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Author Topic: Skills and Story Points  (Read 91099 times)

SonnaBanana

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #315 on: August 30, 2019, 08:59:51 AM »

But then, not letting officers have fleet-wide bonus skills disincentivizes the player from the entire Combat skills tree. Maybe let officers have fleetwide skills but say, only one or two per officer?
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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #316 on: August 30, 2019, 09:46:45 AM »

I don't think that's actually true, at least nowhere near to the same extent.

Fleetwide skills available on officers = it's an actual mistake to get them on your character (barring, as mentioned, significant changes in working around this).

Combat skills available on officers = it's a choice what to invest in, since your personal piloting have a huge impact, and regardless, it's an additional ship-with-skills.
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Innominandum

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #317 on: August 30, 2019, 09:52:11 AM »

Privyet Alex,
I hope we will be able to mod those skills to add downsides to them, also having certain skills as a requirement for certain game aspects like specific industries, general diplomatic actions, financial interaction, Research (x3 litcube stock exchanges & jourabes mayhem overhaul ) wouldn't be bad albeit probably scope breaking ¯\(°_o)/¯. 

Off Topic
Stumbled upon this gem a week ago, best purchase since gnomoria, gj guys.
Someone should write epic store ...
« Last Edit: August 30, 2019, 09:54:03 AM by Amorphis »
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ottodeluxe

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #318 on: August 31, 2019, 08:27:38 AM »

Off Topic
Stumbled upon this gem a week ago, best purchase since gnomoria, gj guys.
Someone should write epic store ...

Please don't. Epic is ruining enough games as it is. But I guess this is not the place for that discussion.

On-topic:

It might seem a bit roundabout, but what about player skills that enable fleet wide officer skills? Something like all ships infleet gain some 5% of the effect of all officer skills (so if all 10 officers have a skill, the whole fleet would get 50% of the actual skill bonus; only applies to ships without officers). This could also be made into a hullmod, so you'd need 1) the player skill 2) the officer skill 3) a command comms hull mod on the officer ship. This would mean a significant investment in OP or story points, but the bonus would also be a huge boon.
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SCC

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #319 on: August 31, 2019, 08:39:01 AM »

Just very briefly, officers giving fleetwide skills is troublesome because it heavily disincentivizes the player from getting those skills themselves.
So... Exactly how it is now with combat skills and, to a lesser degree, administrators and alpha cores?

Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #320 on: August 31, 2019, 09:10:48 AM »

Privyet Alex,
I hope we will be able to mod those skills to add downsides to them, also having certain skills as a requirement for certain game aspects like specific industries, general diplomatic actions, financial interaction, Research (x3 litcube stock exchanges & jourabes mayhem overhaul ) wouldn't be bad albeit probably scope breaking ¯\(°_o)/¯. 

It's possible to mod skills extensively, yeah, though the stuff you're talking about would take a lot of work probably since it's more new gameplay than just skills.


Just very briefly, officers giving fleetwide skills is troublesome because it heavily disincentivizes the player from getting those skills themselves.
So... Exactly how it is now with combat skills and, to a lesser degree, administrators and alpha cores?

I literally responded to that a few posts back? :) With combat skills, that's just straight up not the case since officer skills don't let you pilot a buffed ship. For admins, having personal skills lets you have more skilled-up colonies.

Alpha Cores are another matter, right now that is indeed the case for them but it's also kind of a placeholder mechanic.
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #321 on: August 31, 2019, 10:09:55 AM »

Would fully integrating an AI core into an automated ship increase it's CR recovery rate?
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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #322 on: August 31, 2019, 10:35:20 AM »

What it does is 1) makes the AI core unremovable and 2) gives it one extra skill.
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SCC

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #323 on: August 31, 2019, 10:50:31 AM »

I literally responded to that a few posts back? :) With combat skills, that's just straight up not the case since officer skills don't let you pilot a buffed ship. For admins, having personal skills lets you have more skilled-up colonies.
My bad, I missed that.
Combat skills available on officers = it's a choice what to invest in, since your personal piloting have a huge impact*, and regardless, it's an additional ship-with-skills.
*Assuming the piloting player isn't garbage and is better than 6 additional officers before spending more than 3 to 6 skill points. Otherwise, it's better to ignore Combat tree completely and let officers have combat skills (which you can also get, but it's already established that you can't make them worth it)
In the next version, I don't know how many skill points would the player have to spend to improve his officers, but I imagine that many players will still focus on fleet skills, since only they can get them, and let officers have combat skills, since combat skills (and those few skills outside it) aren't exclusive to the player.

Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #324 on: August 31, 2019, 11:05:48 AM »

Combat skills on the player's flagship can only be gained by the player getting Combat skills, and can not be gained through officers.

If officers offered access to fleetwide skills, then they would in fact grant you access to something that's equivalent to spending skill points. (Unless the fleetwide bonuses from officers were different, etc etc.)

So, it's not at all an equivalent situation. Whether Combat skills end up being "worth it" or not is a balance question, and, as you say, player skill also factors in (though arguably, combat skills can be even more important for worse pilots). Officers offering fleetwide skills is generally not a balance question - it just makes the player picking those skills themselves a bad choice, regardless of relative skill power levels. (I mean, you could also try to balance it by say having an extreme salary cost or something, but there's still a qualitative difference.)

That's really all I'm saying here - design-wise, those two things are vastly different.
« Last Edit: August 31, 2019, 11:12:19 AM by Alex »
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Innominandum

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #325 on: August 31, 2019, 11:51:26 AM »

This whole fleetwide skills on officers discussion feels like a broken record, so let me add my 2 cents to it.

Yes Absolutely YES! Fleetwide skills that are all demerits and are forced on your officers, taking up skills points that you otherwise, if you hadn't asked for this feature, would have been able to invest in something meaningful.

To Alex:
Dear Board Admin,
Any chance this simple machines board could embrace the glory of UTF-8 in the near future ? 
Your sincerely,
Random Person on the net

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Alex

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #326 on: August 31, 2019, 12:05:30 PM »

To Alex:
Dear Board Admin,
Any chance this simple machines board could embrace the glory of UTF-8 in the near future ? 
Your sincerely,
Random Person on the net

There are unfortunately some issues - the "click a button" process is ostensibly there but doesn't work (ironically, with a similar message to what you're seeing when you try to post something with a special character), so some deep database diving is required. I'll need to get it sorted out eventually... my apologies!
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crowman

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #327 on: August 31, 2019, 10:32:46 PM »

Free Hardened Shields and Targeting Unit on my Paragon? Well, color me red cuz I'm fully erect

Now, I'm a min-max kinda guy, and if the bonus exp from permahulling ships is additive and applies to the player, then I can see myself fielding 10 kites in a redacted battle for that sweet 5 mil exp (going by current numbers). I'd rather said bonus was not present anywhere and, instead, the curve was worked out to not scale out of proportion, since having a text field tell you "THIS GOOD" already ruins any semblance of immersion.
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Wyvern

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #328 on: September 01, 2019, 09:54:55 AM »

The bonus XP doesn't work that way - essentially what that means is that if you spend a story point on something inconsequential, you'll get it back (eventually, once you've done enough stuff that earns XP).  Fielding kites in a battle won't get you those points back any faster.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

Megas

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Re: Skills and Story Points
« Reply #329 on: September 01, 2019, 10:13:53 AM »

Free Hardened Shields and Targeting Unit on my Paragon? Well, color me red cuz I'm fully erect

Now, I'm a min-max kinda guy, and if the bonus exp from permahulling ships is additive and applies to the player, then I can see myself fielding 10 kites in a redacted battle for that sweet 5 mil exp (going by current numbers). I'd rather said bonus was not present anywhere and, instead, the curve was worked out to not scale out of proportion, since having a text field tell you "THIS GOOD" already ruins any semblance of immersion.
Without current Loadout Design 3, ship probably needs one built-in mod to roughly break even.  With two, ship may come out ahead, but that price is paid per ship, not one-for-all like Loadout Design 3.

Paragon already has Advanced Targeting Core built-in, so it does not need to spend a point to integrate ITU.  Your point still stands for other ships and/or for other desirable but expensive hullmods.  I would not mind integrating Augmented Engines into Paragon or other burn 7 capital for burn 9.  Augmented Engines and Hardened Shields built-in would be nice for Paragon.
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