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« on: April 11, 2021, 03:05:51 AM »
Everyone's posting their hot takes on skill balance, so here's mine. The skills are fine, it's the aptitudes that are wrong.
Skills, currently, are grouped into aptitudes mostly based on flavour, and not their gameplay use. An aptitude can have fleet-buffing skills, campaign QoL, piloted ships skills and colony skills all mixed together. Since skills are tiered, this forces players to pick skills they fundamentally don't want to unlock the higher ones. Industry has piloted ship skills at tier 2. Anyone who wants colony skills has to pick a skill that applies only to their flagship. Why is this a thing?
Let's now have a look at the 4 aptitudes:
1) Combat. This one is perfect. Every single skill is about buffing your flagship and nothing else. This is how it should be, no big changes needed.
2) Leadership. Here you have fleet-wide bonuses, officer bonuses, frigate and carrier bonuses (?), colony buffs (??!) and rading buffs (??!). Mostly fine, outside of tier 5 colony stuff.
3) Technology. We have campaign QoL, flagship skills, fleetwide buffs, carrier stuff, phase stuff, loadout bonuses and new ships. All over the place, zero cohesion whatsoever. Yes, flavour-wise, navigation and sensors are "tech stuff", but gameplay-wise they have nothing in common with fleet and loadout buffs.
4) Industry. Campaign QoL, flagship skills, fleetwide buffs, zombie ship stuff, colony skills. No cohesion again. A dumping ground for skills that didn't find a place elsewhere.
Suggested improvement is conceptually simple - make aptitudes defined by their GAMEPLAY effects.
1) Combat remains as is - flagship skills only.
2) Leadership is fleetwide buffs, including officers. Remove civilian hull buffs, remove colony and raiding. ECM and phase corps belong here, not tech.
3) Tech is about more freedom in loadouts, encouraging unconventional loadouts and new ship types. Flagship skills go to combat, fleet buffs go to leadership.
4) Industry is about campaign-level QoL and improvements, including ship salvage and zombie fleets. Navigation and sensors go here, not tech. Flagship skills go to combat. Colony skills are ALL dumped here (I know you wanted them separate so players can't have all 4, this was a bad idea as it forced colony skills into leadership, preventing looping). Alternatively, colony skills are removed entirely and moved to admins (with the admin cap increased for everyone). They are simply too far removed from everything else in the game. Industry players are the ones most likely to want them, but even then I don't think it's optimal to have them there.
If all skills in an aptitude are about the same general area of the game, people will feel a lot less miserable about looping around to get the skills they want, or even getting to high-level ones at all.
