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Suggestions / Shift skill effects from player/officers to part of the ship loadout
« on: December 21, 2023, 11:51:58 PM »
The problem:
One problem with the current officer system is that officer and player-piloted ship skills suffer a bit from combinatorial explosion. To some extent every officer's personality and skills need to be considered for placement on every ship (often scrolling through lists in two GUIs where every officer and every ship cannot be seen/compared at once), while also considering how every permutation of these assignments compares to every other permutation as a whole. This creeps into other areas of fleet customization, such as contemplating alterations to the hull designs to fit possible new officer configurations, with a high time cost to testing these out and undoing/redoing the changes. Obviously players can weed out many of these possibilities, but at higher fleet sizes and officer counts it becomes noticeably cumbersome.
Players can resolve this by:
- gradually homogenizing their officer skills (and personalities, and elite skills...) to only the ones considered universally useful (rather than attempting to work with what they randomly acquired)
- by giving up and ignoring most of the nuances of their officers' varied skills
- by giving up on making major changes to their fleet's structure past a certain point
- or by wasting possibly large amounts of time revising these fiddly little details repeatedly
This gets particularly bad when it's considered that the distribution needs to be at least partially re-evaluated every time a major ship is added or removed from the fleet, or sometimes even just have its weapons/mods changed. I suspect that by the mid-to-late game most players will either work to homogenize their officers or stop engaging with the mechanic in depth, eventually defeating the impact of having randomized officers at all.
Parallel to this, a conflict exists for the player between the more exciting "piloted-ship" skills and the more boring (but effective) fleet-wide skills. It's a conflict that I don't think is resolved easily, as "balancing" the two trends toward making the piloted-ship skills overly powerful (possibly to the point of disrupting the vitally important core combat system) or making the fleet-wide skills increasingly boring and unattractive. (The latest blog post discusses buffing piloted-ship skills to shift the current balance).
A solution:
One starting point is to ask "why do officers exist in the first place?" in military organizations (not that realism matters, but I think following this line happens to work). One answer to that question is pretty straightforward: officers exist to implement the policies or "doctrine" decided upon by the military leadership.
Imagine each ship has a "leadership" rating: an individual ship can be poorly-led or well-led.
Poorly-led ships can be imagined as timid, unable to endure a long engagement, and unable to use the complicated doctrines/procedures/tactics/whatever the player character has developed in their career as a fleet commander. These aspects are currently implemented as officer personality, maximum combat readiness, and player/officer skills.
Well-led ships can be imagined as less resistant to risky/dangerous orders, better prepared for long fights, and capable of complicated doctrines/tactics/whatever that require greater coordination by the crew.
Under this possible new system, when the player levels up they pick between either the ordinary fleet-wide/economic bonuses or unlocking a doctrine that can then be added to any number of ships in the fleet (these "doctrines" can just be the current "piloted-ship" skills). When the player revises a ship's design, they can select within the same screen which of these doctrines its officers will attempt to implement and what its desired aggression level will be (with the maximum number of doctrines and the maximum aggression levels limited by the ship's leadership rating).
Where does leadership rating come from? Some options are:
- A new, expensive, and possibly rare personnel type alongside crew and marines, called "officers" (only "sold" by military markets?)
- Recruited commanders assigned to a ship, as in the current system (but adding only leadership rating or maybe other economic benefits to a ship, not the skills directly)
- Possibly passive player skills that boost fleet-wide leadership in various ways, though these meta-skills risk being particularly boring-but-necessary ways of spending points
- Reintroducing the old varied crew skill levels, but that likely isn't worth the complication
(This hypothetical system could handle fluctuations in leadership rating smoothly. If the desired doctrines/skills for each ship are put in a list that can re-ordered by the player, low priority doctrines can be deactivated first if that ship's leadership rating dips for whatever reason. Similarly, higher leadership enables higher maximum levels of aggressive "personality", but can smoothly fall back to less aggressive settings than the player selected if the rating drops. One simple algorithm for allocating the crew-officers would be to borrow from the old varied crew system, with ships ordered earlier in the player's fleet list being prioritized for crew-officers.)
Benefits:
- All mechanics related to configuring an individual ship are handled in one straightforward place with minimal need to consider the effects of the officer pool on other ships (and no incentive to waste time hunting for "optimal" officers for a configuration the player might abandon later)
- The incentive for the player to avoid the more exciting piloted-ship skills in favor of the more effective fleet-wide skills is removed, without making the piloted-ship skills overly powerful or the fleet-wide skills overly boring
- The only truly new mechanic required is per-ship (or at least fleet-wide) leadership rating, and perhaps the new personnel type
- Crew-officers would allow players to control the cost of their fleet over time though a new factor, rather than only considering each hull's relatively static supply cost
- A new economic tuning parameter to incentivize/disincentivize certain hulls in an interesting way
- A new way to disincentivize crew casualties, if needed
- A thematic and easy way for the player to tweak their AI aggression, possibly avoiding frustration from the AI mishandling increasingly complicated configurations
Drawbacks:
- Making commanders more interchangeable to avoid micromanagement also makes them less individually interesting (but in my opinion the current system strongly incentivizes players to minimize their variance or ignore it)
- Little thought is given here to integrating the 'elite' skill system
- What does this add that hull mods etc do not? (A possibly valid criticism, but one that also applies to the current system, and one answer is that it's more closely linked to the player's experience-point progression than other ship customization systems in the game)
- The skill system has already been though many major revisions and the game is excellent as-is (though the many and continuing revisions might suggest a flaw from the beginning)
One problem with the current officer system is that officer and player-piloted ship skills suffer a bit from combinatorial explosion. To some extent every officer's personality and skills need to be considered for placement on every ship (often scrolling through lists in two GUIs where every officer and every ship cannot be seen/compared at once), while also considering how every permutation of these assignments compares to every other permutation as a whole. This creeps into other areas of fleet customization, such as contemplating alterations to the hull designs to fit possible new officer configurations, with a high time cost to testing these out and undoing/redoing the changes. Obviously players can weed out many of these possibilities, but at higher fleet sizes and officer counts it becomes noticeably cumbersome.
Players can resolve this by:
- gradually homogenizing their officer skills (and personalities, and elite skills...) to only the ones considered universally useful (rather than attempting to work with what they randomly acquired)
- by giving up and ignoring most of the nuances of their officers' varied skills
- by giving up on making major changes to their fleet's structure past a certain point
- or by wasting possibly large amounts of time revising these fiddly little details repeatedly
This gets particularly bad when it's considered that the distribution needs to be at least partially re-evaluated every time a major ship is added or removed from the fleet, or sometimes even just have its weapons/mods changed. I suspect that by the mid-to-late game most players will either work to homogenize their officers or stop engaging with the mechanic in depth, eventually defeating the impact of having randomized officers at all.
Parallel to this, a conflict exists for the player between the more exciting "piloted-ship" skills and the more boring (but effective) fleet-wide skills. It's a conflict that I don't think is resolved easily, as "balancing" the two trends toward making the piloted-ship skills overly powerful (possibly to the point of disrupting the vitally important core combat system) or making the fleet-wide skills increasingly boring and unattractive. (The latest blog post discusses buffing piloted-ship skills to shift the current balance).
A solution:
One starting point is to ask "why do officers exist in the first place?" in military organizations (not that realism matters, but I think following this line happens to work). One answer to that question is pretty straightforward: officers exist to implement the policies or "doctrine" decided upon by the military leadership.
Imagine each ship has a "leadership" rating: an individual ship can be poorly-led or well-led.
Poorly-led ships can be imagined as timid, unable to endure a long engagement, and unable to use the complicated doctrines/procedures/tactics/whatever the player character has developed in their career as a fleet commander. These aspects are currently implemented as officer personality, maximum combat readiness, and player/officer skills.
Well-led ships can be imagined as less resistant to risky/dangerous orders, better prepared for long fights, and capable of complicated doctrines/tactics/whatever that require greater coordination by the crew.
Under this possible new system, when the player levels up they pick between either the ordinary fleet-wide/economic bonuses or unlocking a doctrine that can then be added to any number of ships in the fleet (these "doctrines" can just be the current "piloted-ship" skills). When the player revises a ship's design, they can select within the same screen which of these doctrines its officers will attempt to implement and what its desired aggression level will be (with the maximum number of doctrines and the maximum aggression levels limited by the ship's leadership rating).
Where does leadership rating come from? Some options are:
- A new, expensive, and possibly rare personnel type alongside crew and marines, called "officers" (only "sold" by military markets?)
- Recruited commanders assigned to a ship, as in the current system (but adding only leadership rating or maybe other economic benefits to a ship, not the skills directly)
- Possibly passive player skills that boost fleet-wide leadership in various ways, though these meta-skills risk being particularly boring-but-necessary ways of spending points
- Reintroducing the old varied crew skill levels, but that likely isn't worth the complication
(This hypothetical system could handle fluctuations in leadership rating smoothly. If the desired doctrines/skills for each ship are put in a list that can re-ordered by the player, low priority doctrines can be deactivated first if that ship's leadership rating dips for whatever reason. Similarly, higher leadership enables higher maximum levels of aggressive "personality", but can smoothly fall back to less aggressive settings than the player selected if the rating drops. One simple algorithm for allocating the crew-officers would be to borrow from the old varied crew system, with ships ordered earlier in the player's fleet list being prioritized for crew-officers.)
Benefits:
- All mechanics related to configuring an individual ship are handled in one straightforward place with minimal need to consider the effects of the officer pool on other ships (and no incentive to waste time hunting for "optimal" officers for a configuration the player might abandon later)
- The incentive for the player to avoid the more exciting piloted-ship skills in favor of the more effective fleet-wide skills is removed, without making the piloted-ship skills overly powerful or the fleet-wide skills overly boring
- The only truly new mechanic required is per-ship (or at least fleet-wide) leadership rating, and perhaps the new personnel type
- Crew-officers would allow players to control the cost of their fleet over time though a new factor, rather than only considering each hull's relatively static supply cost
- A new economic tuning parameter to incentivize/disincentivize certain hulls in an interesting way
- A new way to disincentivize crew casualties, if needed
- A thematic and easy way for the player to tweak their AI aggression, possibly avoiding frustration from the AI mishandling increasingly complicated configurations
Drawbacks:
- Making commanders more interchangeable to avoid micromanagement also makes them less individually interesting (but in my opinion the current system strongly incentivizes players to minimize their variance or ignore it)
- Little thought is given here to integrating the 'elite' skill system
- What does this add that hull mods etc do not? (A possibly valid criticism, but one that also applies to the current system, and one answer is that it's more closely linked to the player's experience-point progression than other ship customization systems in the game)
- The skill system has already been though many major revisions and the game is excellent as-is (though the many and continuing revisions might suggest a flaw from the beginning)
