Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)
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!
Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.
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.
Quote from: Alex on July 08, 2019, 02:06:49 PMThe 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!Given that you explicitly called out in the blog post that you were looking at things to boost the value of frigates/destroyers in end-game, I'd suggest that's more of a feature than a bug?
I think the issue is more that some ships need a balance pass on OP. I just want the base ships to be good without this special bonus and that definitely doesn't seem true for all ships.
Just went looking through the blog post again, and... I have to ask, what's up with the variant on that Falcon in the first image? Six LRPD and two light autocannons? Just... why?
Quote from: intrinsic_parity on July 08, 2019, 02:51:47 PMI think the issue is more that some ships need a balance pass on OP. I just want the base ships to be good without this special bonus and that definitely doesn't seem true for all ships.That's relative, isn't it? If they're facing similar opposition, but with custom-made player loadouts and officers, how can they not be "good"?
Im using good as a measure of how much I want them in my fleet not some objective measure of combat power. The 10% OP bonus takes some ships from unusable/bad to maybe good and it takes other ships from good to good+. Thats more the issue. I would not use a shrike without the OP bonus but I would think about it with one. I would happily take a paragon either way. The point is more that these extra OP have a very different effect on different ships, and some ships are really getting hurt by this change because there are OP thresholds that allow good load outs to work.
(And, ahem, to discourage buffing everything: if the majority of ships were in the "needs more OP" category, that would probably be an argument for reining in the other ships...)
Any chance the gates becoming an "active" part of the story?
Has it ever been considered to separate the combat skills from the strategic skills? Either have each level give you a point in the combat/command/practical skills and another in the campaign/colony/management skills so you don't "waste" your skill points or gate some stuff behind levels and leave all the skills to be cool/unique boosts rather than borderline required stuff.
(I ended up changing the fleetwide skill calculations to use recovery costs, btw, and hullmod bonus XP is based on OP cost; 0% bonus XP at 40 op and above. Thanks again, Wyvern! Let's see how this holds up )