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[xenoargh]

@Alex:  I totally agree that there needs to be a feeling of progression.  It's largely about, "how does this progression play out" and "have I locked out so many options that I feel paralyzed".  The big problem with the current Skills is that if we've got all of them, we're gods.  This is bad.  However, what's also bad is not having the ability to diversify our fleet compositions because Skills make <that one path> so much better, long-term. 

Using Story points to re-spec is a great idea, in that it removes some of the choice anxiety; if it's de-coupled to leveling, it's better, though; as it is, it's basically just another token you earn every time you level up, rather than something the player can grab if they're willing to go <do something>.

This ties in with the Hull Mods idea, among others.  Instead of having the Freebie Hull Mods be something players save their Story Points up for, because they want a perfect endgame fleet... they should be encouraged to experiment with them, try out things. 

Level caps and a limited burn-once resource like Story Points sound like they are, in general, make players want to min-max harder and make choice anxiety worse; ideally, a new player would explore all the Skill regions over the course of their first game, making different configurations as they understand what they want (as opposed to what the game wants).  Story Points are, potentially, a great way to get there, if they're available and not tied explicitly to levels.

[Wyvern]

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.

So, I'm curious here: what's the reasoning for using total Ordnance Points instead of ship deployment costs?  You know, the thing that's supposed to be a (fairly direct) match to a given hull's overall combat power?

Edit: Because it occurs to me, there's also the same problem in the other direction - the amazing Interstellar Imperium mod features ships with comparatively higher numbers of ordnance points (and, I believe, slightly lowered base stats?), to allow for a choice between several faction-specific hull mods that drastically change up the hulls' overall functionality - or just skipping the faction packages and mounting premium weapons and regular hull mods instead.

[Eji1700]

As someone who's always giving the venture/mule and other "almost but not quite combat" ships a shot, what does the skill that makes civ ships better do? 

The venture I can work with, even though it's a cruiser that's really more akin to a 1.5 destroyer just because of the alpha it can put out with its missiles.  The rest though really struggle simply due to a lack of hardpoints to stick weapons on.  You can mass them and get pretty creative, but at the end of the day a mule really struggles to pull any meaningful weight

[Wyvern]

The pirate Mule is pretty good!*  But, if I'm reading it right, whatever that skill is won't apply to it - because it doesn't have the Civilian Hull tag, so it can't get Militarized Subsystems.

*Edit: Early game, if what you're looking for is something that'll keep the enemy busy without dying, rather than something that'll go off and get kills itself.

[intrinsic_parity]

Another thought, these changes may create new issues with xp and how the player is incentivized to play. In the past there was essentially no reason to care about or grind xp. The only thing that would achieve is to speed up the level progression a bit which the player might not even want (since it was pretty fast to begin with) and the player certainly wasn't desperate to level up since you could take the skills you really wanted while leveling was super fast (early). Now the player can actually improve their fleet a lot and may also gain other campaign benefits by grinding xp for story points. This might incentivize grindy xp farming and other non-desirable gameplay that was not a consideration in the past. Maybe the game is already balanced to avoid that but I certainly never considered the xp gain from things at all before now. It just seems like a significant shift in how the player is rewarded for actions and I don't know what the ramifications will be.

[Alex]

So, I'm curious here: what's the reasoning for using total Ordnance Points instead of ship deployment costs?  You know, the thing that's supposed to be a (fairly direct) match to a given hull's overall combat power?

Edit: Because it occurs to me, there's also the same problem in the other direction - the amazing Interstellar Imperium mod features ships with comparatively higher numbers of ordnance points (and, I believe, slightly lowered base stats?), to allow for a choice between several faction-specific hull mods that drastically change up the hulls' overall functionality - or just skipping the faction packages and mounting premium weapons and regular hull mods instead.

The original reason was that it's more accurate with carriers in some cases, which generally have less OP and don't take up as much of the OP allowance for weapons-boosting skills. Buuuut, looking at how all the skills turned out, that doesn't actually hold up well, and with these other mod-related problems in mind... let me experiment with this a bit. The numbers are a bit different - frigates have less deployment cost compared to their OP so switching to that might hit large ships too much. Still, the way things are structured, this would be pretty easy to try out, I think I'll give it a shot. Thank you for mentioning it!

As someone who's always giving the venture/mule and other "almost but not quite combat" ships a shot, what does the skill that makes civ ships better do? 

Still working through some details, but basically there are two new hullmods - Assault Package and Escort Package - which have a very much increased effect if you have the skill. Assault Package makes the ship a bit of a brick (so, it can fill a damage-sponge role in a pinch), while Escort Package heavily buffs point-defense weapons and gives a bonus to movement.

Another thought, these changes may create new issues with xp and how the player is incentivized to play. In the past there was essentially no reason to care about or grind xp. The only thing that would achieve is to speed up the level progression a bit which the player might not even want (since it was pretty fast to begin with) and the player certainly wasn't desperate to level up since you could take the skills you really wanted while leveling was super fast (early). Now the player can actually improve their fleet a lot and may also gain other campaign benefits by grinding xp for story points. This might incentivize grindy xp farming and other non-desirable gameplay that was not a consideration in the past. Maybe the game is already balanced to avoid that but I certainly never considered the xp gain from things at all before now. It just seems like a significant shift in how the player is rewarded for actions and I don't know what the ramifications will be.

Yeah, that's true and something I've thought about. It seems to me that when there's a better-defined endgame and stuff you need to deal with in a timely manner, that will take care of any grinding. That, and probably don't want to be too stingy with story points in the first place. Going to keep an eye on it, though.

[Grievous69]

With Loadout Design gone, and from the looks of things no OP boost to compensate, I'm afraid certain ships will be ''spend story points on this or forget about it''. Hell even with LD before, I've barely had enough OP on some ships to make a decent build. I guess it's healthy to remove OP boosting skills from the game (since I take LD as soon as possible every single game), but I feel like ships without ''free mods'' will just be inefficient to have in your fleet. Of course this is all just speculation from what I can gather.

[Megas]

We did not have level cap until the last skill revamp at 0.8.  Before then, xp grinding, rates, and stuff were important.  In late 0.5.x, player should autoresolve everything to extend soft cap by about ten levels (to get 10-10-10 build).  (Auto-resolve for everything was removed by 0.6.)  In 0.6.5, food runs gave much more XP than combat, effectively extending soft cap by at least 20 levels.  In some early versions, you gained xp from losing ships, and it was a good idea to bring weak ships to kill yourself or let the enemy kill.

With Loadout Design gone, and from the looks of things no OP boost to compensate, I'm afraid certain ships will be ''spend story points on this or forget about it''. Hell even with LD before, I've barely had enough OP on some ships to make a decent build. I guess it's healthy to remove OP boosting skills from the game (since I take LD as soon as possible every single game), but I feel like ships without ''free mods'' will just be inefficient to have in your fleet. Of course this is all just speculation from what I can gather.

Looking at you, Shrike (and other ships).  Loadout Design 3 was always my second perk I wanted to get, #1 being Electronic Warfare 1.

I think I will end up story-pointing ships I want to use.

Just realized that story pointing ships means I probably want to hold on to that ship, instead of dispose of it as soon as it gets too many (D) mods from dying too much in combat.  I probably might end up hording points until I can spam it on a fleet of ships I want to keep.  It probably would make discard-and-draw less useful.  Probably would making building new ships less useful because they do not have the built-in mods, and player needs to burn even more points if he wants to build replacement.  I guess Restoration will be more of a thing now.

[intrinsic_parity]

Yeah I think you could even give all the ships the old loadout design OP bonus by default and it would probably work out well. I remember a lot of ships that felt super OP starved, even with the old bonus. This might really need some ship by ship tweaking if there isn't an across the board increase. I basically played the game under the assumption that I had those extra points (and it never felt like enough).

[Megas]

Yeah I think you could even give all the ships the old loadout design OP bonus by default and it would probably work out well. I remember a lot of ships that felt super OP starved, even with the old bonus. This might really need some ship by ship tweaking if there isn't an across the board increase. I basically played the game under the assumption that I had those extra points (and it never felt like enough).

I agree.  Some ships felt like they barely had enough to be functional with Loadout Design 3.  I would not use either Shrike without LD3.

[Megas]

One possible problem with relying on "Story Points" to power-up ships is it makes losing them in combat painful.  If you really want to keep the ship, that means some form of guaranteed recovery (like Reinforced Bulkheads), and even if you do keep it, it will take (D) mods.  If player does not want to pay huge restoration costs, that means much reloading in a difficult fight much like pre-0.8 games.

Story-point ships will be like rare ships before the days of ship recovery.

I would not mind being able to spend a story-point to make Heavy Industry to always put a certain built-in hullmod to all ships produced.  For example, ITU for all ships.  Then, if I lose a ship in combat, no problem, just rebuild it.  (I tend to rebuild ships frequently in endgame and not worry about losses.)

[xenoargh]

So, I had some dinner. 

While I was out, I was thinking, "what is it that makes a Skill mandatory?"

The answer's pretty simple, really.  Any Skill that gives players' fleets a global bonus is seen as mandatory, with a lesser-but-still-noticeable priority given to other global bonuses (travel speed, money).  This is because of how the stacking bonuses work.  Combat's currently low on people's priorities, for example, because the only mandatory Skill it ever had (Ordinance Points 3) has been removed.  Otherwise... it's possible that people might still be doing Combat fleets; it's not that Combat's been nerfed to death (although there are a few things that aren't quite as useful as others) it's that there's no global power-boost.

So... regardless of how this finally pans out... my thought here is that, if you want the final system to work, either:

1.  Nothing touches global fleet balance, other than Officers bringing their personal Skills to the table.
2.  Every Skill should have a global fleet balance bonus or economic bonus.  All Skills are therefore desireable; rebuilding a set of Skills is really about where to put emphasis.

None of the above can fix truly broken balance issues, but I think that it might help a lot, in terms of how players see the Skills and in terms of understanding what needs fixing and why.

[icepick37]

Ah, this sounds fun. I am super intrigued at the possibilities opened up here. Especially since I play with wolfpack style fleets as long as I reasonably can.

[SCC]

I put frontal shield conversion hullmod, then omni conversion, cast petrify on the latter and take off frontal conversion off. Unless you fixed that issue already, what now?

— 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.

I approve of this change. While Command Points are situationally useful, I don't think anyone but HELMUT ever used the skill for them.

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

HMM.

(No, probably not.)

Hey, it's only fair that the game cheats, too! I recall that some other game passes dice like that between the players and the game master as well. Perhaps make it a feature of the hard mode.

I agree.  Some ships felt like they barely had enough to be functional with Loadout Design 3.  I would not use either Shrike without LD3.

Those free built-ins seem to possibly be stronger than LD3 was. If you petrify Heavy Armour and Integrated Targeting Unit on an Onslaught, that's already 70-36=34 more OP. On a Paragon that's a bit worse, Hardened Shields plus Stabilised Shields vs +10% OP is 45-37=8 more OP, less (but it might be more, depending on hullmods). For Shrike? Assuming you petrify, say, Hardened Shields and ITU, you get 20-8=12 more OP. Unless you go for something more extreme, like HS and SO, then you gain 42-8=34 OP, as much as the Onslaught in the first example. You know, I can see SO being a prime candidate for becoming permanent, such savings...

[Wyvern]

You know, I can see SO being a prime candidate for becoming permanent, such savings...

And that's why it's built in to all the Pather hulls?