Oh, yay! I'm assuming EXP would scale with fleet captain/admiral "rank" (or level) for those that do have skills, right? Would they pull from the exact same skillset as the player? Or will they have access to unique skills, limited skills, or reduced bonus skills? I ask because I know of some games that give the AI only limited access to the same skillset as the player since the AI can react with no lag, making some skill combos kinda "broken" in AI hands.
Ah, once again, details I don't want to discuss until I'm reasonably sure how they'll actually work
I will say that the "lag" issue seems more relevant for active skills, which there aren't any of.
Oh, and I just remembered what my forgotten question was: What will the EXP progression be like? Currently, I'm in the mid-40's. Going from 45 to 46 requires about 750k exp. The best EXP fight are Heg Def Fleets @ 40k-50k on average. Are you intending to make extreme high levels impractical or is this just a current side-effect of not having much of game implemented yet, so we're lacking sources of EXP from higher ranking sources (like the aforementioned "experienced enemy captains")? And in regards to EXP, is there a level cap? Or will this be like SPAZ where the level cap is only when the player decide to stop grinding? If it's tied to AP, I'm guessing the limit would be around the mid 70's from a practical viewpoint. (With only 4 aptitudes at 10 levels each, 40 AP is all you need to max them all, so level 80 would've been the absolute max for that. Lower since you have to account for starting points given to you.)
There's a soft cap. What you're describing is pretty much you running into it. Ultimately, I'd like the player to have ~25 AP total, from all sources, and around 4x that worth of SP. Maybe a *few* more if they play for an exceptionally long time. Basically, think of it this way - you get to max 2 aptitudes, and 4 skills within each (or however you want to distribute that). Beyond this, the gains will slow down dramatically, so anything there is more of an added bonus than anything you can reasonably plan on getting.
Lastly, will we be able to re-spec a character we've built up later? I sometimes want to try out new char builds, but don't necessarily like having to replay an entire game just to test out a char build. In-game, I can kinda see this as a special "memory adjustment service". Pay a price to have your char respec'ed, but you either have to forgo EXP for a little while while your "new memories" settle in or have a chance losing a level or two and the poins that go with them. (SPAZ had a in-game re-spec penalty of having to sacrifice new exp up to a set threshold before it starts counting towards your char progression again.)
Undecided. It gets tricky when dealing with skills that potentially allowed you to change the game world (such as, "you can command X more outposts now" - what happens when you respec? This isn't a concrete example, just an example of the
type of issue that'll come up.) I'm leaning towards "can't respec", though. You'd still be able to cheat (edit the save file, or use some other possibly-built-in means) if all you're interested is in testing out a build.
