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[J3R]

Alex your logic is sound. Looking forward to your next blogpost.

[Alex]

Alex your logic is sound. Looking forward to your next blogpost.

Thank you!

At the moment?  Yes!  At least assuming that by "profitable" you mean "has a chance to give me rare weapons or the occasional super-rare extra chance at recovering a ship I want".  I don't do Carabus' save-and-reload thing, but I do currently salvage debris two or three times if there was anything in the opposing force that I want - railguns, needlers, XIV hulls or Auroras or Tempests... and if that salvaging doesn't break even on supplies, I don't really care.

Hmm, alright, thank you. I'm fairly sure you're not going to get more ships beyond the first scavenge, btw.

Not to derail too much but surveying is a precursor to colony development so if you wanted to turn surveying into a cost-based mechanic, you could lump it in with some colony perk (which has whole-game ramifications). Heck, you might take the skill initially for the survey bonus but continue to invest because of the colony component.

Mmmmaybe, yeah. It's in the same general vein of bundling it with something long-term-useful.

How about unlocking campaign abilities if you have a certain ship in your fleet? Something like "increase the repair speed of the ships in the fleet but can't move" skill, which would be more than just a number change, thus making it more interesting. I also like the idea of adding charges for those abilities, so you can't abuse them too much between shore leaves.

<and other similar kind of stuff>

Yep, that could work. Whether it would ultimately be interesting - and interesting enough to warrant doing - is a more complicated question. Repairs don't take that long to begin with, and there's already a skill to speed them up a lot. So it might just be adding detail where it's not really impactful. I think this sort of stuff has to come from a place of identifying a specific thing that happens in the campaign - and happens *often* - and then adding something that either interacts with that or (if it's a problem) fixes it. So I'm not sure that thinking it through in the abstract, "how would auxiliary ships work" kind of way is super useful, since it's missing that foundational ingredient.

("So, you've run out of supplies again" could well be such a starting point, though...)

Heck, that gives me a thought, why cant we salvage ruins on planets?

In the next release, that's called "colonizing and building a Tech-Mining industry there"

Finally, ships with mining/salvage drones, do they reduce casualties from salvaging accidents? if not, they should, I'd use them over a person in a risky operation any time, could give players a reason to keep a Shepard in their fleet for the bonus.

The casualties/loss of machinery are a limiter on how many times you want to spam scavenge on a debris field; anything reducing them seems troublesome since it'll make more spamming more appealing.

[Sutopia]

Although this replay may not be directly related to this topic, now I'm wondering what kind of skill system does 0.9 have?
Is there a planning blog post for it?
As the skill amount increases, are we still getting capped at 42 points max in vanilla?
Have the "piloted ship" perks separated from the campaign skill tree?

As I see there are a number of industrial skills getting introduced or revamped, I fell tech tree is offering quite too few in variety.
Also, industrial skills are almost guaranteed to be fleet-wise perks, gaining this tree ridiculous advantage over other skill trees.
I'm feeling everyone is gonna rush for full industrial style or semi-industry, few will pick the hard road w/o industry perks.
As you mentioned elsewhere, the aptitude and level cap were meant to make players make decisions between play styles, but now I'm only seeing industrial play style getting kind of OP.

[Midnight Kitsune]

Although this replay may not be directly related to this topic, now I'm wondering what kind of skill system does 0.9 have?
Is there a planning blog post for it?
As the skill amount increases, are we still getting capped at 42 points max in vanilla?
Have the "piloted ship" perks separated from the campaign skill tree?

As I see there are a number of industrial skills getting introduced or revamped, I fell tech tree is offering quite too few in variety.
Also, industrial skills are almost guaranteed to be fleet-wise perks, gaining this tree ridiculous advantage over other skill trees.
I'm feeling everyone is gonna rush for full industrial style or semi-industry, few will pick the hard road w/o industry perks.
As you mentioned elsewhere, the aptitude and level cap were meant to make players make decisions between play styles, but now I'm only seeing industrial play style getting kind of OP.

Alex has mentioned that there won't be a skill revamp until later. We MIGHT get a level cap boost but this is not confirmed as far as I know

[Gothars]

I think this sort of stuff has to come from a place of identifying a specific thing that happens in the campaign - and happens *often* - and then adding something that either interacts with that or (if it's a problem) fixes it.

A ship-ability I can use when caught in a hyperspace storm would  be nice. Maybe something that outright dispels the storm. Or wait, a ship that can capture the storm and use its energy to create antimatter-fuel! That would change the gameplay from avoiding to chasing storms! Awesome.

[Deshara]

battleship sized salvage gantry confirmed

[Schwartz]

This mostly removes variables for the player to see, right? So he'll always be able to salvage, but returns may still be very different.

Why not have it so that difficult salvages can be attempted by a novice, and he'll chip away some of the value therein without destroying the salvage object? So that he can come back later to "get through those difficult bulkheads" or "take apart that volatile reactor" when he has more skill? Essentially turning salvage objects into things that can be taken apart in one, two or three stages depending on their difficulty and the skill of the player. So a pro can bag the whole thing as usual, but a novice doesn't feel like he's wasting resources. May even work as an incentive to get that skill. Or to hang around and protect a half-salvaged tech goldmine.

[Gothars]

Why not have it so that difficult salvages can be attempted by a novice, and he'll chip away some of the value therein without destroying the salvage object? So that he can come back later to "get through those difficult bulkheads" or "take apart that volatile reactor" when he has more skill? Essentially turning salvage objects into things that can be taken apart in one, two or three stages depending on their difficulty and the skill of the player.

Because this "can come back" is actually a "has to come back", into a region that is otherwise explored, pacified and boring.

[Megas]

A ship-ability I can use when caught in a hyperspace storm would  be nice. Maybe something that outright dispels the storm. Or wait, a ship that can capture the storm and use its energy to create antimatter-fuel! That would change the gameplay from avoiding to chasing storms! Awesome.

Old Sustained Burn.  Made storms much less aggravating.  You passed through quickly and it ate a bunch of supplies just for clipping it.  Now, I just reload the game and try again if I cannot escape the storm quickly enough.  Emergency Burn is useless due to taking too much time transitioning from SB to EB, not to mention you wait too long before SB becomes usable after EB wears off.

[Alex]

Alex has mentioned that there won't be a skill revamp until later. We MIGHT get a level cap boost but this is not confirmed as far as I know

I did increase the level cap to 50 for the time being, btw.

A ship-ability I can use when caught in a hyperspace storm would  be nice. Maybe something that outright dispels the storm. Or wait, a ship that can capture the storm and use its energy to create antimatter-fuel! That would change the gameplay from avoiding to chasing storms! Awesome.

Hah! That's... almost awesome enough to want to add as a one-off in some way. Like, "spend X days in a row in a storm to finish some kind of storm-analysis mission", say. Then you'd have to find a large enough moving storm to be able to do it.

Speaking of storms, I'd changed how they work. Instead of being a constant CR drain for all ships, there's a chance to hit a single ship with a "storm strike" every couple of seconds. The strike does damage to CR, armor, and hull, and larger fleets attract stronger strikes. Overall, this means that:

1) Supplies/day consumption doesn't shoot up nearly as much, since it's not affecting all of your fleet
2) The overall supply consumption is considerably less, due to the specific numbers involved
3) It occasionally creates some tactical considerations, i.e. a ship you usually depend on is temporarily crippled, without being ruinously expensive

Also removed the sensor profile penalty when caught in one, just to clean it up a bit.

[Megas]

I did increase the level cap to 50 for the time being, btw.

Nice, for a temporary quick fix.

[Cyan Leader]

Speaking of storms, I'd changed how they work. Instead of being a constant CR drain for all ships, there's a chance to hit a single ship with a "storm strike" every couple of seconds. The strike does damage to CR, armor, and hull, and larger fleets attract stronger strikes.

Hum, is this displayed in the game in any way besides the fleet screen? As in when caught in a storm, is there some sort of sound when a strike occurs? What about a message? Is the player made aware when a ship has been crippled? Just a couple of thoughts, might be confusing without some of that.

[Alex]

There are the general storm strike sounds, so I think that part is covered. If you look at the CR tooltip, there's also an item there for the CR loss caused by the storm strike. There's also an angry red paragraph of text in the storm terrain tooltip.

I do see what you're saying about a message, though, since all the other stuff requires you to go looking. Hmm. Let me try that. Seems a bit too spammy, but if raising the per-strike damage and the delay between strikes takes care of that. Yep, I think this is good - thank you!

[errorgance]

Alex, regarding storms, one Issue I have is often I get caught skirting the edge during sustained burn and get the full effect, could we get more varying intensities of storm and/or decrease the storms effects further away from the center of the storm?

 also, if we're talking space weather, what about more visible storm fronts?
(yes that's the ribbon from star trek generations)

of course as mentioned before, a skill to lie dogo in a storm, or to more safely transit through a storm might be useful too.

If you decide to go with the random ship being struck/buffeted/whatever in a storm, what about an individual commanders skill to avoid such strikes/turbulence?

[Sutopia]

there's a chance to hit a single ship with a "storm strike" every couple of seconds. The strike does damage to CR, armor, and hull, and larger fleets attract stronger strikes.

Does it mean you only get 1 ship hit at a time max or you're getting every ship rolling the chance of getting hit in every storm strike check?