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[SCC]

Yeah. When you click to respec in the skills screen, the game tricks you into thinking that elited skills stay elite, even if you don't have them, when you actually will have to elite them again upon respecing for them again.

[Chaos Blade]

The more I think about it, the less this skill scheme seems to be working as it should.

The problem with binary skills is that, well, folks will play the hell out of this game and a few obsessive enough might be able to work out which choices work best, making binary choices less ideal.
I mean they'd need to be more gameplay style enforcing but at the same time, some skills with rather niche applications (strike craft/phase) oppose more generalist skills (I mean, no player is going to be running a mainly carrier or mostly phase fleet, my experience with either is limited, though I've had far more carriers and battle carriers than phase ships, that while a pest or pain to dealth with, seem to need far more control and skill than what I have atm)

So, I think this needs serious rework, try to put the potential playstyle paradigms on paper and then work on how to skill for those and see what can be branching. And even then, still have some skill options rather than and or
I honestly think the aptitudes need a basic and advanced distinction, for instance the basic Industry skills could be all about trader vs scavenger and the advanced ones mostly colony variations (tall or wide, perhaps?)
Combat is a bit more iffy, because there are a few options (though it is my less invested skill since I have officers for that) but maybe offence/defence, bruiser/sniper or some other dichotomy could workbut there are quite a few options as well weightclass of the ship, type or primary armaments
Leadership should be quality or quantity, that is to say better bonuses to officers or less impresive bonueses spread out (alternatively more lower level officers or fewer high level ones)

Tech could let us favor Phase vs Carrier while also adding in flux regulation but I am less certain

One idea is that some skills in the binary option could have a primary/secondary.
Take the idea of industry with trade / scavenging the first skill could give better cargo space and better deals for trade (tariff reduction?) while scavenging could give us more salvage and better fuel efficiency
So what if the better trade skill would net us tarif reductions, more cargo space and a minor fuel efficiency bonus, while the scavenging one could give us more (better?) salvage and fuel efficiency whith a minor bonus in cargo space?
That option could let the player get a bonus on their playstile but still get something from the other side of the aisle that could make up for not picking up one of the binary options.

Take the first Tech skills, one gives us better navigation and the other better sensors, both seem useful and both give nav skills that are useful, so have them both offer that to the player, both skills are given but you either get an emphasis on navigation or an emphasis in Sensors (so instead of forcing you to pick one and tryng to see if you can wrap around to get the other, you can choose your emhpasis while getting a bit of both)

I am still of a mind that some skills shouldn't be binary picks and more be skills to be picked, specially if there is no real viable vs or no reason for a skill to be so up the afinity tree just to maintain the paired approach

[Serenitis]

The more I play the game, the less I like the skill system.
It's a bit on the restrictive side, and I feel like I have less ability to actually 'do' things than I would at a similar stage in 091.

I don't think the binary choices are nescessarily bad, in principle.
It's just the combination of binary and sequential choices which is really making it awkward.

Maybe if you could pick one skill from any pair without restriction, but could only double-up if you also picked something else from the same column?

[Megas]

...now that story points are coming faster in the upper levels.

If they really come that fast, then hoarding points to feed geometric growth of colony improvement seems like a viable option.  (I) Better hoard those points for colony improvement instead of wasting them for respec-ing and other frivolous uses, since I want my souped-up real estate.

While I may like having powerful ships, I also want super colonies too!

[Jet Black]

The new system is great. I love it. But I think the biggest reason people are upset is because it doesn't have enough diversity to cater to different play styles. Instead of two choices per skill we need 3. There are simply not enough choices to please every play style.

Bump the level cap or just make xp required scale exponentially while giving out story points at the same pace as level 15 or so. Lets face it, hitting the level cap quickly in a long game feels bad.

The story points are genius. The elite skills are genius. Making the skills all feel more juicy... genius. Side note, building mods into ships was also pure genius. With so many player buffs we might need ai buffs lol.

Played the new version for about two days now. It feels like bigger fleets and bigger ships have very little representation in the skills. While smaller ships have loads. Same with carrier, missile, etc. It is definitely making the players feel shoehorned into specific ways to play. It also makes the devs job or choosing what goes where even harder because the spots are so limited. So a putting three skills into every tier WILL fix a ton of problems.

Maybe we need a skill tree with colony only. Some skills don't feel like they are in the right tree?

[Okay]

The Colony skills feel insanely bad. Every single other skill in the game gives you a bonus you can't get any other way. Fleet bonus, bonuses to ship you are piloting, or even something like burn speed from a tug skill stacks with your skills, or let you go without the ship in the first place. On the other hand, alpha core are better administrators than you . (Unless you know, you spend 15points to do something they can do equally well, and then you are only "as good" as them. Except they bypass colony cap too, so they are still better!) You could also compare the skills to administrator costs. It's bad. Normal administrators aren't that expensive.

And these skills that farmable items do straight up better? "Capstone" skills. Colony skills feel like something with story points, not skill points if they were elite bonuses on top of actual skill then I could see myself wanting them, that's pretty much what they are worth. Ironically story points are straight up better at improving colonies than the skills are, and by a large margin at that.

[sector_terror]

Okay that is fair, but it only applies to leadership5, extra industry productions and extra 2 colonies is insane.

[bluevulture]

Maybe if you could pick one skill from any pair without restriction, but could only double-up if you also picked something else from the same column?

That kinda returns us to the old system, just without the explicit leveling of separate trees. Which I don't think would be bad, I liked that more open way of selecting your skills.

The new system is just too cramped. Too few skills, too many restrictions. The idea of specialisation isn't inherently bad, but with soooo many different playstyles for every single tree, it just feels like there aren't enough "general" buffs, that can nudge you into a direction, but instead just kinda rail-roads you with extremely specific buffs, and then the limits on those buffs do that again.

I don't mind choices, just, you know, give me enough of them to last me an entire playthrough, without having to respec every 5min (which I think has become sort of a crutch for this new system).

[TaLaR]

New system forces you to specialize hard (even Afflictor and Doom have somewhat different optimal builds...so yeah, it's really narrow), and stay that way (because reassigning elite-skills is extremely expensive)

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

Bump the level cap or just make xp required scale exponentially while giving out story points at the same pace as level 15 or so. Lets face it, hitting the level cap quickly in a long game feels bad.

Nailhead, meet hammer.  Like seriously, I'm only lazily like 10 months into a 0.95 game and already like level 11 or 12 (I'm assuming that if I were really playing instead of lazily waiting for a balance pass, would have already been level 15).  Like seriously, why bother with the ole college try when the ole community college try is already freely available?  Plus, the only hard cap in life is death; everything else is a soft cap of some varying difficulty.  Why should an abstracted video game be any different?  But philosophical (and maybe coding choice) differences aside, adding an arbitrarily low level cap essentially seems like an excuse to require constant respeccing instead of forcing a player to have to even occasionally make hard choices rather than tediously swapping back and forth.  Can't tell if this is kowtowing to whining or a purposeful time sink to allow players to not have to restart the game a bunch to relearn the new skill system and more quickly optimize a player's preferred elite skills.  Either way, it really grinds my gears.

The story points are genius. The elite skills are genius. Making the skills all feel more juicy... genius. Side note, building mods into ships was also pure genius.

We are all entitled to our own opinion, so calling much of this genius is your prerogative.  But only allowing for non-standard permanent mods to ONLY be added via story points seems less genius than a purposeful choice to create a story point sink.  If the game also allowed for the addition of non-standard permanent mods for some prohibitively high monetary cost (ie, like 5 or 10 million per SINGLE additional mod), then no longer just story points in search of a use, but rather a legitimate choice between blowing a crazy ass wad of cash or a potentially more valuable story point.  Moreover, since player colonies are now capped at size 6, colony cash has been somewhat restricted (although since industry availability per colony size has changed and story points/lewt can now improve industries, haven't yet had much opportunity to really push limits of colony income; so maybe like 15-20 million per mod instead).

Yeah. When you click to respec in the skills screen, the game tricks you into thinking that elited skills stay elite, even if you don't have them, when you actually will have to elite them again upon respecing for them again.

Oh, yeah, just up and forgot that elite piloting skill while running a colony on a gas giant, let me respec back real quick before we go blow up the second Death Star...

[KDR_11k]

Automated Ships just feels too much like "go big or go home" to me, an automated battleship is a huge presence on the battlefield but if you use anything smaller you get like a frigate and a destroyer with basic AI cores.

[Megas]

Automated Ships just feels too much like "go big or go home" to me, an automated battleship is a huge presence on the battlefield but if you use anything smaller you get like a frigate and a destroyer with basic AI cores.

While true late, if player is still playing early game when he gets Automated ships, having three or so Lumens are useful, especially when they have more PPT than unskilled destroyers.

[speeder]

The new system is great. I love it. But I think the biggest reason people are upset is because it doesn't have enough diversity to cater to different play styles. Instead of two choices per skill we need 3. There are simply not enough choices to please every play style.

As I said earlier this is NOT the problem, or the solution.

The problem is that often the choices are between skills you want BOTH, because the whole tier is relevant to your playstyle, meanwhile other tier is totally irrelevant and you want neither.

The least Alex needs to do is move around the skills so their progression make more sense, for example you should be able to get both tier 1 industry skills without spending 6 points.

[Megas]

What I really want from Industry are Reliability Engineering (for +CR/PPT), Field Repairs (free d-mod removal), and both colony skills (if I do not have time to farm alpha cores or deal with drawbacks).  Bulk Transport and the fuel skill are convenient, though.  Bulk Transport means I can remove Militarized Subsystems (which blocks the +1 burn from Bulk Transport) with Surveying Equipment for all of my sub-capital transports.

[Chaos Blade]

The new system is great. I love it. But I think the biggest reason people are upset is because it doesn't have enough diversity to cater to different play styles. Instead of two choices per skill we need 3. There are simply not enough choices to please every play style.

As I said earlier this is NOT the problem, or the solution.

The problem is that often the choices are between skills you want BOTH, because the whole tier is relevant to your playstyle, meanwhile other tier is totally irrelevant and you want neither.
that should ease up a lot of the issues I am feeling from the character progression, that and some hard caps on bonuses (either hard caps or less effect over, seriously derelict contingent is too OP and feels a bit counterproductive to make scrap heaps to be more combat capable than prisite vessels, at the very least they should ameliorate a bit the high D of some hulls, but I am not sure that is even a good idea, from a story perspective, or from a game balance, given how expensive is to restore a ship, on the same page I think the field repairs should also be gone, dmods removal should be a thing, but it also feels a bit cheap it should cost something)

The least Alex needs to do is move around the skills so their progression make more sense, for example you should be able to get both tier 1 industry skills without spending 6 points.

One solution there is to make the skills less a and/or and more one of emphasis, that is to say you have to bonuses, one to salvage and one to cargo, so one skill puts primary emphasis in salvage and a secondary bonus to cargo and the other does the opposite.

Won't work on all picks, mostly because some picks are apples or oranges type situation.
But I think some of that AND maybe less skill progression (some skills are at odd places in the aptitude "tree") maybe have basic skills (freely accessible) and advanced skills (only accessible if you have 2/3 aptitude points, that is to say you have 2/3 skills in the same aptitude) we might also get rid of some of the OR choices, specially those that are apple and oranges