Raiding proc-gen pirate stations for supplies seems really strong, especially with Ground Operations. It's just money, but I haven't paid for supplies in like 10 in-game years.
On further consideration, I'm paying 10,000 credits per month for these 500 marines, and my fleet needs about 250 supplies per month. So if I'm not using them for anything but raiding for supplies, and that's how I'm getting all my supplies, I'm only saving 15k credits per month plus however many supplies I use on combat; call that another 15k. That's good, but not overpowered IMO.
Thank you for the added thoughts here!
My phase frigates with officers that have elite Phase Mastery don't give themselves enough time/space to slow down when coming out of phase and keep ramming stations and exploding themselves.
Made a note!
About the skills system, the best solution would be separating each skill tree exp gain from one another, let combat give exp to personal skills, colony building and management give exp to industrial, etc. And skill three is a good idea, to get to better, top skills you have to learn something simpler.
I've seen this idea come up before, yeah. That's just not a direction I want to go in. I think utlimately there's more potential for interesting combinations if the skills are all using the same points. Otherwise... well, you'd probably have to end up with
massively nerfed personal combat skills, for one, since everyone would have them and they're not competing with anything else.
maybe issue, crashed when finishing a CustomProductionContract, infering that the person is not in the market from the trace stack
Thank you! Hmm. What game version are you on? Some stuff that could factor in here could've been resolved by one of the hotfixes, so I want to make sure.
Third, although I'm sure it's more a "me" problem than a "game" problem, same as in 0.9.1, there's no way to get fleet-specific skills any way other than to get them yourself. Combat skills? Hire officers. Colony skills? Hire administrators. Of the 40 skills ingame 22 of them are player exclusive or at least have some kind of player-exclusive effect (Ground Operations' raiding bonus), so it seems like a no-brainer choice for the player to grab them. Especially since many of them have pretty powerful effects in their own right.
Two thoughts here! If you could get non-combat skills in ways other than character skills, you'd never get them via character skills. And, two - while I understand the "combat skills? hire officers" sentiment, I think it's one of those things that sounds right but is actually a very false equivalence. "Combat skills on the ship you're piloting" is not the same as "combat skills on another ship", not by a long shot. The latter can still mean a lot, of course, but... just not the same thing.
Well, that was my suggestion, too. Instead of picking every skill, we should be able to pick from the remaining skills after wrapping around.
Ah - I think that leads to some "obvious best" choices simply due to how skills synergize. Would you ever pick officer training and not pick officer management? Or, in the cases where the tier 5 skills are really powerful, would you ever really not pick both? I mean, that could possibly work, but at the price of nerfing some of the more fun skills.
With the current skill system, I can't even max out the colony management skills.
I've seen this sentiment before, and... I mean, I *kind of* get it. But at the same time, you can't get all of the combat skills, either.
I feel like the automated ships skill is extremely cool in practice, but has way too little of an impact compared to the alternative. Just 30 points means that with just 3 [REDACTED] version of the kite with 3 gamma cores, i'm already at full capacity... sure i could take a bigger ship with reduced CR, but as much strong a single redacted ship can be, other than the novelty, giving 10 to flux capacitors and vents, and an extra hullmod to every single ship is just too good to pass out. My suggestion would be to raise the maximum points, even doubling it, reducing the points cost of the gamma core while increasing beta and alpha cores cost.
I think it would be balanced if you could have a single good ship with a good commander and enough leftover points for a couple of smaller ships with trash commanders, or a lot of smaller ships with trash commanders , or some medium sized ship with good commanders etc, opening up to various combinations that are impossible right now
Thank you for the feedback, I'm keeping an eye on this. Have you spent much time running with a Radiant with an integrated Alpha Core?
There isn't much of a point to gamma cores, really.
(Yeah, this is something that could probably use another look at some point. Really, though - unless the cores just provide meaningfully *different* bonuses that don't just amount to "pick whichever one gives more income right now" - what gamma cores do doesn't matter terribly much since chances are you'd get beta or alpha cores fairly soon anyway. Unless, say, gamma cores just did not attract Pather cells or inspections? Some qualitative differences, again.)
oh shitttttttt
Really loving the update so far! I think the new approach to skill trees is different and interesting! It allows for flexibility in playstyle and no one branch seems overpowered. I do have a couple of items I wanted to call out to see if Alex had any feedback, apologies if these were covered earlier in this long thread :
Thank you!
1. Previously, alternate versions of base ships had different stats based on the faction: Example being pirate variant ships had unique hullmods but worse stats in hull/armor/flux/shields etc. In 0.95a, Pirate variants have the same stats as base and keep unique hullmods, making them the superior choice over standard variants.
Hmm - that must be going back to when the pirate ships always had built-in d-mods? This... isn't actually a question, though. So: yes! Pirate ships, especially some of them, are cooler.
2. Trade missions seem to pay much better than raid or covert missions that are much higher risk. Raid missions needing marines and require you to disrupt a target for 60+ days is high risk and a considerable time/resource sink compared to a "take these goods to location X", yet the pay for the Raid mission is not any higher than the trade one. Same goes for "drop this spysat off at HEGEMONY HOMEWORLD DEFENDED BY 4 ARMADAS AND DONT BE SEEN! Pay is 35k" Ummm, I think Ill go move these goods instead!
Yeah, mission reward balance is something that will need some tweaking, for sure.
3. Trader or smuggler professions are tough to maintain due to availability of missions/goods. Trade or smuggle missions are slightly on the rare side and inconsistently found, requiring you to hop around quite a lot to find them. To do freelance trading, puts you at the mercy of goods availability and finding a profitable route. This is fine and all as it requires skill, but then you are punished by double taxation (30% at buy, 30% at sell). This really grinds the "legal" trader into the ground. Freelance smuggling is much more attractive in that the taxation part is wiped out, and given #1 above, you now have much less risk of getting caught because your pirate trading fleet is the creme de la creme
Yeah, legal trade - aside from fulfilling delivery missions - is just not very profitable.
All in all, great update and I am loving it! Just curious on some of the risk/reward evaluations and if they are intended or are open for rebalance. Great job Fractal team!
Thank you again! And, yeah, fair points re: rewards. Some of the patrol-related changes (demanding inspections, CR loss from them) are intended to increase the risk of smuggling but perhaps they don't go far enough.
