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Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills
« on: April 14, 2024, 08:03:17 AM »Which comes back to my original question to the posters in the thread: Is the game too hard, too easy, or about right in difficulty?Too easy for no flagship playstyles.
Thank you for answering the question. Which is a good data point, especially coming from you, since I've got ample evidence you can play the flagship style fine.
You could for example instead of reducing officer and core levels, simply multiply the effects of skills on the flagship (and only the flagship) by a factor of 1.25, or 1.5 or even 2, in concept similar to how carrier skills get a 1.5 multiplier on officered ships.
One thing I'd been thinking about for a *while* is finding items that, when right-clicked, grant the player a unique combat or two. Something very limited - you wouldn't get amazing at combat off those alone - but it could be a fun way to approach this sort of thing.
Gameplay and design wise, this isn't that different from the pre-chosen character builds but limited to one path. It just makes doing certain actions or quests feel mandatory on repeat playthroughs, which is not a bad thing as long as its entertaining to do. On the plus side, unique skills to the player are really handy balancing levers, since they don't impact anything else.
And, yeah, it's a fair point about officers having too many elite skills; that definitely got a little out of hand. I've pulled it back a bit with CyberAug going from +2 elites to +1, but 3/6 elites is still a lot.
I feel like you've chosen a harder balancing path by coupling the player to NPCs and end game challenges so tightly in terms of skills. Your balance levers are elite skills number and maximum level for the officers. Whereas in a more decoupled system, where perhaps officers and AI cores alike only ever get 1 elite skills, period, you also get the lever of changing elite power itself like you did in the recent release. In such a system, AI cores could remove all the elite skills (not even 1 - they are alien in a sense) and just get a bonus Hypercognition skill, like they do with Administration where you actually did break the player/officer/core symmetry. Or maybe instead of selecting elites, you pick an AI Hypercognition specialization. Defense, Offense, Support. Something like that. Make them orthogonal to people, they're non-human, let the "skills" reflect that. It also gives you something you can use tune end game difficulty very easily without changing anything else, and potentially adds variety to encounters. Instead of just having all the skills, now an Offensive Radiant with very different and large bonuses will feel very different to a Support Radiant and a bit of variety at the end. Right now an Alpha Core Radiant is an Alpha Core Radiant, because you haven't left yourself the option of customizing, simply applying the same 90% of all elite skills - which mirrors player flagship power.
Personally, since I almost never pick the +2 officer skill, you could probably drop the elite skill from Officer Training and people would still take it. +1 base skill on 8 officers isn't bad, especially compared to most fleet wides. As for Cybernetic Augmentation, you could double the damage reduction for the flagship as well and remove the +1 elite skill and call it a day. Again, this isn't that different from simply giving the player's flagship larger bonuses - here it is just more and different bonuses. So easier to balance.
And if no flagship playstyles are truly true strong, this is a sensible way to go - weaken a few fleetwides. Even if they are not truly strong, well, then you've got levers to adjust that are orthogonal - you can weaken or strengthen end game threats (hypercognition), weaken or strengthen flagship (elite skills), and weaken or strengthen no flaship style (fleet wides) relatively independently.