Boy cant want to play with this once you update it
I recently just got back to Starsector after a 1-2 year hiatus and downloaded a bunch of mods to play with and im loving it.
I've been reading on this thread and so far i like what i saw, cant wait to try this out!
Thank you!
I'm excited to play it myself once I get the beta out there.
Blog-post-esque time!
Ok, so I think I like what I have now as far as some key Industry perks to make that skill line more competitive with the rest of them. Technology is, I think, completely done. The only thing I might do is give some elite bonuses to the skills that lack them. I'm honestly not sure if that is necessary though. It is just kind of nice, imo, if most if not all skills have an elite version. Still, Technology is already a very powerful skill line after the elites for CW and EW were added in. Hmm...
Anyway, back to Industry. First things first, here is Derelict Contingent. As it was in Vanilla it is pretty much agreed upon that it was too strong. So I took away its primary strength which was the hull damage negation. I don't want to make the skill go from really strong to "meh I don't even care now" though. That can be difficult to avoid, so I decided to keep its overall power but shift it a bit towards the campaign instead of pure combat buffs: (You will likely also notice that I cleaned up the icons for moved skills to make them look more like their skill lines.)
One of the things that is annoying about losing ships is that your variant is broken and you lose what could potentially be very valuable weapons and fighter wings (read as all strike craft for clarity's sake). If the theme of one side of Industry is d-modded fleets and losing ships more often, then it makes sense to remove this annoyance as part of that particular play style. It is a very strong perk, however, so it definitely needs to be the elite bonus. To make the skill strong even when its not elite I kept the CR bonus in the basic version. Since the elite version also unlocks Shield Shunt, the minimum armor bonus to unshielded ships makes the most sense in the elite version as well.
Going back to the idea of d-mods and their combat impact, I thought it would be a good idea to bring back the reduced d-mod effect perk for Industry. It just didn't make sense in DC. So where to put it? Field Repairs seemed like a good place:
This adds a much needed combat boost alongside the powerful campaign benefits in the Industry line. That should make up for the combat loss from the new DC a bit, without RNG making d-modded ships nigh invincible.
Notice how the elite version contains the d-mod removal (this was not trivial to do actually) and that is very, very much intended. Here is the reasoning: if you get a lot of combat and campaign benefits from d-mods and now their effects are also mitigated a bit, some players actually might not want to remove them so they retain the full benefit of their perks! Making that mechanic contained in the elite version lets players max the tree without being forced to take d-mod removal. If they still want to slowly remove D-mods and have less of them overall, then they still have the option to do so for the cost of a story point. I think this is the best of both worlds for an industry player.
Finally, we have the capstone T5 skills. This "blog post" is only focusing on the combat/d-mod side of the skill line, so in this case it would be Special Modifications:
Part of what makes Industry unique in the rework is the ability to drastically alter how you build a ship. Special Modifications is the natural T5 skill for this and it was already quite strong. It was, however, somewhat limited in usefulness depending upon how much you were willing to invest Story Points into extra S-mods. For this reason, I made it even stronger. Industry needed the love anyway. Time to bring back the max OP bonus from the days of old! It makes sense here specifically because the standard version of the skill increases the amount of potential OP that the player can invest in a build through the additional vents and caps. The elite version naturally should make it easier to take advantage of the standard perk.
Since the skill is now in Industry, it also makes sense to give the elite version a small-ish campaign bonus. An extra Logistics Hullmod seemed perfect both in the theme of the skill line (unique loadouts)
and as a way to use the extra OP that the player now has at his or her disposal for campaign benefits instead of strictly combat.
That's all for today. I haven't gotten to the Colony side of the Industry line yet, but I'd expect those skills (and their elite versions) to be equally as powerful - if more campaign focused and less combat focused. I am overall very pleased with Industry as a skill line. It seems a lot more versatile in the types of playstyles it supports while keeping its theme iconic.
Feedback/concerns is - as always - most welcome.