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Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills
« on: April 17, 2024, 11:24:37 PM »Oh damn I really like the multiple offciers per ship idea. It even fits thematically, i.e. if you have, say, an Engineering Officer with Ordnance Expertise and Polarized Armor you instantly understand that's the "I'm giving her all she's got cap'n" guy.
Yeah in some ways they become not really "officers" per se, more like "specialists", since they specialize in one or two skills, and it makes sense that a ship has multiple people who have specialized into their niche roles. I mean in some sense it's unrealistic that you get this one guy on this ship who is so good that he's specialized into 5 or 6 different areas enough to make a significant contribution to the ship's performance, and what are the rest of the crew doing? Mopping floors? My headcanon is that officers really bring a team of experienced underlings with them, and you're really hiring the whole team (which is what makes them so expensive compared with regular crew), so it's not really just they themselves making the contribution by their lonesome, but it's still a bit odd.
And drawing all the extra portraits since the average number of officers per fleet would double/triple/quadruple!
David gets to bill for overtime!
This is not something you can just claim is obviously true. Constraints and limits are what makes a game a game and not just playing make-believe. Any change to the skill system (short of just granting more skill points without doing anything else) is going to take away some options that previously existed. Should we therefore decide that changing the skill system is inherently bad?
Uh well all games are more or less make-believe, so not sure what you mean. Yes you need some constraints in a game, the question is how much, and for a sandbox game, you want to let the player decide how much they want to lean in one direction at the expense of another without overly constraining it. A flag officer, assuming it would be the current limit of level 5 or level 6, would constrain the player to basically put at least 5 and at most 6 skill points onto the flagship. Any player who prefers putting 4 or less points, or 7 or more points, would be negatively impacted by it and prefer it less than the current system. So you would need to account for the type of player who wants to play with a super ship as well the type of player who doesn't want to pilot and is fine with letting their ship be a "dump stat" so they can put points toward the fleet as a whole instead. You need to justify how those different types of players would prefer the new system more - provide an explanation for what benefit it would bring over the current system, or address how it would correct those shortcomings - instead of just saying "Constraints and limits are what makes a game a game" or "Because it's not fun".
If you went with a hull-size limitation with the max number of officers allowed, you’ve capped the ceiling of the smaller ships. Something like Wolfpack Tactics might bump them up one more officer, but even then, you’ll never see a Frigate with like 8 skills. That’s not necessarily a negative but a consequence of the system.
Yes, I'm not sure if a size-based cap on officers per ship is really needed, I think it's more just for flavor. I mean the thought of having 4 officers and yourself squished into a Kite and everything. Realistically if you're going with a Wolfpack fleet, you're likely to prefer putting one or two officers in each frigate anyway instead of dumping them all onto a couple of frigates, unless you're going for Support Doctrine, so that limitation may not even be needed.
I’m unsure I would want a Pokémon mentality to officers. Gotta catch ‘em all. To imitate the same base level of power of 8 Level 5 officers as current, you’re talking 30-40 of these lesser officers. That’s just swimming in them. Again, not negative per se but has implications.
Agree. It changes the feeling of the officers from a handful of subordinates (like say, the VPs of a company where you're the boss) to essentially a commodity like weapons or blueprints. However, it would address a number of the issues with the current system, namely with how difficult it is to get officers with the right skills you want, encouraging more wolfpack play, and so forth.
Also, would officers level? If so, what does that look like? If not, it sounds like it’s more about amassing them than developing them.
I was thinking of them as essentially static and didn't consider them leveling. Presumably the way to get better officers is to fight harder fights where more officers with 2 skills and elite skills would show up. (In other words, if you fight d-modded pirates, you'd get regular one-skill officers, if you fight Hegemony Starfortress or harder contact deserter bounties, you could get better officers.)
@Vanshilar: just wanted to say, thank you for laying out your thoughts! This was a very interesting and useful read.
Oh to be clear, I didn't come up with the idea. It was someone else who brought it up, probably BigBrainEnergy below. I just found it compelling because it addresses many of the issues that players have raised about the current officer system.
FWIW I think the current system is mostly fine as it is. The only things I feel like should be tweaked are how the officer leveling system works; I would rather choose any skill than choose from a pre-selected subset for them, since if the given options for level 5 are not what I want, I'm not going to just stick with it, I'm going to toss the officer and find a new one, or just save-scum. I just shamelessly save-scum until I get the right combination of skills for each officer.
The other is some way to "store" officers that aren't needed for the current trip at hand or change their skills. This isn't as critical now when there's basically only one type of endgame enemy, but presumably in the future when there are several different types of endgame enemies, each perhaps needing different skills to handle them, there would need to be a way to swap out officers as needed or change their skills as needed for different types of enemies that you're going on a trip to fight. Like dropping them off at your colony to retrain their skills (and take them off your roster temporarily) or something.
(The many-officers-per-ships idea is - it has some positives to it, but it's so different then what the game looks like now that it'd be pretty massive trying to rework all of it, and it's also way, way more complicated.
Well, yes and no. In terms of how ships operate, I think it'd actually be pretty similar to current, by just taking the existing code machinery, and add a layer before it that takes officers on a ship, check for whether or not any of them have each of the 14 combat skills, and then return that array to the rest of the existing code. But yes obviously there'd be a lot more code that needs to be written in terms of officer generation, putting multiple ones on a single ship, creating enemy fleets with officers, etc., so there'd be a lot of backend code needed to make it work.
Balance-wise, in some ways it'd be pretty similar to current, i.e. more or less the same combat skills (maybe Systems Expertise and Missile Specialization would need to be toned down if they're "just another skill" instead of capstones), and there's already the 3 non-combat trees, so while there may be tweaks here and there to make it fit, I don't see that as a big change. Probably fine-tuning the number of officers, etc.
I think the biggest issue is from a design standpoint, i.e. whether or not it'd fit with your idea of how officers should feel in the game for the player. As FooF mentioned above, this makes them more into a collect-em-all mentality (like weapons) rather than handpicked advisers type of feel, once they get into the dozens. Then they just become another commodity to manage. On the other hand I've always felt like the "characters" in the game are the ships, not the officers, which I treat as just bonus stats, but that's just me.
There's also the matter of priorities, i.e. there's already been multiple skill overhauls and such, and is it really worth trying to reinvent the wheel again when there are a lot of other things to work on with the game. I mean the skills system already more or less works, the officer system already more or less works, but there are a lot more directions the game can go in in terms of expanding on the story, creating different endgame enemies, etc. And of course even if it does get put in, then players would find new problems to complain about with it, etc., so it's not like it'll solve everything.
Compared to Vanshilar's suggestion, I think each officer having 1 skill is better than giving them 2 because it would solve a lot of potential frustration with skills being bundled together that you don't want on the same ship.
Oh I think of it as officers with 1 or 2 (with maybe the rare ones in the sector having 3) skills more to differentiate between them (i.e. increase the variety of officers that you can get, rather than just 14), and also to help reduce how many officers the player would need. And so yes if a ship can for example have 4 officers, in theory it could have up to 8 of the perfect set of skills if you got lucky with that, but in practice it'd be more like 5 or 6 skills, similar to the current setup. (Skills wouldn't stack, i.e. if two officers on a ship have same skill, it would only count once, so yes the second one would be redundant.) How easy it is to find the perfect set would just depend on how often you could get them; I would think it's something along the lines of after each (significant) battle, you get 1 or 2 that you can pick up, or something. Ones that the player don't want simply get discarded, so it's no big deal that way. So it's something that takes a long time to get the "perfect" set, but you should be able to get "pretty good" sets without too much difficulty, especially since you can mix and match them and you can improve on each ship piecemeal.
I never considered putting officers on the player flagship, but it would make perfect sense to be able to jam them in there and all their skills get treated as elite while the player is present (an idea which I find both thematically and mechanically satisfying). Plus the "captain" (now second-in-command) could determine your flagship's personality during autopilot.
Yeah to me it nicely ties to why your flagship can be so powerful (have more skills than other ships, and have more elite skills than other ships). It has nothing to do with your player character personally but is something that the flagship of fleets are simply able to do, by virtue of the admiral commanding the fleet onboard that ship. So in this way, yes the player can have his super ship if he wants (perhaps because the flagship can have one or two officers more than the usual limit), but since that's drawing from the total number of officers allowed in the fleet, then it means there are fewer officers for the other ships. This makes that flagship vs fleet tradeoff much more transparent, whereas right now the flagship vs fleet tradeoff happens more in the skills system, leading to the issues raised.
Also it may be interesting to fight against, since (sufficiently large) enemy fleets will also presumably have a flagship as well. So that flagship essentially serves as the "end boss" of that fleet basically. And of course since [REDACTED] are all elite skills, they're essentially all flagships, but then again, they're also endgame.
Even with 40 officers I think it wouldn't be too hard to make the interface work, they only have 1 skill, so you can shrink down their portrait to about the same size with a name over the top like:
Then stack up 5 of these per row.
Put the personality underneath, dull and grey, while the captain's is bright white to indicate that it is active.
Oh I think the interface would be the easiest part, the officers would just have their portraits and skill icons in a row next to each ship, like the current but just line up the officers for each ship in a row. I'm no good with graphics so can't really draw what I mean. The problem though is some mod or another would want officers to each have 345729 skills which would mess up the whole interface.