simple like "first 5 carriers get 100% damage on their wings".

So if you have 5, you get 500% extra damage, which is 100% per ship.

if you have 10 you get 750% extra damage, which is 75% per ship.

It's still absolutely worth getting if you want to go all carriers but it also doesn't force you to go all carriers, since at 5 you'd be capped at your most efficient point, and can then decide if you want to keep focusing or then put a frigate fleet on the sides to back them up.

It'll depend on lot on the numbers ,but I don't think the core idea is shot.
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SCC

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #41 on: July 08, 2019, 12:57:00 PM »

— Removal of "dead" aptitude points is going to make others happy, and I won't have to listen to complaints about them anymore.
— New Combat and Leadership icons are very nice, but Technology and Industry ones feel a bit too monochromatic in comparison.
— Use of smaller ships or smaller number of ships isn't necessary to encourage, there's a hardcap in there already. Is there a "bonus floor" for bonuses with diminishing returns, like Fighter Doctrine? If so, then this bonus floor, current bonus and maximum bonus should be all displayed. One thing I can already think of is that edge camping will be even more desirable, since it's a way to decrease the enemy's numbers advantage.
— Does Coordinated Manoeuvres still provide the usual benefit, besides officered frigate and destroyer one?
— The player can't fly unboardable ships directly... Considering that Guardian exists (you flexed on mods hard with that, even if you didn't intend to), perhaps it is a good thing. Can AI cores be installed only on unboardable ships, or could it be made so that certain ships can be both crewed and uncrewed in that regard? Some mods probably could use this.
— Story points have an... Unflattering name. Permanent hullmods? Alex, you were meant to bring balance to Starsector, not destroy it! Integrating AI core into the ship fully sounds cool, though. Can I spend story dice to make factions' pickets that obviously can't do anything to my death fleet? By the way, thanks for adding another "no-X" challenge to my "I'm bored" run in the next version.
Overall, interesting development. It seems that skills are still mostly stat bonuses, for better or worse. The most I'll miss is getting all the skills I care about and not skipping everything else. Having to choose between Field Repairs and Salvaging was a truly evil mastermind-like move on your part.
Another thought: Story Points offer a means to scale difficulty.  A complaint I’m hearing is that it could be perceived as “glorified cheating”.  Perhaps Easy/Medium/Hard should scale the number of Story Points you get per level. Maybe you should start with some on Easy.  Players that feel like they make the game too easy, or feel like it makes their victory unearned, could move to Hard Mode where you get fewer of them.
I wouldn't mind something bad happening every few spent story points.
Considering it seems that Loadout Design is now more like a ship-specific hullmod (it's in the menu for picking an AI core's skills), I would not assume immediately that all skills are the same as in 0.9.
It better not be ship specific, or Alex better create some check to prevent having over OP ships in your fleet.

Megas

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #42 on: July 08, 2019, 12:58:48 PM »

We had scaling mechanics back when Starsector had Logistics during the 0.6.x era.  Unused Logistics meant CR bonuses.  However, it was pointless because it was always better to cram as many ships as possible, even above the limit, especially during 0.6.5 with those cash cow food runs.

So, depending on what happens, it may be better to eat the reduced bonus for having too many ships because the benefits of more ships more than make up for the loss.

Re: Permanent hullmods.
If current Loadout Design 3 is gone, then this can make up for lost OP.
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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #43 on: July 08, 2019, 01:14:30 PM »

Could I use story points to do stuff to my faction/colonies? Like faction wide/fleet wide hull mod instillation? Orders to invade a system? Diplomacy? Change my faction colour from blue to anything else?

Not that this all should be a major thing.

Maybe; haven't decided on that yet. At the moment, I think there's one or two things on my list to look at (say, heading off an incoming expedition w/o spending credits), but we'll see.

I actually like this system more because it's more intuitive, I know there might be quite a few people that don't like the levels being limited or the new level up system but I think it's a step in the right direction, I sort of wish it was possible to have 3 skills per tier or at certain tiers as choices but that might be pushing it a bit

Thank you! Yeah, I thought about how many choices to put in per tier. Two just seems cleanest, especially if we go with "generic vs specialist" in many tiers. Also, if there are 3 tiers per level, then either you get way more skills or there are less tiers and things just don't line up as nicely as far as the number of points/number of skills/max level/etc.

So after I get to the last skill in a tree, I can put points in any skill in that tree I missed the first time? Or if I want the second T5 aptitude, do I need to spend another 5 points?

I can see the ups and downs of both, but if I don't want anything besides one or two things a ways down the tree, it's gonna feel like an unreasonably large investment.

The latter, to get both tier 5's you'd need to spend 10 points. Otherwise picking up both tier 5's would be kind of a no-brainer, as they tend to be quite strong.


Will using story points on salvaging a ship let you pick which one you want, letting us snipe out specific ships in a fleet again? Or is it, (as I just thought of mid-writing) when you find a random ship floating about to pick loot of, you'll always be able to choose to make it recoverable instead of no? (And more importantly, will we know if we need to spend the point beforehand to garentee it? Or can we decide to take it anyways when the game initially says it's unsalvagablee? (Akin to adding the dice after the inital roll, as you mentioned?)

Details are TBD, but, yeah, you'd always know if you need to spend the point or not, wouldn't make sense just to make you guess.


Either way, I'm hyped! I wonder how many skill points you'll have to throw around after getting all the non-refundable skills. I also wonder how you'll work with them being deeper in the tree, or if you'll just front-load them? It means you could go down a path, snipe a skill, and reset your points, keeping that skill and going elsewhere.

For non-refundable skills, when you reassign points, you have to do it in such a way that the requirements are still met. There's 3 of them currently (two at leadership tier 4, one at technology tier 5 - not Automated Ships, but the other one). Thinking about ways to make these non-permanent as well, but it's tricky.


All is fine but I don't think making remnants recoverable is a good idea...
And so as permanent hullmods, "just put the hullmod which cost most op inside the ship!"oh that's...wild.

I have to say, story point system is an awesome idea but the application you showed might have a very bad influence on the game balance.

There should be more limitations.

We'll have to see! The downside to always making the most expensive hullmod permanent would be that it might not leave the ship as flexible, though yeah, you'd generally want to make the more expensive hullmods built-in. There's no more OP bonus from skills, though, so that offsets it to some degree.

Spoiler
A thought on this system.  You probably won't like this, but...

What if you just give players their 15 Skill Points right off the bat?  De-couple that from Levels; tie Story Points to Levels and Doing Stuff That's Impactful instead? 

One of the major problems with the Skills system, in general, that this overhaul doesn't really appear to fix, is that it feels like a pay-wall in the game design, locking away most of the "good" gameplay.  Players keep hoarding their Skill Points, comparing builds, etc.- this is all detrimental to the gameplay. 

Right now, players are all pushed towards monoculture characters, where they need to be able to fight but also have to be good Colony admins, if they want to "win" the easiest way.  I think that having players be pushed into pushing around Carrier fleets optimized via putting as few skills as possible into Combat (and therefore, being unable to explore fighting their own ships much) was one of the unfortunate side-effects of this.

What we want, I think, is to deliberately encourage players to re-spec as they want, try new things out, keep having fun- not feel like they're Doing It Wrong because they invested more than 6 points in Combat (or whatever).

In Vanilla right now, the caps mean that the player's basically unable to go a bunch of routes if they're trying to minmax. 

My current solution was drastic- get rid of the level cap and make experience gains considerably faster, so that players aren't nearly so starved.  It's not a great solution; you still can't re-spec and eventually even un-capped Levels get slow.  But at least the early game doesn't feel artificially hard.

In a system where all players have Skills to allocate immediately, they won't feel crippled or stuck behind a pay-wall.  That these Skills are initially weak isn't such a big deal then; there will still be "better" routes, but psychologically, nobody's going to be stuck in Choice Anxiety (at least, not in this area of this game design, lol).

Story Points could then be used to logarithmically improve Skills or unlock Elite, and spending them is good, because they'll give the player something that improves an area a little bit, as well as XP gain to keep moving forward against the endless Level curve. 

Story Points could continue to be Level-bound as proposed, but Levels could be capless (but the XP needed to keep going up would, of course, skyrocket).  Other Story Points could be gained by Doing Something that scales in challenge with level and times accomplished, keeping it tantalizingly available but not over-powered.

Anyhow, just my $0.02, for what it's worth; I think that, in general, there's a lot to be said for having a system where players respec quite a lot and make themselves into the thing they need over and over as part of a playthrough, rather than feeling that they need to understand <this specific Elite build strat that requires X levels, Y Story Points, and Z grinding>.
[close]

(A bit much to respond to on every point, but, generally speaking, having levels gives the player a chance to grow into their character and get a sense of improvement over time. That's important.)

I think these new-fangled "story points" are the first time I've seen plot armor worked into the mechanics of a game.

Hah, yeah, there's a good element of that for sure.


An immediate concern is the Ordnance Point scaling method.  Won’t this disproportionately benefit ships with built-in weapons?  Some modded ships mostly rely on that type of weapon.  Perhaps the scale should count weapon-OP from built-ins for the total amount of OP that a ship counts as having.

That's a good point, hmm. Wasn't thinking of this because it's extremely marginal in vanilla. Not quite sure how to handle it, though; having say the Onslaugh count for more OP than it has would probably be confusing.


As for permanently adding OP-free hull mods... On the one hand, this is neat!  On the other hand, I'm a little bit wary of the 'max 2' bit - means there's incentive to pick the most expensive hull mods, rather than the most interesting.  May I suggest that you have an ordnance point limit as well, so that if the player chooses to install mostly cheap mods, they can get to three or four of them, while someone who installs Safety Overrides and Augmented Drive Fields would only get the default two?

Hmm - I get what you're saying, but I think it gets too complicated for my taste. Let me think about it, though; not in the best head-space for that right now, what with responding to all the comments :)

May I suggest that you have an ordnance point limit as well, so that if the player chooses to install mostly cheap mods, they can get to three or four of them, while someone who installs Safety Overrides and Augmented Drive Fields would only get the default two?
On second thought, don't do this - instead, scale the bonus XP granted based on the OP cost of the hull mod, so a super-expensive mod like SO costs (in the long run) more of a story point than installing something cheap like Advanced Turret Gyros.

Ahhhh, that's promising; let me make a note. Bonus XP could actually be based on OP rather than hull size at all; that seems like that'd make sense.

Also curious: what happens if I have a civilian vessel, install Militarized Subsystems, and then attempt to perma-install SO?

You can do it, and then uninstall MS. Hadnt considered it! Seems alright, though, since story points generally let you bend the rules a bit anyway.


Story points are a fascinatingly fresh take on incorporating a TTRPG mechanic into a video game. My only concerns with this new system is that I won't be able to edit a file and make sure I can have all the skills now

You can still change the max level, and I've also moved the number of skill points per level to settings.json, so that's easier to change, too.


... and Loadout Design (as shown in the pic) occupy tier 2.

(Oh yeah, that's just a placeholder icon. Loadout Design is gone.)


Another thought: Story Points offer a means to scale difficulty.  A complaint I’m hearing is that it could be perceived as “glorified cheating”.  Perhaps Easy/Medium/Hard should scale the number of Story Points you get per level. Maybe you should start with some on Easy.  Players that feel like they make the game too easy, or feel like it makes their victory unearned, could move to Hard Mode where you get fewer of them.

Yeah, was actually thinking about the same thing. They do offer a means of controlling difficulty that seems fairly flexible; want to see how it plays out first, though - didn't really get much of a chance to do real playtesting yet.


Actually; expanding on the spending story points on your ship thing to improve it - I'd *really* like to be able to spend points on improving aspects of a ship's stats.

That's basically hullmods, isn't it? I.E. Flux Distributor etc.

Uhhh, also you could use them for other funsies stuff like buying and setting up system improvements once you've gotten to the colonization stage (or pay out in a bar to come across someone who's got info on good colonization targets? If you pay X amount it could roll through the list of every planet and look for stuff that a player would be interested in - low hazard ratings or extremely rich in resources, or  the third desirable criteria of several nearby good enough colonizables that the patrols support each other meaning you don't have to baby it) like an asteroid belt mining operation (+1 resource to system, as a bad example) or any of the other potentially neat megastructure stuff.

Yeah, definitely the sort of general thing these could work for.



If i were a guard on patrol duty and had to scan a ship, i would accept a credits bride because we all need credits, not some magical "you're immune to 1 scan" pass.

Ah, this is what I'm talking about in the post, as far as encouraging the player to think of the story of what's happening based on the in-game actions. Obviously, "here, officer, I've got this immune to 1 scan pass" would be a very silly story.

In-game, this would be presented as something like, say "I'm on a secret mission for the High Hegemon. If you want to tell your superiors you blew my cover, go right ahead with the scan". This is something that makes sense, right; it's a pretty reasonable thing to have happen in the context a sci-fi story. But you could really come up with anything that makes sense. Or something that doesn't make sense, in which case, well, that's on you!

(Also, remind me not to put you on patrol duty :D)

Considering that the AI smuggler fleets can wander around with their transponders off without faction patrols so much as looking at them, I, for one, will be quite pleased to have an option to do something even vaguely similar.

Yes, exactly! It's a way to let the player do this kind of stuff, where it wouldn't be a reasonable option if it wasn't limited by, well, something like this.


with story points, you can permanently assign hull mods to a ship. isn't that a balancing issue? so you can end up having a pretty invulnerable ship.

Well, it's limited to 2 hullmods per ship; I don't think it's inherently any more of a balancing issue than, say, giving ships more OP directly.

My point is- if the enemy can't do, the player shouldn't. otherwise its a balancing issue (because no matter what the enemy does, the player will be unkillable and eventualy fights will become boring because you are pretty invulnerable at that point).

Hypothetical fleet with 20 fully-integrated Alpha Cores says hello.

Also, I wouldn't assume that story-point-requiring actions are player-only. For example, a story-point-action could even be something the player is only able to do intermittently and with great effort (i.e. using a story point) on account of being an upstart, but something a more established faction could do on the regular.

Overall point being, of course we want to have appropriate end-game challenge, and there's lots of ways to account for anything that story points might do in making the player more powerful.


i agree having more control over your officers and being able to change stuff on them. but shouldn't that be something like specific training or things you do thogeder with the officer that makes the officer change? you know ... developing a connection with your officer and slowly building him/her up.
For an example: the more battles the officer does on board a carrier, the more experience it gets while piloting a carrier and if forced to change to a cruiser, it will underperform because its used to flying carriers and not cruisers, and it will take time untill it gets the hang of piloting cruisers. but at the same time will forget about his carrier experience.

Right - this is the sort of thing that gets really complicated, and has all sorts of negative gameplay implications, if you actually try to simulate it in-game. Using a story point to abstract it away into whatever the desired effects are makes it both better and - this is important - something I can actually reasonably do, in terms of the amount of time I have to spend doing it vs the payoff.


Are we able to refit the AI ships or are they limited to set variants? If we're able to refit them I assume we can use the simulator... I'll pilot a drone vessel some day yet!

You can refit them, yeah. So you can similate piloting a droneship to your heart's content :)

The skill changes are looking great, the quote used for the Energy Weapon Mastery skill is very nice. The Gunnery Implants skill has a typo on "psych" being "pysch".

(Thank you, fixed up the typo.)

Should phase mastery perhaps lower phase activation flux cost by a % to allow the player to use the -50% cooldown more easily(I definitely don't just miss blink dodging I swear)? As well, I hope the leadership skill that increases your maximum captains gives decent other bonuses because being only a +2 on an initial 8 cap seems rather weak. I suppose it might be far stronger than it seems given how many player skills might be tied to the ship having a captain.

I'm not sure it's qualitatively different than reducing the upkeep cost; it's less flux either way, and at -50% the cooldown is still one second.

As far as the officers skill, that's 25% more officers - and, yeah, if you put them in smaller ships... I think the way it is now - it giving +6 officers - is just so wildly powerful that it makes the still-very-powerful +2 feel weak.

Is the +% OP skill still in or did that get snapped? As much as I love it, it probably breaks the game balance- especially now that we can put two hullmods on a ship for no OP cost.

Right, yeah, that's gone; the ability to build in hullmods is in some sense a replacement for that.

Speaking of, the current limit is two "Non-built-in" logistics hullmods does this mean we can now put four logistics hullmods on a single ship? EDIT: It just occurred to me that only 3 hullmods were even in the list for the image showing applying permanent ones, so maybe logistic ones aren't allowed? Makes sense.

You can't, no - the ones you build in yourself still count, only the ones built into the base hull don't.


- the name feels weird. I feel like the name of something should convey how it is meant to be used, but this name doesn't do that for me.

It's meant to indicate the 4th-wall-breaking that's going on.

- they may be too broad. With so many different ways to spend them, I can already feel the decision paralysis and the massive stack of unused points

I think bonus XP should take care of this, mostly. Or at least ameliorate this.

- free hull mods could really throw off ship balance on some ships

No more so than extra OP from a skill, right?

Speaking of ship balance, is this going to be accompanied by a major balance pass? It seems like a lot of these changes (particularly the changes to skills and how they can have smaller/larger effects based on the number of ships etc) will affect ship balance in a major way which will likely require rebalancing. Or is the plan to make the changes and then patch balance problems as they arise.

I'll have to playtest and see how it feels. I wouldn't think re-balancing ships around the skills would be a good idea. It would probably make more sense - generally - to tone down any skills as needed.


Finally, there are some mechanics like the inverse scaling of skill bonuses with the number of ships that are cool but feel a bit counterintuitive and really hard to communicate to the player. not sure what to do about that. My instinct when I get a skill that buffs carriers is to get a more carriers to take advantage of my investment, but I might actually be hurting myself by doing that.

I think the skill tooltips actually do a good job of explaining the mechanics (see: Carrier Group skill tooltip from blog screenshot). I put in a good bit of time trying to phrase things clearly and concisely there, since, yeah, that defintely has the potential to be confusing.


Stuff like built in weapons.

Right, DR brought this up a bit earlier in the thread, it's a good point.

Oh and what about ships with mods already built in? Do they lose a perma mod slot? And are there ways to remove the perma mods, maybe even at the cost of an StP?

If it's built into the hull, they don't. If it's built into the variant (and is a "normal" hullmod), then it would. (No way to remove perma mods at the moment, though, say, removing d-mods piecemeal could be a decent use of a story point.)


— Use of smaller ships or smaller number of ships isn't necessary to encourage, there's a hardcap in there already. Is there a "bonus floor" for bonuses with diminishing returns, like Fighter Doctrine?

There's no bonus floor. The forumlas are X/<number of points>, i.e. for Carrier Group, the bonus is 300/<number of fighter bays>. So if it's 6 bays (or less), that's +50%. If it's 12 bays, then it's 25%, and so on.

— Does Coordinated Manoeuvres still provide the usual benefit, besides officered frigate and destroyer one?

It doesn't. It gives you some bonus command points, though; there's a few of those spread out in the Leadership tree, since it's kind of a fringe bonus and it didn't make sense to focus a skill on it.


— The player can't fly unboardable ships directly... Considering that Guardian exists (you flexed on mods hard with that, even if you didn't intend to), perhaps it is a good thing. Can AI cores be installed only on unboardable ships, or could it be made so that certain ships can be both crewed and uncrewed in that regard? Some mods probably could use this.

You still can't recover the Guardian, btw. Only UNBOARDABLE ships with a special tag can be recovered using the Automated Ships skill. A Guardian in the player's fleet might be a tad much. As far as AI cores, they (and only they) can be installed on ships with the "automated" hullmod.


— Story points have an... Unflattering name. Permanent hullmods? Alex, you were meant to bring balance to Starsector, not destroy it!

:D It'll be fiiiiiine.

Having to choose between Field Repairs and Salvaging was a truly evil mastermind-like move on your part.

That's not Salaging, just using its icon as a placeholder for the "Derelict Contingent" skill. Also, Field Repairs is fairly different.

I wouldn't mind something bad happening every few spent story points.

HMM.

(No, probably not.)


(... finally caught up with all the replies, whew!)
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xenoargh

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #44 on: July 08, 2019, 01:16:21 PM »

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It'll depend on lot on the numbers ,but I don't think the core idea is shot.
It'll definitely depend a lot on the numbers; falloff would have to be faster than 25% at double-the-numbers to make Drover Doom Fleet unattractive. 
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I fixed that over here the old-fashioned way, anyhow; Drovers use 15 Deployment Points now; that takes them over the tipping-point vs. anything egregious.  Well, that, and ship / weapon balance; Drovers aren't quite so amazing in Rebal's current numbers.

Anyhow, we'll just have to see on that.  What I'm concerned about is that if we have two Skills, one massively-more-important than the other and the ramp's similar; there's no way I'm going for the lesser choice.  I feel like this game already does that waaaaaaaaay too much right now; instead of being encouraged to diversify or try out lots of playstyles that are all valid, current Vanilla is largely about one main build (Carriers, with enough Industry to get Colonies in motion and a tiny amount left for Tech- largely because of the "invest points in the Skill before you can do anything" rules).  Anything else, we're punished.  I'm kind of hoping that we don't end up with "use five Destroyers and this OP perk, use 5 Carriers for that one, don't need to pilot your own ship because Combat's not worth ever pushing points into" in the final game design.
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Hellllo Modpocalypse number... 3? 4?
Oh yeah, definitely on the Modpocapypse, lol.  Welcome to modding an Alpha product.

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Everything from ship balance to character progression to building Colonies gets broken by this, where it goes, what it favors. 

At least with the current design, if you got really crazy about it, you could code your own Skills.  I can't see this being practical going forward; at best, we'd be able to tweak what's there. 

I can see the crying already; Mod A tweaks Skill X to make Feature 1 work correctly; all hell breaks loose from the "defend the core gameplay, it's just fine" crowd, no matter how sensible it really is, because Mod B uses Skill X in its original form to <do something massively OP>. 

I'll probably just release the current generation of Rebal so that people can see it one last time, then go back to maintaining a TC so that I don't have to put up with that nonsense.
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