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[Igncom1]

Well, less fun and more !FUN! if you catch my drift.

[Alex]

Potato, poTAHto.

[Megas]

I wonder how many of the skills are really necessary to make a difference. For 1v1s, the defensive skills may be important if you can't outrange, but in a fleet setting, I think just getting the offensive skills may be enough to get most of the benefit, and that starts to be more affordable point-wise.

Combat is viable because no skills is viable (at least in 0.8 ) given a sufficiently large fleet.  In a fleet setting, combat is less important.  Combat for the flagship is probably most useful for players who want to solo fights against enemies with traditional gunships.

Outranging enemies helps, but that alone is not enough if the enemy is faster and has the numbers to overwhelm the defender.  If AI was not so cowardly, max-skilled Paragon could probably slaughter everything.  As is, Paragon hits a brick wall once only (a swarm of) frigates are left.  This is why I use abuse fighters because nothing outspeeds all fighters.

There are not too many offensive perks.  The best ones (for gunships) are in Technology (Gunnery Implants and Power Grid Modulation for some loadouts that need the flux bonuses to work).  As for Combat itself, Ordnance Expert 3 is good, but gated behind two junk levels/perks, making it too high an opportunity cost.  Ordnance Expert 3 is a classic case of just getting two more officers from Officer Management and let them get that Combat skill instead of you.  One point for two guys that can get it, a great bargain, instead of player spending three points for his ship alone.  Repeat this for several skills and this is how player may feel forced to be the cleric or bard if he wants the most power.


Re: patience
This is why I like fast leveling in Starsector, and I like how most ships are relatively easy to obtain with recovery.  (I wish the game could handle speeds greater than 2f without things breaking, though; 1f is much too slow for comfort, 2.5f to 3f would be ideal, except sounds do not always play at the right time.)  I probably would be annoyed if I need to spend hours, days, or even months grinding enough XP for one level or replay a fight many times before a rare and powerful item drops.  ...Or if I need to play long enough to check off a list of numerous frivolous achievements before I unlock desirable game features.

[AspirantEmperor]

Great to hear what you're thinking. And yea, I hadn't thought about what it'd be like fighting with allied fleets from your faction.

Actually, now I'm really looking forward to that. Some of my favorite fights are joining patrols vs pirates/other factions. If I own a fleet and am facing one three times my size I should really run, because fighting will cost me dearly. But if an ally is fighting 3 to 1 and I have a couple of frigates nearby I can give my best shot at turning it around. Not to be callous to my allies, but when I'm not directly paying for their replacements, a brutal fight that can come down to only a handful of survivors per side can still be something I gain from, where if I did own the whole fleet, the best case scenario would still cost a fortune to rebuild from. I'm hoping this means we get more fights like that.

[Thaago]

We already have two skill tracks: individual ship boosting skills (those officers can take) and fleet boosting/ability adding skills(those officers can't take). I propose chopping the skill system apart along those lines.

I think its fundamentally unsatisfying in a game focused on flying our spaceship and blowing up enemies for the individual ship boosting skills to be suboptimal - the player should not be worse than the officers at boosting their own ships unless the officer is higher level than the player. "Officer Envy" is real and bad.

At the same time, if the single ship boosting skills are too powerful it skews combat greatly towards just deploying ships with officers, max combat skills, and then always picking the same few 'must have' other skills (see .7.2 skill balance). Finding the sweet spot between 'super ships away!' and 'strong fleet, weak player' is a difficult design job that changes with any new feature. (Not to say you can't do it, but hard is time consuming.)

With that in mind, I think the skills system should have two types of points. Officers get individual ship boosting skills. The player gets both an individual and a fleet-wide each level. I'm on the fence about aptitudes - I get that they are supposed to make player specialization more optimal, but I don't think they work as they are right now.

A huge advantage of two types of points is that it separates the balance between the two skill categories. Individual ship affecting skills can have different power levels from fleet wide skills and it doesn't matter, because they no longer compete for points (Combat Endurance 3 vs Fleet Logistics 3 wouldn't be a problem). The balance between officer/non-officer combat ships can be tuned easily without messing with anything else.

UI wise, you could recycle the current look by turning the aptitude area into the number of points available for that type of skill.

Its also an extensible system: Maybe there is another point type for colonies that has the administrator skills? Maybe the different types of points are tracked separately, and you level each with different activities?

Well that turned a bit long.

[Drokkath]

Yep, I gotcha. My patience for certain types of games is also more than a bit low. The important part is to have fun, and I'm glad the mods let you do that.

Thank you, especially for making it possible to mod the game with ease.

I probably would be annoyed if I need to spend hours, days, or even months grinding enough XP for one level or replay a fight many times before a rare and powerful item drops.  ...Or if I need to play long enough to check off a list of numerous frivolous achievements before I unlock desirable game features.

Oh dear, yeah. *shudders* I hear ya as I feel the same way about it. To like-minded people (aka us in a sense), it is both torture and horror in a digital form.
I'd rather face a biomechanoid from an unknown derelict ship on LV-426 alone with only one harpoon gun with no spare harpoons other than what is already loaded in the gun while not trying to disturb or even get close to leathery objects in stasis.

[Thaago]

More on topic of far flung outposts, I think it would be cool if there were a few small, independent colonies strung out in the outer systems that the player could find. I often see groups of scavengers all mining the same resources in a far off system, so if they had some hidden base that I could tail them back to and then trade with it would be really cool. And then it would be on my map to plan future expeditions around.

It would make things feel a bit more alive. On the other hand, it would upset that "far away from any civilization" feel the outer sector has at present.

[intrinsic_parity]

You need to see how tariffs make trade-based profit difficult, and then how food shortages, etc, provide opportunities to profit anyway. You need to learn from hard experience that unnecessary, reward-less combat is a bad thing.

This is very true. I think the biggest obstacle for new players is going to be their experience with other games. There are a significant number of things in starsector that seem like they should be profitable but aren't (trade, general combat, and selling ships specifically). In other games, these things would be the main way to make money, but in starsector, they are actually money sinks. I would say the game can be very deceptive in that way. New players will try to make money in the way they would in other games only to find that they have lost money. I can see how this could become frustrating very fast.

We already have two skill tracks: individual ship boosting skills (those officers can take) and fleet boosting/ability adding skills(those officers can't take). I propose chopping the skill system apart along those lines.

I strongly second this suggestion. I think as long as the skill system is comparing player ship skills to fleet wide skills, it will struggle to be balanced. If a player ship skill is strong enough to justify taking it over a fleet wide skill, then it causes a bigger increase in player power than buffing every (or maybe a subset of) ship in the fleet. This seems like it will inherently lead to either overpowered player ships and officers or underpowered combat skills. I don't like the idea of combat skills as a sub optimal choice in a combat focused game. I really think that separating the types of skills will make balance much easier.

An alternative suggestion for the skill system is to add logistics officers that the player can use to gain qol and other necessary fleet wide skills while personally focusing on combat effectiveness. This could also add significance to the loss of officers.

More on topic of far flung outposts, I think it would be cool if there were a few small, independent colonies strung out in the outer systems that the player could find. I often see groups of scavengers all mining the same resources in a far off system, so if they had some hidden base that I could tail them back to and then trade with it would be really cool. And then it would be on my map to plan future expeditions around.

It would make things feel a bit more alive. On the other hand, it would upset that "far away from any civilization" feel the outer sector has at present.

I personally think finding small pockets of civilization far out in the empty expanse is the single most exciting thing to have in an exploration game. As long as they aren't all over (I think 1-3 per map) this would be amazing. Also finding a secret tritach research base with cool tech would also be really cool. Basically the feeling of stumbling on something secret and valuable in the middle of nowhere is incredibly intriguing.

[Techhead]

More on topic of far flung outposts, I think it would be cool if there were a few small, independent colonies strung out in the outer systems that the player could find. I often see groups of scavengers all mining the same resources in a far off system, so if they had some hidden base that I could tail them back to and then trade with it would be really cool. And then it would be on my map to plan future expeditions around.

It would make things feel a bit more alive. On the other hand, it would upset that "far away from any civilization" feel the outer sector has at present.

I personally think finding small pockets of civilization far out in the empty expanse is the single most exciting thing to have in an exploration game. As long as they aren't all over (I think 1-3 per map) this would be amazing. Also finding a secret tritach research base with cool tech would also be really cool. Basically the feeling of stumbling on something secret and valuable in the middle of nowhere is incredibly intriguing.

I would love to see some of this. From secret research bases and remote pirate hideaways to simple backwater colonies struggling to get by.

[TaLaR]

At the same time, if the single ship boosting skills are too powerful it skews combat greatly towards just deploying ships with officers, max combat skills, and then always picking the same few 'must have' other skills (see .7.2 skill balance).

Unless personal/officer skill are nerfed into complete oblivion, deploying unofficered ships is always a wrong choice (unless your fleet is just random salvage and you have no control over it's composition whatsoever).
Correct fleet composition starts by taking battlesize and dividing it by amount of available Officers, maybe with some left-over in reserve (including CR bench-warmers).

10 officers limit completely invalidates compositions like frigate swarm (unless battlesize is ridiculously low). Considering that officers will cost upkeep in next version, even removing limit won't fix this problem (1 officer per Onslaught is way more efficient, than 1 per frigate). Synthetic solution could be giving single Officer's skills (including player character) to a pool of ships (A capital/cruiser + frigate/DE + DE or 2 frigates/ 4 frigates), but it seems hard to justify in fluff.

[Megas]

I'm on the fence about aptitudes - I get that they are supposed to make player specialization more optimal, but I don't think they work as they are right now.

When the best build maxes all (or spends more than nine points into) aptitudes, and the suboptimal ones spend less, aptitudes do not work for their intended purpose.  Instead, aptitudes serve as a tax, they suck up enough aptitude points that player is inferior to officers after player invests points into few fleetwide and/or QoL skills.

As for current officers, they are not so powerful that ships without them are invalidated, unlike 0.7.x.  However, it has done so by making Combat unattractive enough to the player, due to skill balance.  (e.g., one point into Officer Management instead of three into Combat Endurance or Ordnance Expert.)

I like the two skill idea, although with administrators coming, that could be bumped into three.  Especially if player administrates three and his employees administrate one.

[Althaea]

Some personal input on combat skills: they are more viable than a lot of players give them credit for. To me, the difference between flying a ship with no skills and with even just a few points invested in Combat is fairly noticeable. It's not that I'm looking to solo enemy fleets or neglect the rest of the fleet in favor of my flagship. Rather, Combat helps me dive into the thick of battle and direct its flow, protecting allied ships and killing enemy ones quicker and more easily. However, the game can be quite punishing to the reckless. I would speculate that a large part of Combat's reputation is that new players tend to get bitten badly while trying it, as a bunch of major stat boosts won't keep a new player from fluxing out their Wolf on kinetic damage and being annihilated by harpoons, while more experienced players who understand the game better tend to go for more optimal builds, which a combination of leadership/technology certainly is.

I certainly think a change to the skills system is warranted. I'd been wondering whether I should post a thread in the Suggestions forum about perhaps reducing the level cap to 30 while giving 2 points per level instead (which might also help with the whole "aptitude point" empty levels thing, if that's desireable). Nearly halving the number of skills in each aptitude while making each skill stronger amounts to something fairly similar, though.

I like the notion of "masteries", or something of the sort. Something like, a fleet commander who used to be (and still is) an excellent captain can make use of that knowledge to revise fleet SOP or train his subordinates and their crews accordingly?

[Starasp]

Alex, would it be possible to add a feature allowing you to rename Officers and Admins? I always had fun doing things like that in DF and Rimworld and naming various sims and dorfs after my online friends and whatnot, thought it'd be fun here too.

[intrinsic_parity]

Some personal input on combat skills: they are more viable than a lot of players give them credit for. To me, the difference between flying a ship with no skills and with even just a few points invested in Combat is fairly noticeable. It's not that I'm looking to solo enemy fleets or neglect the rest of the fleet in favor of my flagship. Rather, Combat helps me dive into the thick of battle and direct its flow, protecting allied ships and killing enemy ones quicker and more easily. However, the game can be quite punishing to the reckless. I would speculate that a large part of Combat's reputation is that new players tend to get bitten badly while trying it, as a bunch of major stat boosts won't keep a new player from fluxing out their Wolf on kinetic damage and being annihilated by harpoons, while more experienced players who understand the game better tend to go for more optimal builds, which a combination of leadership/technology certainly is.

I don't think anyone is saying combat skills don't make the player ship more effective. The complaint people have is that the fleet wide buffs make the players fleet far more powerful than buffing just the flagship. For this reason, experienced players can't justify taking combat skills since it leaves their fleet weaker, even if it is more fun.

[Rbrx]

I've only lightly browsed through the previous pages of comments on the last few colony posts, and didn't see the question on ship/equipment construction raised.
Will we be able to build a shipyard of sorts on these colonies, to construct various ships and weapons? One of my biggest gripes with the mid game is after raising your reputation and killing a few pirate bounties, going from planet to planet to see if they've got any new weapons you can use, or in one unfortunate run no one was selling sunders. It would be great to invest in your colonies to being able to craft ships and equipment, to have some better control over the fleet you use.