About Automated Skills, how about make Guardian also capturable unlike vanilla? It kinda OP, although I liked it, I personally make it capturable, but again, this skill have only one benefit, Radiant, rest of remnant ships might be useful, but they don't overshadow human ships, and derelict drones are just useless, and in vanilla it shared position with more useful skill which can make whole fleet more powerful, and again, your mod have your own balance, you can just tone down it a bit for player use ![Smiley :)](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
About skill tree, on one of your screenshot you selected multiple skills in Combat line, interesting, do you remove mutually exclusive skills and now its possible to choose both skills in same position? If yes then I like it, I liked skill system in 0.9.1a more where it had no mutually exclusive skills.
Currently Automated Ships competes with Phase Mastery at Tech tier 5. So both are powerful bonuses but if the player isn't flying a phase ship as their flagship then Automated Ships is the obvious choice. I'm throwing around the idea of giving a secondary effect to Phase Mastery unrelated to phase ships to make it a bit more of a meaningful choice.
The Guardian is probably too powerful for a player ship. In this mod it spawns a large number of derelict drones over time, has even more powerful stats than the Radiant, and has the same ship system.
Maybe as a setting that defaults to off - but I'm not 100% sure how to approach doing that as I'm a little unfamiliar with how the code works there.
You can select both skills in vanilla too - once you get to the last skill you can go through the same line again picking the other options.
Yeah this is what you're seeing, BreenBB. I just wrapped around Combat in the screenshot to get the most flagship boosts possible.
Btw DatonKallandor I tested cruisers a bit with a max player skills and unlike frigates it doesn't
quite double the DP effectiveness. It's more like 50-60% additional effectiveness - which I find sort of interesting actually.
The Apogee with a decent loadout can take on any battlecruiser and can give an Onslaught a run for its money - but still can't take on higher DP capitals. (This is under player control where I kite away when Combat Capacitors is active or otherwise the Apogee probably won't win. Side note: Combat Capacitors now additionally reduces armor damage taken and increases armor mitigation while active. The AI won't suicide with it as much now.)
That's probably the part of it I find the worst to be honest.
I'm not certain as I haven't gone all the way down the code rabbit hole for skills, but I
think that part is hard coded since it involves the UI.
Are you a fan of the branching tree system that others have been taking about in suggestions? Something more like Pre-Mists of Pandaria World of Warcraft? Diablo II would be another example.