I like the deliberate simplicity in the surveying mechanic- I feel like there would be enough to keep track of (I'm assuming) with the setting up of outposts and markets afterwards.
Yeah, exactly! Doesn't feel like the right place to add a ton of complexity to, if it's just something on the way to outposts and not a final destination.
I do wonder though, how many campaign events will involve surveying, like faction missions, and whether or not surveyable planets might have existing civilization, presumably cut off after the Collapse.
Don't know yet
Surveying itself is core, but stuff like this, while extremely cool, is more optional - so it's a question of picking out the bits that fit in best with the core stuff.
Speaking of discovering unexpected things, it'd be pretty amazing to survey a planet and discover that there's a rudimentary colony there already; one that has been isolated since the collapse and never managed to reach anyone or get back to space. There's bound to be a few, especially on the low-risk worlds.
Yeah, that one particularly would be very neat.
... even get your ships magnetically dragged in
Black holes have that mechanic on lockdown.
Ton of disposable ship could become viable at some point, but 10 officers softcap and 25 ships total hardcap seriously limit efficiency of such approach in current version. Of course, it's probably subject to change...
Well, 10 officers is probably going to require skill point investment. And if multiple fleets are a thing... as you say, a lot is subject to change.
As far as making a survey skill or set of survey skills which are useful to have at any level and not something that you'd either be guaranteed to never have or always take to max rank, I might suggest treating the survey skills as data interpretation skills rather than data collection skills. You perform a survey and collect complete, accurate survey data regardless of your survey skill, but the survey report is only as accurate as your skill in data interpretation allows it to be. A zero-skill surveyor might interpret the data to indicate that the location has a feature with a value of X, with the true value X' being within 50% of X in either direction; higher survey skills would reduce the maximum error. The value of X would preferably be set the first time the player viewed the survey data at a given survey skill level, so as to avoid repeatedly viewing the survey reports to collect enough random points around the true value to find a much more accurate estimate of the true value than that which is reported in the game.
You could be assumed to keep the raw data in storage somewhere and reevaluate the data each time your character's survey skill improves, regenerating the survey report to provide a more accurate interpretation of the data, which removes the incentive to put off surveying until the character maxes out survey skill (or at least reaches a point where the accuracy of the report is within acceptable limits), and because the data itself is complete and accurate you have little reason to redo the survey "in case something was overlooked the first time around."
If it's felt to be necessary, you could also add a merchant type that can be paid to provide a higher-accuracy interpretation of survey data that the player has collected, so as to reduce the risk of making a bad choice for outpost placement for players with low survey skill; if the cost is sufficiently high, if the maximum accuracy of reports gained by the merchant is still worse than the maximum accuracy of reports generated by a player character which maxes out survey skills, or if there are other drawbacks to giving the merchant access to your survey data (e.g. the survey report is now in the public domain or is the merchant's property and so you cannot legally sell it or cannot legally sell it at full value, or it can come to the attention of factions with which the merchant is aligned and result in fleets of that faction paying unwanted visits to an area you were considering setting up shop in, or it makes the surveyed world a potential location for other factions to set up shop if they previously had no information on the area or were in no rush to set up there because they thought no one else was interested in it), you'd still have an incentive to improve the character's survey skill, but it wouldn't necessarily be essential.
This feels like it makes a lot of things more complicated. For example, market condition effects would need to care about how accurate your survey of them was. Do things (such as ore mining) function at the estimate effectiveness or the real one? If it's the estimated one, then it doesn't make sense for over-estimates to exist.
Then, every time you level up the skill, you have to either be notified of all the changes (of which there would be many, right? pretty much every condition would change a bit) or you'd have to go looking through all of them.
Let's take a step back: what's the benefit here? What problem is this trying to solve, compared to the approach from the blog post?
As far as tying survey speed to survey skill goes, my own opinion is that it'd be better not to do so. I tend to find that things that increase the rate at which a task is performed have either so much of an effect on the time taken as to be nearly essential or so little practical impact on the time taken as to be nearly worthless, and, worse, a lot of times a large part of the reason for getting them is tedium-reduction.
Yeah, totally agree. One would guess there's probably a sweet spot for this somewhere where it might work, though. But in general, time delays that don't have a gameplay reason aren't a candidate for skills reducing it, they're a candidate for being eliminated.
That said, you could make an argument that surveying could take time so that it could be interrupted by hostiles. That could be interesting, but would have to happen pretty often for that to be worth adding a delay.
You know, it might be worth some thought if this should be tied to the survey skill level. While I completely agree that getting a permanently better planet with a higher skill would be too enticing, getting a better chance at a one-shot bonus could strike a good balance.
A downside of the current implementation is that you might feel cheated under certain conditions. Imagine a case where you invested a lot in the skill and then all the interesting "high risk" planets turn out disappointing and you end up settling on some low risk ones. Wasted skill points! If you at least got some better one-time bonuses that would mitigate the issue.
I'm thinking of a wide range of things; stuff like ships, weapons, (shipwrecked) officers and hidden missions.
Hmm, yeah. I think that might be a different skill, though - "Salvage", perhaps? There's also a danger here that doing the one-shot plundering will feel like a waste at anything below maxed out skill, because you're not getting all you could. Might be alright if there are enough opportunities to do it that it's not a concern, though.
Very much thinking about this already! Great minds think alike and all that
As far as feeling "cheated" - the survey skill will have some other benefits. In addition, low-hazard worlds never get some of the top-tier resource conditions. I suppose it's theoretically possible that *none* of the high-hazard worlds roll anything worthwhile, but then it doesn't feel like one-time bonuses would help here, that just doesn't stack up against "spent skill points".
Alex, I know you are holding back on playing stellaris but there are some lessions that could be learned! The best would be the "events" that happen when you survey planets and stars. I have hundreds of hours now and I still see new events...
Yeah, that's kind of why I don't want to. Going along very similar lines in this particular area, it feels like.
Dynamic difficulty is yet another concept I really dislike. The game tells players "Hey, want to win? Don't play too well or you will die! Feign incompetency and live!" Might have a point if it has unlockables or acheivements (yet another thing I dislike - pointless grinding and busywork for the sake of the game patting you on the back).
Reminds me of someone beating Oblivion with a level 2 character, specifically build to avoid levelling up, iirc.
Generally dislike the concept, too. But I think there are ways to make it work, as long as it's not hamfisted. For example, say the amount of attention factions turned on you was proportional to the amount of trouble you caused for them. Basically "dynamic difficulty", but there's an in-game reason for it, and that doesn't feel bad.