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[intrinsic_parity]

At this point, I'm not even sure that killing smugglers would have a positive effect. I do want to take another look at how reputation works especially re: independents and pirates, though.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=13018.0

an idea for how a new reputation system could work

[PixiCode]

I've been reading up on the conversations here for a little while and didn't have anything to add, up until now at least. Particularly pertaining to Megas and Alex's conversation about character skill points particularly. Not so much officer, I have nothing to really add there that's worthwhile.

Firstly, I want to ask - when Alex says Combat should be weaker because it's cheaper, he means the idea that you would use less ships because you rely on your flagship more, correct? If that's the case, I don't think that's correct. I enjoyed Starsector before the combat skill changes and I still thoroughly enjoy the game! However, as it stands now I wouldn't call a combat path cheaper. If you want to face end-game fleets, it's impossible to do a combat-focused player build without investing in a large fleet or investing in a very long, drawn out battles. Like Megas said, the AI is usually pretty cautious with a few odd outliers who like to be suicidal. This means if you're playing a combat-heavy ship and playing a 'cheaper' game AKA less ships, you're going to have a huge range disadvantage as well as a numerical disadvantage when the AI clumps up waiting for its moment to strike. If you don't want to die, you'll need a fast ship. Ships that are incredibly mobile usually seem to lack the power to actually do serious damage quickly, and if you're not incredibly mobile the AI will swarm you once it has proper numbers to wreck your day. A medusa can solo an onslaught, but not it can't solo the onslaught's fleet in good time. This means you'll either run out of CR before you kill the fleet and have to retreat, suicide several flagships to do damage or field a larger fleet to support your flagship. The CR one means you're investing much more time into the battle than you otherwise would, while the latter two incur a larger credit investment, which have their own time investment of course. Then of course you might need to have a duplicate flagship or several flagships to deal with CR problems if you're stuck fighting many battles or need another flagship to pursue enemies for whatever reason, which also adds to the cost.

Then there's also the ECM mechanic which completely requires you to deploy more ships to overcome, if only to act as ECM buoys. Or use the ECCM hullmod, which reduces what your combat ship would be capable of otherwise. I'm not trying to argue anything above needs a huge change, I'm just saying that as it's currently designed I think calling combat 'cheaper' is not true. Even if it costs you less credits, it costs you more time per battle, especially with the more cautious AI. All I care is so long as it's all still fun.


Also I'd like to mention to Megas' side of the argument, I feel like it's a little silly to expect frigates to suicide into a paragon. I understand you're probably arguing purely from the fun side of things, which is fair enough. I think it's more fun to expect the frigates to be smart and overcoming it by deploying another flagship if there's only frigates around, like a destroyer or cruiser that would deal with thirty frigates more effectively. But I do see the fun in having a paragon wipe out a fleet of frigates too, and how frustrating it is to have ships just... stand there outside of anyone's range, waiting, yet not retreating.

I had that happen a lot when playing as the Knights Templar using only those Crusader cruisers, trying to save on supply costs by only deploying a cruiser. There would only be like two frigates and one destroyer left, but they would refuse to fight until their CR got low. That was a pretty special case, what with playing a mod not even designed to be played by the player, but yeah it's really frustrating.

EDIT: I forgot the Crusader was a destroyer, but come on. That thing is basically a cruiser!

[Embolism]

One other thing I was thinking about for a skill revamp is adding an extra "mastery" effect to all the combat skills, unlocked at level 3 for each skill, that would apply to all ships in the fleet (including the flagship). It wouldn't add up to anywhere near having an officer on board, but it'd be something the player can't get without investing into the skill personally.

I think this is the best way to balance Combat skills without complete separation of player and officer skills. A benefit of this is there's already precedence: some Combat skills unlock hullmods for fleetwide use which an officer with the same skill won't provide.

[AspirantEmperor]

Personally I'd be against splitting the skills into two trees that you earn points for independently. I don't know if this undercuts what I said about combat builds earlier, but I'm almost exclusively a support/utility player. I'm the sort who actually likes the idea of an operations center heron flagship (fast enough to get around the battle, tough enough to not die to a stray frigate or missile volley, cheap enough to deploy alongside my actual threats, and comes with a small band of fighters to quickly support whatever looks like the weakest link at the time).

When you say "I want to have separate trees for combat and fleet skills," I hear "I want a combat skill build but I'm going to choose the best build available to me, and that build's a support/utility role with officers doing the actual fighting. So can you please force us to get some combat skills so that I can play how I want to without feeling like I'm using a sub-optimal strategy." But for me, a support player by choice, that sounds like being forced to take half of a build that I really enjoy and put it toward a playstyle I don't much want.

One more thing: as a support build, I expect to have a weaker fleet than a combat build. After all, I salvage more ships after a fight. Part of my repairs are completed for free. My sensor range allows me to better choose what fights I want to take. And soon I'll have more colony fleets to fight alongside for important battles. I won't even count Fleet Logistics and Loadout Design because they're so good that combat builds feel they have to get them anyway (though I've already invested the aptitude points for them). If I get all this and the stronger fleet, something feels wrong.

[Mr. Nobody]

What about sprinkling fleetwide stuff across the trees?
I remember the Combat tree having in the previous version a skill that directly reduced the OP cost of weapons, just as an example.

[DatonKallandor]

Just remove the combat skills for the player and let us put an officer into the flagship. No more bad skills being taken at the expense of objectively better ones because there's no more overlap between player and officer skills. And for the people that still want to fly a cool stronger-than-usual flagship, they can just plop an officer in there and get the benefit.

[Gothars]

How about a stat like "intimidation" or "reputation" that grows with each point invested into combat skills. It would give a bonus to certain negotiaion related things like bounties, probability of smuggled goods being found or even prices of fuel and supplies.

It even makes sense that personal combat/badass skills that are not directly related to your qualification as a leader are still recognized. Just think of Teddy Roosevelt.

[Megas]

@ AspirantEmperor:  The problem is support (or unarmed carrier-specialist flagship kiting from everything while killer fighters kill all) is far more powerful than direct combat, and support cannot be delegated to officers like combat can, because officers can take the same combat skills as you, but they cannot take the support skills only you can take.  If I can get more combat power (not for me, but for my wingmen) for less by getting Officer Management or Fleet Logistics, something is wrong.  Also, since 0.8.1, Electronic Warfare 1 and maybe a few skills are mandatory if player does not want to fight with a permanent handicap against late-game fights.  Once again, only my character can take those critical support skills, not my officers.

If your fleet needs various roles, this is like forcing the cleric "band-aid" role to the player.  Your party mates are incapable of being anything other than warriors (warships) or pack mules (freighters and tankers), and adding one more warrior (you) is much less useful than adding a force multiplier role (cleric, bard, mage, whatever) to the party.

This is a similar problem in the game Endless Sky as well.  I want to pilot the fast and sleek warship (of various types) and blast things, but I end up piloting the slow and clumsy Bactrian (colony ship) because I need its capacity to board and plunder enemy ships (which is very rewarding for most of the game, and only the flagship can do it), while my fleet of warships (like Shield Beetles or Korath automatons) swarm and kill everything else.

[intrinsic_parity]

It seems like the best solution us just to add support officers so that the player can choose the roll he/she wants to play and then can fill the other rolls with officers.

[Alex]

Skills etc: this is starting to get a bit off-topic in that it's dominating the discission in this thread. Lots of stuff to consider here, but it's also re-treading some familiar ground, so I'll cherry-pick a few things to respond to and ask that we keep the rest of the thread more on track

... 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.

Yep, exactly.

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.

I think the main thing here is "officer envy". Which gives me some other ideas, but in the name of not contributing to derailing the thread further...

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?

Yep, that would be the notion, if that's the way "masteries" went.

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.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that too. Could be really neat to find an existing colony - either one you can govern yourself, or just reconnect to the core worlds.

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.

I'll keep it in mind! Not a priority item but might be able to work it in at some point.

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.

I would imagine so, to some extent, but the specifics are very much TBD. I could see something like "you find a blueprint for X and now your heavy industry/orbital works can produce it", for example, but no commitments on the details.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=13018.0

an idea for how a new reputation system could work

Hey - yeah, I did see that! In brief: I get the idea, but I think it suffers from "makes sense behind the scenes, total pain to actually convey to the player" issue. You know what I mean? "Your Hegemony reputation in Corvus may or may not change by a couple of points in one or the other direction in a few days, which may or may not be enough to enable|stop you from being able to buy a ship that requires a certain reputation level" etc.

(Ironically, my first internal stab at the reputation system design looked very much like this.)

Firstly, I want to ask - when Alex says Combat should be weaker because it's cheaper, he means the idea that you would use less ships because you rely on your flagship more, correct? If that's the case, I don't think that's correct. I enjoyed Starsector before the combat skill changes and I still thoroughly enjoy the game! However, as it stands now I wouldn't call a combat path cheaper. If you want to face end-game fleets, it's impossible to do a combat-focused player build without investing in a large fleet or investing in a very long, drawn out battles.

Ah - what I mean is it's cheaper when it's smaller scale, and if it was also cheaper on a larger scale, than that would be its own problem. So, we're pretty much saying the same thing.

I had that happen a lot when playing as the Knights Templar using only those Crusader cruisers, trying to save on supply costs by only deploying a cruiser. There would only be like two frigates and one destroyer left, but they would refuse to fight until their CR got low. That was a pretty special case, what with playing a mod not even designed to be played by the player, but yeah it's really frustrating.

Yeah, I've got a TODO item somewhere to help address this. It's a gradual process, weeding out these special cases - it's gotten better than it was before, and hopefully it'll get better still.

When you say "I want to have separate trees for combat and fleet skills," I hear "I want a combat skill build but I'm going to choose the best build available to me, and that build's a support/utility role with officers doing the actual fighting. So can you please force us to get some combat skills so that I can play how I want to without feeling like I'm using a sub-optimal strategy." But for me, a support player by choice, that sounds like being forced to take half of a build that I really enjoy and put it toward a playstyle I don't much want.

I think that's really well put and nails down why I'm not a fan of the "two skill pools" idea - it makes a hard assumption that the non-direct-combat skills aren't fun, and that's a subjective evaluation, even before you consider how having those indirectly changes your combat experience.

How about a stat like "intimidation" or "reputation" that grows with each point invested into combat skills. It would give a bonus to certain negotiaion related things like bounties, probability of smuggled goods being found or even prices of fuel and supplies.

It even makes sense that personal combat/badass skills that are not directly related to your qualification as a leader are still recognized. Just think of Teddy Roosevelt.

I've thought about stuff like that, or even tying that into aptitudes. It's just hard to think of that as a balancing factor, because "certain things" seems like it would inevitably end up as "a few random things here and there that are hard to properly consider as a whole", if that makes sense. It could be a neat element of the combat skills (or of something else, such as just winning battles when outnumbered), but, again, hard to see as a balancing factor, especially as it'd be tough to convey to the player beforehand, i.e. when they're making their skill choices.

[orost]

With regards to the reputation system... I've always thought the system used in Paradox strategy games would work very well in Starsector. Here's a random example off google images:

Spoiler

[close]

Relations are tracked as a list of separate factors, each with their own cause, caps and decay or expiration behavior. The sum of them is the final relations score. It's very powerful in creating consistent, reasonable behavior while also being easy to understand and keep track of, because everything that's going can be seen at a glance. My favorite aspect of it is that it rewards learning of and trying as many ways to improve the relations score as possible, because no individual factor has a huge effect, but they all stack with each other. The higher you want to go, the larger the variety of activities you have to engage in. While in Starsector's current system, as your reputation increases, lesser options close off even if you've never done them, and reaching the cap is about picking one thing that works all the way up to 100 and repeating it a lot.

(I thought about posting this in suggestions, but "copy this from that game" seems not quite substantial enough to create a thread for, and since there's already a conversation about it here...)

[Alex]

This is really neat, thank you for posting that. It's interesting - there's already a similar system in Starsector for stability (complete with gradually expiring modifiers), but I hadn't considered a similar approach for reputation. Hmm.

[intrinsic_parity]

Hey - yeah, I did see that! In brief: I get the idea, but I think it suffers from "makes sense behind the scenes, total pain to actually convey to the player" issue.

I get that, but I think there are some decent ways of conveying the information to the player. The player doesn't actually need to know how the system works specifically, just how it works in practice. Something like a 'reputation map' that shows player reputation with a faction in each system would give the player all the information they need to know. I also think the idea that the people who saw you do the bad thing would care more than the people who didn't is a fairly intuitive concept. I'm pretty sure escape velocity nova did reputation in a similar manner and it worked very well.

You know what I mean? "Your Hegemony reputation in Corvus may or may not change by a couple of points in one or the other direction in a few days, which may or may not be enough to enable|stop you from being able to buy a ship that requires a certain reputation level" etc.

This is more a problem with how purchasing power is tied to reputation than with the reputation system itself. Currently you can get rng scanned and lose a few points of reputation which makes you unable to buy stuff. Or if you fail a mission, that could prevent you from buying stuff. It's just the nature of having a discreet cutoff for being able to buy stuff.

Also, I'd rather accidentally lose the ability to buy stuff sometimes than instantly go hostile in all systems when I mis-click engage after getting scanned. The 'instantly hostile with all planets' system also makes piracy and harassment much less viable. This could be especially important with the new update where you might want to harass an outpost to destabilize it, but now you are hostile with all the outposts of that faction. I guess for me, the positives far outweigh the negatives in terms of how it changes interactions with factions and what gameplay opportunities it creates.

Additionally, If you don't like the 'central government' bit, that can be eliminated or changed so that it isn't tied to a specific system and is only affected by missions and political events and maybe the net average of all systems or something like that. I think there are a lot of iterations of the idea you could come up with to solve specific problems.

[Madao]

My pc goes out of commission for a week and I miss some of the best news I've read in a while... Late to the party but wow this looks great! Looking through the thread I have nothing to add that hasn't been said already.. I will just say that I am extremely pumped 

[Megas]

Quick question:  If we build a military base, does the colony get a military market (for us to buy ships) or is such hardware (if produced) for Local Resources?