I’ve been doing a bunch of work adjusting skills in the last couple of days. Since it’s so fresh in my mind, and since there were a lot of changes, it seemed like it might be interesting to talk about the reasoning behind each change – nothing huge, just a sentence or two describing the thought process. This is an extremely unplanned/impromptu post, and it (probably?) won’t be a very long one. [Editor’s note: this turned out to be overly optimistic.] I’ll try to organize things roughly in the order that I made the changes, so you get a little more of a real view into how this type of work goes sometimes.

Overview
First, a bit of a step back. While there are 4 different skill categories, or “aptitudes” (combat, leadership, tech, industry), there are two broad types of skills – ones that boost the ship you’re piloting, and ones that boost… everything else. From other ships in your fleet (usually including your flagship, though not boosting it as much as personal skills), to things like colonies , campaign travel and so on.

Coming at it fresh, it might seem “obvious” that skills that boost your fleet are way better than skills that boost your flagship. Boosting more things is clearly better than boosting fewer things! This is perfectly reasonable, but like many obvious things, it turns out to be wrong – or at least, more complicated than that.

Under the control of a good pilot, personal-ship skills make a huge difference, and your flagship can make an outsized impact on the battle. However, the amount of difference it makes is dependent on the player’s piloting skill. A player that’s better in piloting will get a lot of mileage out their flagship being stronger. A player that’s not so good at it – or one that just elects to command their fleet and doesn’t even try to pilot a ship themselves – won’t.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the balance between these two types of skills is inherently player-skill-dependent (or, preference dependent, in the case of a player that just wants to command their fleet). This means that there’s no specific value where Personal Ship Skill A will be “balanced” when compared to Fleetwide Skill B. Rather, what we’re adjusting here is the amount of piloting skill a player needs to have to make the personal-ship skills worthwhile.

(There have been suggestions to split the skills to use two separate pools of points so they don’t compete with each other. I don’t want to go off on a tangent about this, so I’ll just note that I am aware of this and feel strongly that it’s not the way I want to go with it. I think this sort of balance and the build decisions that come of it – that evolve as the player’s skill and game knowledge evolve – is interesting.)

Elite skill effects
With that, enough setup! Let’s dive in.

First up: I’ve had a long-term TODO item to improve the “elite” effects of the piloted-ship skills. In brief: those skills each have a special bonus you can unlock. Your officers can only get a limited number of those (more on that later), but you-the-player can unlock all of them. It’s meant to make it feel like there’s a particular reason to pilot a ship yourself – you can’t just get the same bonuses from an officer – but as it stands, the bonuses aren’t quite up to the task.

Mostly, this is fairly straightforward. Not trying to do anything fancy, just slinging a few more bonuses around.

Ballistic Mastery improves ballistic weapon damage and range. The elite effect increases projectile speed – a “soft” bonus (i.e. it’s hard to quantify), though quite good in practice. Still: let’s just throw in an extra 5% damage here, why not. It feels good to have something tangible to go with the soft bonus, to feel like you’re always benefitting in a concrete way.

Target Analysis gives increasingly larger damage bonuses to larger ships – 10% to destroyers, 15% to cruisers, etc. Its elite effect is doing more damage to enemy weapons and engines, knocking them out more quickly – good, but also a bit of a “soft” bonus. Just doing more damage to cruisers and capital ships is frankly good enough for the baseline effect, so: moving the bonus damage to destroyers to the elite portion of the effect, and adding a new 5% bonus damage to frigates for good measure.

(Side note: I’d love to throw around numbers that feel more impressive than 5% here and there. And, sure, in some places that works out. But the way combat works, a few 5% bonuses here and there really, really add up.)

Systems Expertise is a weird one, I just had trouble coming up with a nice bonus for it, so it ended up as a grab-bag of underwhelming effects like reducing malfunctions and overload duration. Not very exciting, no-one plans to overload.  So, alright. Nuking the grab-bag of bonuses is a given, but what to replace it with? It *is* a top-tier skill, so it ought to be strong. How about 10% less damage taken? Just, overall. It’s a thematic fit – being an expert in all of the ship systems could conceivably enable you to secure them more effectively. It’s not a super exciting bonus, but frankly, skills can’t afford to do that too much – go too wild with that, and the AI has a hard time with it, and so do players that are surprised by a particular enemy ship having a given skill.

Helmsmanship is just broadly a bit weak – nothing really wrong with it. So, a quick boost to the percent speed bonus the base effect provides, and another boost to the flat speed bonus the elite effect provides (up to 15% and 10 su respectively), and, done. Again, not trying to do ground-breaking things here – rather, making “safe” changes that shouldn’t break things but still nudge everything in the desired direction, when taken all together.

Combat Endurance has a fun elite effect – you regenerate hull (up to a limit) once it drops below 50%! This isn’t something you can do by other means, and it’s a cool ability to have, but it still suffers from requiring you to be “losing” too much before it activates. So: let’s make it regenerate hull whenever it drops below 100%. That happens often enough that it’s not really a “losing” state anymore. And it has the benefit of keeping a ship with a larger hull buffer for as long as possible, so it’s also stronger after this change, even though the total maximum amount of hull regeneration is the same.

Gunnery Implants has a bonus to the fleet’s ECM rating, a higher one for small ships. This… let’s set this one aside for now; how ECM works needs another look first.

Damage Control is another skill with an elite effect that’s fun but requires you to be losing – if you take massive hull damage in a single hit, it gets reduced a lot. So if you play well and don’t make mistakes, you’re going to see no benefit from the skill, yay. Also if an enemy officer has it, you might be scratching your head when you torpedo their ship and it has way less impact than expected. (See: prior point about not really having that much latitude to go wild with these effects.)

So… executive decision time, nuking that effect from orbit, too. I like it, but it’s got to go. What to do instead, though? Don’t want to stack more damage reductions onto this skill, it already kind of *does* that. How about a nice +15% damage to enemy hull? It makes sense that knowing all about damage control would also let you know how to count *enemy* damage control efforts.

Except, hmm. This kind of means that other damage-reducing skills should also maybe provide a small damage bonus against their chosen type of defense, too. At first this felt like a rabbit hole, but there are only two more skills like this.

Field Modulation boosts shields (and phase cloak), and tacking on a 5% extra damage to shields to the elite effect feels just about right.

Impact Mitigation – the armor-boosting skill – has a strong elite effect (boosting ship maneuverability – the thematic connection is being able to angle the ship to distribute the impacts). So it gets a more modest “10% increased hit strength” – that’s something that factors into the armor damage reduction calculation. Given the already-valuable elite effect, this extra boost more of a nod to the theme of these three skills boosting offense slightly than being a substantial boost in its own right. (With that: the rabbit hole turned out to be fairly shallow.)

Ordnance Expertise increases the ship’s flux stats (in brief, flux builds up when you fire weapons, the more of it you can dissipate, and the higher your ship’s capacity, the more weapons fire you can sustain). Its elite effects isn’t flashy, but it’s good enough. The baseline effect, +2 flux dissipation for every ordnance point spent on weapons, though… well, it’s too strong. This skill is almost an auto-pick on an officer, but more problematically, it changes the balance of the game by letting ships fit too many offense-focused weapons and making things like point-defense less valuable. There are other factors involved here, for sure – some overall reduction in weapon flux generation, a few new low-flux weapon options, other means available for improving flux stats – but Ordnance Expertise is part of the picture, too. So the baseline effect gets a modest reduction – 1.5 instead of 2 points. It doesn’t need to be nerfed into the ground, just enough that other skills might be more competitive against it, so I think it makes sense to start with a conservative change.

A few other skills – Point Defense, Energy Weapon Mastery, Polarized Armor – seem like they’re in a fine place to begin with.

Missile Expertise – the other top-tier Combat skill, alongside Systems Expertise – I’d already toned down the elite effect of, some time ago. Unlike the others, it was way too strong, boosting missile DPS by 50% *and* increasing their hitpoints, resulting in even higher effective damage output.

ECM rating
At this point, the elite skill effect pass was done, with the exception of Gunnery Implants, and it was time to tackle the ECM rating/Electronic Warfare mechanics.

In brief: each fleet gets an ECM rating (from ships, skills, etc). These are compared, and the loser’s weapon range is reduced by the amount they lost by, capped to 10% maximum. The problem is that if an enemy fleet has really high ECM, then having a little ECM doesn’t help you even a bit- they have enough to max out your penalty regardless. And the main current endgame enemy – the [REDACTED] – have very high ECM. So it’s extremely binary, either put nothing in it, or absolutely max it out using every trick in the book. Anything in between is pointless. This isn’t good!

There have been some excellent suggestions made on the forum. (Argh, I can’t find the thread now! I even had the link in my TODO list, but deleted it after making the changes.) Anyway, the main point of that specific suggestion was to have one side’s ECM reduce the other side’s weapon range, so that both sides end up with reduced range, and one side having more ECM doesn’t cancel the other out.

That’s good, but there’s still a thorny question as to how you might make higher ECM values worth it. If 10% ECM rating maxes out the enemy range penalty, then having more isn’t worth it. One option is to have diminishing returns on it, so that as your ECM rating goes up, the range penalty approaches the maximum value more and more slowly. This is harder to explain, though, and for the player to evaluate at a glance. If e. g. at some point getting 5% more ECM gives 0.25% increased range penalty, then… that’s still basically useless, just in a complicated way.

But, well – the point here isn’t necessarily a “perfect system”. Rather, a system that works well for the ECM rating numbers you’re likely to encounter in-game. With that in mind, the new ECM rules:

• ECM rating cuts enemy range by half of the rating, maximum 10%, so this maxes out at 20% ECM rating

And, actually, that’s it. That’s the new baseline ECM rule. Unless you’re investing heavily into ECM, you’re not likely to see values higher than this. And if you *are*, chances are you have the Electronic Warfare skill, which is where a few added rules come in.

Electronic Warfare is another skill that needed some help – all it would do is increase the ECM rating by 1% for each ship you have deployed. Just changing up the ECM rating mechanics is enough to give this skill more value/meaning, but it’d be really nice to spruce it up some, make it something that’s actually fun to take. And, since the skill lets you reach higher ECM rating values (i.e. quite doably above 20%), it should provide some benefit when you do.

The fun part:

• The EW skill lets your ships capture combat objectives much more quickly, and from a longer range

Five times more quickly, to be exact, and from 1000 longer range. Another “soft” effect, but being able to capture objectives more quickly and reliably is huge. Imagine sending a frigate to capture a Comm Relay, an enemy frigate gets there at the same time, they have a bit of a fight, neither side able to chase the other off for long enough to complete the capture. Or, instead, as both frigates approach, yours captures the relay almost immediately, before they are even in contact, and you’re able to deploy additional ships right away.

The high-values-provide-a-benefit part:

• With the EW skill, ECM rating values above 20% reduce the maximum range penalty from enemy ECM, by half of the excess ECM rating

So if you have 30% ECM rating, the maximum range penalty you’d suffer is 5%. At 40%, the penalty is countered entirely.

Which does mean that values above 40% are wasted, but they’re not very likely unless you’re really aiming to get them, and if they don’t help, why would you be? It also means that if the enemy fleet has 40% ECM rating and Electronic Warfare, then having an ECM rating between 0 and 20% does not help you any – the range penalty gets cancelled out completely by enemy ECM. Less than ideal, but enemy fleets won’t often have a rating that high, and overall we still have a *much* wider range of ECM values that matter.

Going back to Gunnery Implants and its elite bonus – increasing your fleet’s ECM rating is nice, though now the bonus is only half as valuable because half of the ECM rating becomes the range penalty. At the same time, I don’t want to increase the bonus since that would make higher ECM rating values easier to reach and we’d be back where we started as far as the problem of “useless” ECM numbers – just, with larger numbers. So: Gunnery Implants already increases weapon range by 15%. Let’s give it an extra 5% as the elite effect. This might be too strong, actually; it might be worth considering toning the base effect down to 10% alongside that change. Something I’m still keeping an eye on!

Cybernetic Augmentation
This is another technology skill that didn’t quite work out. What it does is increase the number of elite skills your officers have by 2. This is a good bonus, and it’s more valuable now that the elite skill effects are stronger, but there are still two problems.

One, making officer skills elite costs “story points”. (Without getting into detail, the key thing is that it’s a fairly limited resource – you can always get more, but that can take a while.) The problem is that two more elite skills for every officer you have adds up to *a lot* of points.

And two, it gives officers too many elite skills! If you recall, the point of those is to make the player feel a little more special. But with all of the possible officer-elite-skill boosters, you end up with officers that have 4 out 6 skills elite (or, 3 out of 5).

So, what to do here? First off, the effect is actually nice, but we can tone it down to 1 elite skill. That solves both problems, and honestly, with elite skills being stronger, the skill might be powerful enough as-is.

But it feels a little empty with just that. It’d be fun to give the skill another effect. And, continuing with the theme of making taking personal-ship skills better, maybe something that contributes to that, too. At first I was thinking of just simply tacking on some kind of piloted-ship effect to an otherwise fleetwide skill, but that didn’t feel quite right. Then, I got an idea!

What if the skill gave an additional bonus based on the number of piloted-ship skills you have? Something like:

• Affects all ships with officers, including the flagship
  • +1% damage dealt per piloted-ship skill you have
  • -1% damage taken per piloted-ship skill you have

The actual effect is generic, but I think it needs to be, at least for the concept to make sense. The idea is, you’re better at making combat augmentations based on your actual combat skills. So either it’s something generic like this – or it’d be something where the bonuses are based on the specific skills you have. The latter would involve basically re-engineering the skill system to support that, so: not happening.

There are still a few minor problems here, though. One, “piloted-ship skill” doesn’t read very well. We could say “combat skill” but that might imply “skills under the Combat aptitude” rather than “skills that benefit your personal ship in combat”. Luckily, all piloted-ship skills can be made elite – it’s an intrinsic property of this kind of skill – so we can just say “elite skill” instead. Since that’s a term directly used in the game, in many places, that should make it clear. And requiring the skill to be elite’d is not a significant mechanical change; you’d want to do that anyway.

The other problem is a 1% bonus just sounds weak and boring. This I think we can get around by just rephrasing it:

• +X% damage dealt (1% per elite skill you have)

Or something similar, where X would be the number of elite skills you currently have. A slightly bigger number, and saves you the trouble of counting up the skills – win/win!

For fun, let’s double this bonus for the flagship only. … and, coming back to it sometime later: let’s only double the “damage dealt” part. Too much stacking of “damage taken” reduction has the potential to get out of hand.

But now, new problem: the skill is probably too strong for where it’s at (the third tier of tech). Luckily, one of the top-tier tech skills – Neural Link – doesn’t quite pull its weight as a top-tier skill – so let’s swap them.

Neural Link
Another tech skill that needed a little something. Probably part of a pattern, but one that ends here!

In this case, it’s on-paper a strong skill – switch between ships instantly! Apply your personal skills to two ships at once! But in practice – it works, but it also doesn’t live up to its top-tier billing. The “apply skills to two ships” part is fine and good, but the fancy maneuvers that come to mind when you hear “instant switching between ships” are mostly too hard to pull off.

Moving it down a tier resolves that, I think – it’s still a strong skill, it still works. There’s just less pressure on it to perform at the absolute top level – and on you as a player, to utilize it to that degree.

While I was there, I took the opportunity to clean up the wording on the skill, and the associated hullmods that make it “work”. For example, the skill tooltip now emphasizes applying your skills to two ships at once – a key aspect of the skill that was a little buried before.

However, another aspect of the skill is that it lets you personally control automated ships! Normally, you have to install an AI core in one (well, you don’t have to, they just get way better if you do) and they fight on your side, but you can’t pilot it yourself. Except for with this skill!

To do that, though, you have to get both top-tier tech skills – Automated Ships (which lets you have those in your fleet in the first place) and Neural Link. This means a heavy skill investment in tech, leaving less points for personal-combat skills, so, there’s a tradeoff.

But if you can pick up Neural Link and Automated Ships right off the bat – without an extra investment in tech – this tradeoff is no longer there, and the balance shifts. The question is, is that ok?

The way you’re able to pilot an automated ship is with the “Neural Integrator” hullmod. So if we say that it’s *not* ok, an easy solution is to make this hullmod be unlocked by Cybernetic Augmentation – the newly-minted top-tier tech skill – instead. It fits well enough thematically.

Neural Integrator
To answer that question, though – we’ve got yet another rough spot to polish up. (This is one case where I’m not going in chronological order – I actually made this change pretty early on, maybe even before the elite skill effect changes.)

The Neural Integrator hullmod has a very high ordnance point cost, meaning a ship sacrifices a lot to have it – weapons, firepower, flexibility. This is mostly tuned around the Radiant-class battleship it lets you personally control. It is extremely powerful in player hands, and this serves to rein it in a bit. Unfortunately, with the addition of a Nova-class battlecruiser – that that ship has fewer ordnance points, but is saddled with the same cost, so it’s hit really hard and is not really worth using with Neural Integrator.

So: instead of having an extreme OP cost, let’s change NI to increase the ship’s deployment points instead, say by 20%. Since it’s percentage-based, the cost is affected more in proportion to the ship’s power, making the Nova a little more competitive. And this also reins in the power of the Radiant a bit more.

With that change, I think it’s ok to have the option to manually pilot an automated ship be more readily available, without a full tech skill point investment. At least, that seems worth experimenting with – and the option to move the NI unlock up a tier is always there.

Hull Restoration
And, finally, we come to Hull Restoration – an extremely useful top-tier Industry skills. It repairs your ships over time, getting rid of d-mods (otherwise-near-permanent/very expensive to remove penalties, e.g. “glitchy sensors” etc), and lets you (mostly) recover your ships without getting new d-mods if they’re destroyed.

The complaint about this one is that as you get into the endgame, it doesn’t help you much in combat. The counter argument is that with this skill, you can afford to lose ships (since you can recover them so easily), and this unlocks more aggressive and potentially stronger playstyles! The counter-counter argument is, why do this if you could invest in skills that make you stronger more directly and just not lose ships in the first place?

I think there’s some truth in both the counter and the counter-counter argument. With that in mind, what sort of in-combat bonus would make sense here? The general idea should still be “you can afford to lose ships”; that’s the overall flavor of Industry. So, I don’t want to the skill to boost ships directly. How about this:

• Pristine or near-pristine ships (with at most 1 d-mod) have their deployment point cost reduced by 10% or 5 points, whichever is less

This maintains the feel of the skill – it’s about using (and sometimes losing/recovering) pristine ships, and you get to use more of them at the same time. It also combines nicely with several other top-tier skills. For example, when used with Support Doctrine, you get even cheaper unofficered ships.

(I’ve also removed the “increased combat readiness” part of the skills; with this change, it was just cluttering things up.)

Support Doctrine
And speaking of Support Doctrine, it’s another skill that I thought might need a little help. I’m not actually a hundred percent on this one, so it’s more “see how it goes”, but – it’s a top-tier leadership skill that competes with “Best of the Best”, which is *really* good (that one lets you build more things into your ships, plus has some other bonuses).

Support Doctrine, on the other hand, gives your ships-without-officers the effects of some skills, and makes them cheaper to deploy. Right now it gives the non-elite effects of 3 skills; the change is to give it a 4th – Ordnance Expertise. This *might* make it too close to an officered ship – an unaugmented officer can have 5 skills, one of them elite. On the other hand, the Support Doctrine skills are not hand-picked by the player and it’s not an amazing combination – just a mix of things that are generally useful to almost any ship. And, if you’re picking it up, you’ll likely also pick up the skill that gives you stronger officers, along the way.

So, not sure about this change – it’s one that I’ll keep an eye on during playtesting, for sure.

(And <checks> this 4000+ word essay wraps up my little spontaneous blog post attempt! This is why I don’t usually do those.)

 

Comment thread here.

 

(P. S. I forgot one! It’s not a combat skill or a top-tier skill, so it fell through the cracks. “Containment Procedures” is a skill that reduces fuel use and lets you recover more fuel. Basically its job – as an industry skill – is to help you run a larger fleet, which the industry aptitude as a whole encourages. It’s works for that, but the fuel reduction bonus it gave is “50% or 25 units, whichever is less”. The 25 units part is fine. The problem is with the 50% part – it really trivializes fuel costs early on, skewing the feel of exploration in a way it was never meant to. So: the change there is reducing it to 25%, while keeping the endgame usefulness just about the same.)

 

Tags: automatic ships, balance, cybernetic augmentation, elite, neural link, skills, there are actual numbers in this post please don't make me regret it