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[Doctorhealsgood]

So uh... Why not use rugged construction ships for derelict ops? The D-Mod effects are diminished.

[Megas]

Not everyone is fond of the armchair general style.

I do not like "armchair" at all.  If I played that way, I know I can dump Combat to get more skilled AI-controlled ships than buffing my flagship to their level.

So uh... Why not use rugged construction ships for derelict ops? The D-Mod effects are diminished.

What available ships have Rugged Construction?  So far, those are Hound, Cerberus, Vanguard, and if player has Automated Ships, all of the playable Derelicts, out of which, only Rampart is good enough up to late-game human fleets.  The rest of the Derelicts are worse than Vanguard, and the Hound is probably better than the 3 DP Derelict frigates.

[Princess of Evil]

What available ships have Rugged Construction?  So far, those are Hound, Cerberus, Vanguard, and if player has Automated Ships, all of the playable Derelicts, out of which, only Rampart is good enough up to late-game human fleets.  The rest of the Derelicts are worse than Vanguard, and the Hound is probably better than the 3 DP Derelict frigates.

A Rampart-only fleet with DO is extremely scary, especially since they're free to recover - you can't exactly lose crew on a drone. Especially since the DP discount, afaik, works on the Automated Ships DP-based debuff.

[basileus]

The main reason I use Ziggurat was to beat Ordos while avoiding min-maxing officers AND having no Leadership skills.  The officers are the biggest problem because they need to be built specifically for the ship, but they take too long to cultivate, which makes changing ships in the fleet painful because the new ships usually need new officers.  Ships are the real main characters analogous to a jRPG.  The officers are the ship's (stat stick) equipment.

If I want to use a conventional fleet, I need Leadership; and if I want my flagship to be on par with the enemy, I need Combat.  No way around that.  That leaves Tech and Industry as the optional trees.

I don't disagree that creating perfect officers is a hassle.  That might not be so bad if it didn't involve so much specialization.  You're not wrong that it tends to lock pilots into being well suited for small subset of ships, which is a disincentive for experimentation.  One thing Alex could consider would be allowing us to move officers into and out of our active officer pool.  (You can do this at present by parking them in Nex Task Groups, but that's too much of a hassle.)

Anyway, going back to the topic of Industry and Hull Restoration in particular, and circling back to Lawrence's attempt to show how bad Industry is.

I don't agree that the only good combat benefits of Industry are Ordinance Expertise and Polarized Armor.  Hull Restoration gives you +15% extra CR, which translates into a late game CR bonus of +5% speed / damage / damage mitigation for the entire fleet.  You don't have to fight the enemy for it with control points.  It's not reduced by having large fleets.  It doesn't only apply to ships with officers. 

But, wait.  There's more, it bumps up autofire accuracy from normal to excellent.

Not done yet.  If you have combined it with Combat Endurance, then all of your ships have 100 starting CR for +10% flat bonuses, and you can either safely field those ships in repeated battles without having to worry about malfunctions or less than excellent accuracy or just keep your ships in one super-long single battle.  Either way, it's not an issue to deal with 5 Very Large, Low Tech Grand Invasion Fleets + Special Task groups.  40+ Legion / Onslaughts and innumerable even tankier Moras  .  (Field Repair is also quite helpful for situations where you're fighting such impossible huge forces that you're going to need to redeploy your ships several times during a single battle to wipe the entire enemy fleet.  Very high starting CR is sine qua non because even the most powerful of ships won't win a serious fight if it starts in the malfunction range.)

Point being?  For the late game content, Hull Restoration is one of the strongest, most well-rounded combat skills in the game, super flagship cheese not withstanding.  It gives speed, damage, damage mitigation, accuracy, and endurance to the entire fleet, and it doesn't have the sort of fleet comp restrictions that the lesser fleetwide combat buff skills do.

What more do you want?  Seriously.  Now we can start a new thread where Serentis and PoE spell out how to properly use DO.  When I described Industry as "viable" I was just trying to be polite because it doesn't feel good when someone comes into a thread, shoots your points down, and flexes hard.

[Doctorhealsgood]

What available ships have Rugged Construction?  So far, those are Hound, Cerberus, Vanguard, and if player has Automated Ships, all of the playable Derelicts, out of which, only Rampart is good enough up to late-game human fleets.  The rest of the Derelicts are worse than Vanguard, and the Hound is probably better than the 3 DP Derelict frigates.

Gamma Sentry(s) can spam an insane amount of Salamanders in quick succession. Probably enough to saturate PD and successfuly disable engines so there is that if you wanna meme. Frustratingly there is only enough automated ship budget for exactly two Alpha Ramparts without any reduction in CR so you can't exactly fit them in. Unless you either eat the CR cut or go with Beta Ramparts instead i guess? On that case you could fit 5 of them... But burning 5 out of 30 fleet slots on salamander memes and losing out on 2 extra skills for your ramparts feels unwise and you might be better off adding a third rampart if you go Beta. Is there any small missile mount that would be fine for fast missile rack spam? Because i don't know any.

A Rampart-only fleet with DO is extremely scary, especially since they're free to recover - you can't exactly lose crew on a drone. Especially since the DP discount, afaik, works on the Automated Ships DP-based debuff.

And just as i was finishing writing this i just remembered that DO might work on the automated ships limit and my numbers are off now. On that case it is 3 Alpha Ramparts very slightly past the limit or 4 Beta Ramparts for exactly the same DP value. (If my math is right that is lol)

[Megas]

I don't agree that the only good combat benefits of Industry are Ordinance Expertise and Polarized Armor.  Hull Restoration gives you +15% extra CR, which translates into a late game CR bonus of +5% speed / damage / damage mitigation for the entire fleet.  You don't have to fight the enemy for it with control points.  It's not reduced by having large fleets.  It doesn't only apply to ships with officers.  ...

+15% CR from Hull Restoration needs three s-mods, which requires BotB.  Without it, only +10% with two s-mods.  In any event, the bonus CR makes Hull Restoration an alternative Crew Training, a tier 1 (Leadership) skill, thus Hull Restoration is only a tier 1 skill in terms of combat power, which is not enough to make up getting a forced fourth filler skill in tier 1 or 3 on the way from tier 2 to capstone.  Crew Training applies to up to 240 DP worth of combat ships, which is the most I can deploy in a fight without losing ships and sending replacements.  And unlike older releases, bringing more ships in reserve (to swap into after one fight to give the first ships a breather while reserve ships fight another battle) is a bad idea anyway because it kills the xp% multiplier at the very least.

For CR from Hull Restoration to be impressive, it needs to give at least double the CR it gives today, more than Combat Endurance or Crew Training can ever give.  Or instead of more CR, more combat bonuses.

All the benefits of having 100% CR, they are nice, but I cannot rely on max CR for every fight.

[basileus]

All of the Combat skills, except for two, are tier 1.  Does that mean that they either are or should be worse for combat than tier 2 skills in other trees?  While in many games, skill tiers tend to denote clear demarcations in power, that's not really how Starsector works, considering that capstone skills are available during the early game by level 5.  Even you seem to realize how the skills seem to have been slotted all wrong based on their combat power.  Have you considered that maybe that's a feature and not a bug?

As soon as I reviewed the new skill system, it seemed to me that the purpose of the skill tiers wasn't to have a natural progression in combat prowess with clear demarcations, as is the case in many games; but rather, it seemed intended to prevent exploitative gimmicks leading to snowballing in the early game.

Something like Bulk Transport > Automated Ships > Derelict Operations / Hull Restoration.  Then go find a system with a bunch of Domain Era Probes, and go nuts.  You almost wouldn't need to come back to the Core Worlds.  Hull damage is irrelevant because no crew in combat.  No need to either come look for pilots or level them up because of AI cores.  Always able to choose the best officer skills.  Negligible monthly upkeep because of the lack of either combat crew or human officers.  Bad fight?  Just scuttle a ship or two and keep going.  Low fuel or supplies?  Just scuttle a ship or two and keep going.  Derelicts and Remnants are a dime a dozen.

This might be exactly what some participants in this thread are doing, but at least they have to earn their stripes on the way to level 10.  Alex would have a really hard time keeping the game interesting for vets without running off all newbies if he didn't try to do some of the things he does to prevent the worst of the gimmicks.

All the benefits of having 100% CR, they are nice, but I cannot rely on max CR for every fight.

This is true, but by the point that a 100 CR baseline fleet has given up all of its bonuses, it can still fight with an expectation of victory 2 more times without any recovery time.  A fleet running primarily on the baseline CR would begin with 40% CR.  How's that fight going to go?

No one has suggested that the end game fights are too difficult for them to complete in their preferred style.

Exhaustion is the only conceivable scenario where an end game fleet in the hands of an experienced player should either lose or be forced to disengage / retreat.  (Unless they've deliberately made the game harder for themselves.)  There is a fixed minimum CR decay from deployments.  Higher baseline CR means more frequent deployments are possible before a fleet becomes too exhausted to fight.

So now it's just a question of what people are optimizing for.  Do you want to win fights as quickly as possible during best case situations?  Do you want to win fights with the best possible profitability in terms of supplies consumed vs gained?  Do you want to be able to win under the worst case situations possible?  Do you optimize for flagship power or fleet power?  For active play styles or passive play styles?

I realized quite early on in this thread that the arguments were circular because people were making different assumptions about what players were supposed to be optimizing for, even when it comes to combat.  Some participants are trying to argue that they are making objectively correct and empirical judgments about optimal play and balance, but that's not what's happening here.

This isn't a scientific inquiry.  It's more like a political debate.  At the top are assumptions.  The assumptions are about what all people's priorities are supposed to be.  Now from those assumptions, people are crafting what they believe to be perfectly correct and logically consistent arguments to reach their obviously correct conclusions.  All of which may be correct, if everyone agrees on the same initial value judgment.  The reason most political debates never end is because so many people have difficulty conceiving that others might have different values and therefore different priorities.  Differing priorities leads to differing optimal solution paths, with prevents neat and tidy solutions that all parties will agree on.  This is why we can't have nice things.

[Megas]

All of the Combat skills, except for two, are tier 1.  Does that mean that they either are or should be worse for combat than tier 2 skills in other trees?  While in many games, skill tiers tend to denote clear demarcations in power, that's not really how Starsector works, considering that capstone skills are available during the early game by level 5.  Even you seem to realize how the skills seem to have been slotted all wrong based on their combat power.  Have you considered that maybe that's a feature and not a bug?

It may not have been intended for tier 2 combat skills to be necessarily more powerful than those in Combat, but Ordnance Expert and Gunnery Implants at least turned out to be noticeably stronger than them.  Energy Mastery is mostly for close-ranged specialists (lame for large ships that fight near or past the 1000 su range), and Polarized Armor is vital for those without shields but nothing spectacular for most others.

Tier 1 = Most Combat and Leadership skills, some Tech and Industry campaign skills.
Tier 2 = Tech and Industry combat skills.
Tier 3 = Tech fleet (combat) skills, Industry campaign (non-combat) skills.
Tier 4 = Leadership officer skills (and for human officers only, Combat capstones)
Tier 5 = Capstones

(I sometimes forget that tier 3 Leadership is actually tier 4 because the Officer Training/Management skills have three skill prereqs like officers' combat capstones, while Tech and Industry skills between tier 2 and capstones only have two prereqs.)

I have little to no problem with the Combat tree aside from officers needing fewer levels than the player to get the Combat capstones.  Officers can easily get both capstones while player needs to spend too many skill points to do so.  (Looks like a favor for those who prefer armchair combat.)

I do not have any problem with Leadership other than envying how strong it is as a whole.  I think it is the most powerful tree in the game.

I have no problem with Tech up to tier 2.  After that, Technology seems okay in theory (fleet skills offering fleet combat power like Leadership), but I have gripes with some skills, and I think the capstones are underwhelming despite unlocking weird fun stuff, which I wrote about before.

I have no problem with Industry up to tier 2, but after that getting the campaign QoL is not worth sacrificing the combat power (aside from possibly Derelict Ops.), even if the QoL is fun or mitigates campaign annoyances.

I think capstones should be worth more than one low-tier combat skill worth of power.

(Not sure if all that answers your question satisfactorily.)

This is true, but by the point that a 100 CR baseline fleet has given up all of its bonuses, it can still fight with an expectation of victory 2 more times without any recovery time.  A fleet running primarily on the baseline CR would begin with 40% CR.  How's that fight going to go?

100% CR means Hull Restoration and BotB (otherwise, it would be 95% CR) and either Crew Training or Combat Endurance.  A similar fleet without Hull Restoration would be 85% CR, not quite baseline.  If fleet has both Crew Training and Combat Endurance on all of the important ships, it would be 100% CR anyway for the ships with Combat Endurance.

But the difference of 10 to 15% is basically one fight, provided the ship is not too damaged for another round after fighting.  The two ships that need to rely on stacking CR are Ziggurat and Radiant with a Beta+ core.  Ziggurat needs more than 90% to fight two battles in a row, and Radiant with Alpha core starts with 20% CR (though practically 35% since Combat Endurance is a given) and needs at least one more source of CR beyond Combat Endurance to go above yellow.

[basileus]

I guess my biggest question is what, specifically, you guys want to see added.

It was not obvious to me what you were asking for when you talked about tier powers for skills.  I now have a clearer picture of what you mean by that.

I'd rather just see specific suggestions of what you guys would need to consider the Industry tree viable for endgame so that others can see if they seem to unbalancing or not?

I have no philosophical objection to adding combat power to Industry, but I am concerned that it could cause more balance problems in the early game than it solves in the late game, if not designed carefully.  I, personally, don't typically feel the need to farm Ordos in the current version of the game.  If I end up fighting Ordos, it typically ends up being the result of the only convenient gate for a particular region of the sector turns out to be in a high system.

In order to farm the Ordos, I would either have to want alpha cores or they would have to drop good weapons that are impossible to get any other way, and there would need to be new, more challenging content added that necessitated fielding those weapons.  Right now, that would only apply to their strike craft, which aren't superior at their OP costs.

You're bound to end up with 3-4 Alpha Cores from a decent exploration phase, which in my experience is more than enough.  Even if I go with Automated ships, it's always better to use a gamma or beta instead.  I don't want them to manage my colonies because I'd rather get free story points each month from XP for profitable colonies.  Plus, there's no real advantage to making your system defenses stronger, since Nex just scales the invasion fleets anyway.  Special Task Groups are a much better solution.

So they are useful on the spaceport of my two personally managed money makers, and and also if I am trying to do Cryorevival or the Coronal thing, but it's very rare for either of those to be a factor for me.

It's difficult for me to understand what this Ordos farming phase is about and why it's so much more important to balance for than the earlier parts of the game, which is why I'd like to know what, specifically, you guys have in mind.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

I guess my biggest question is what, specifically, you guys want to see added.

Why, I'm glad you asked!

To quote myself, the cool thing about Hull Restoration is that it's quitessentially an Industry skill that's mostly QoL. BUT if you have a skill from another tree(in this case BotB) then you can improve it and make it combat-related. You could make every Industry skill work this way. For example:

Bulk Transport + Tactical Drills = Militarized Subsystems costs no OP
Salvaging + Sensors = +50% sensor range in combat
Field Repairs + Electronic Warfare = doubles the ECM bonus(does anyone ever take Electronic Warfare?)
Containment Procedures + Flux Regulation = the 10% flux bonus applies to total ship flux, not just base flux
Makeshift Equipment + Phase Coil Tuning = adds 10 to the max phase ship deployment pool
Inudstrial Planning + Fighter Uplink = +20% fighter replacement rate(or with Cybernetic Augmentation: makes your character as good as an Alpha AI core when governing colonies. But that's not combat-related)
Derelict Operation + Automated Ships = the deployment cost reduction from D-mods also applies to the DP cost for calculating total automated ships pool

(I tried to match skills 1:1 as they appear in the trees and make some sort of sense. Also I spent like fifteen minutes on it so go easy on me especially when it comes to balance)

This way you can get the QoL Industry skills early in the game and, as you keep playing, you unlock minor combat bonuses from them by combining them with Leadership/Technology.

[Brainwright]

Sorry folks, but picking Derelict Ops and having no means of removing crippling D-Mods like Compromised Storage or Faulty Automated Systems is dumb.  Really, really dumb.

Doubling up capstone skills is a better alternative to no alternative at all.

[basileus]

(I tried to match skills 1:1 as they appear in the trees and make some sort of sense. Also I spent like fifteen minutes on it so go easy on me especially when it comes to balance)

This way you can get the QoL Industry skills early in the game and, as you keep playing, you unlock minor combat bonuses from them by combining them with Leadership/Industry.

Balance can be addressed through playtesting.  Making the combat perks tied to synergies with other skill trees seems like a good solution to avoiding too much early game power creep.

[Megas]

You're bound to end up with 3-4 Alpha Cores from a decent exploration phase, which in my experience is more than enough.  Even if I go with Automated ships, it's always better to use a gamma or beta instead.  I don't want them to manage my colonies because I'd rather get free story points each month from XP for profitable colonies.  Plus, there's no real advantage to making your system defenses stronger, since Nex just scales the invasion fleets anyway.  Special Task Groups are a much better solution.

...

It's difficult for me to understand what this Ordos farming phase is about and why it's so much more important to balance for than the earlier parts of the game, which is why I'd like to know what, specifically, you guys have in mind.

Low-grade cores (on Remnants) are fine against human fleets, but against Ordos, I want Alpha for stronger ship, especially when my ships are generally inferior to Ordos that have more DP and skills than the player fleet.

If I want Radiant, if my target is human bounties, I use Gamma core for maximum CR.  Against enemy Ordos, I go for Alpha.  (Beta still takes a big chunk of CR from Radiant, even if the penalty is a somewhat less severe than Alpha.)

For Ordos, the main reason for me to farm them is XP to stockpile story points.  The main reason why I use solo Ziggurat is higher +xp% multiplier against human fleets when I do not feel like fighting Ordos.  (I tried two Neural Linked Onslaughts instead, but their +xp% multiplier was less than solo Ziggurat, and weaker than lone Z too.)

[gladius2metal]

My main issue with Hull Restoration is that it is extremely "gamey" and makes little sense even within the game universe.
One random d-mod, ok, but it takes 30 days no matter if that d-mod is on a capital ship or a dinky frigate.  Most mods, skills, etc. apply differently depending on the hull size.

What I did is, take ships with d-mods out for my various missions to get them restored over time. Meanwhile, all the ships sitting in the station or colony, are not getting touched?

I suggest that one would get a mod that is limited in numbers (e.g., 3) called "restoration crew" that one can put on a ship, this crew then removes d-mods over time, once finished the mod is "removed" and the number goes up again. Additionally, restoration time is dependent on hull size, so it is rather fast with a frigate, but can take quite long on capitals. Additionally, it would be great if the restoration speed is faster if the ship is in storage.