So I started playing the new version.
I am liking the academy storyline.
But the skills
So, I started as a salvager/explorer, that is my preferred playstyle anyway, I tend to avoid combat and just go around scanning stuff, trading and scavenging. I never play as pirate or smuggler.
So from my point of view:
1. Combat skills... no idea, I ignore them, because my focus is something else.
2. Leadership and Tech skills: my impression is they favor frigates for some reason, while my starting fleet already has a bunch of bigger non-capital ships, also some skills only apply to certain kinds of ships that I don't have.
3. Industry skills: they are... in a way a big wtf.
The thing is, the choices are "wrong", often in a tier the choices are synergistic, so you want BOTH of them, the biggest offender of this is the colony skills, where all of them are tier 5 in two different trees, meaning if you want to play as colony manager you can't, since you will never have all of them.
Also, industry tier 1 skills need each other, to be more specific: the salvage skill give you a shitton of normal resources, with no bonus for rare itens, but shitton of normal resources is worth close to nothing unless you have the huge cargo capacity that the other tier 1 skill can give you... so basically if you want the salvage skill, you are obliged to get the other tier 1 skill, meaning you have to go all the way to the end of the tree, and to be honest, the rest of the tree can suck if your goal is play as salvager.
Tier 4 has CONFLICTING skills, while Tier 5 is needed for colony leaders, so you need both Tier 4, being a huge waste.
Many of the skills are not bad per se, the problem is you aren't really making choices, specially not playstyle choices.
What I would do at least is change what skills go in each tier.
For example: want to play as salvager?
Tier 1 you pick salvager.
Tier 2 you pick the cargo skill...
Meanwhile: want to play as governor?
Tier 1 can be one of the governor skills.
Tier 2 another.
So your choices would be: you want to start a salvager path or a governor path?
And if you use 10 levels on Industry, then you get both paths.
Another tier of skills let you use less fuel OR less supplies... again BOTH are useful, but for a specific playstyle, I would stuff both into the salvager/trader path in different tiers.
From what I looked into theo ther trees they have the same issue, often you have tiers where you want BOTH while other tiers you want NEITHER. This is not just a sympton of some skills sucking, but the fact taht each tier favors a different playstyle thus you end with this sucky way, instead you should design this way:
You have the 4 broad categories, combat, tech, leadership, industry.
Then each of them you should imagine they have subcategories.
Thus you have something like eight "classes" that cost 5 points to max out. So your player character can have 3 "classes" at once.
So I would do something like this:
split combat for example into close and long range classes (for example close range have + damage to guns, long range have + damage to missiles and fighters)
split industry into salvager/trader and colony leader/builder
split tech in phase ship commander, and another into something else. (dunno what to be hoenst).
split leadership into fleet commander / somethign else?
So suppose you want to be a combat master that use phase ships, then you max out combat and get all pahse-ship related picks of tech.
Want to be "pacifist" ? You can pick both sides of industry + half of tech or leadership.
Want to be a pirate? You can pick only the "trader" side of industry, pick the "fleet commander" of leadership and pick the "clsoe range" combat skills, then you can go brawling with low-tech ships building an ever larget fleet of junk ships.
To me this makes much more sense than the current system where you want both tier 1 industry skills, both tier 5 industry skills, but not the tier 3.
