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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5  (Read 58884 times)

Megas

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #150 on: April 06, 2021, 06:15:10 AM »

Other than that, looking at the other skill groups, the choice is real folks. You can even respec to a certain extent for the low low cost of a single story point. temporary re-specialisation is a thing now.
Not true after player makes several skills elite, and it is a safe bet that any skill that can be made elite will be elite.

Respec is expensive after skills are made elite, and if player changes flagships, he may need a different skill configuration.

Removing the sequential requirement from each "tree" and giving more choices would be a pretty good change I feel like. Would have to find another way to unlock all skills for a given choice, but with SP, that shouldn't be that difficult. I mean, we already use a huge amount on colonies, why not skills as well?
Given the geometric growth of colony improvement costs for each structure (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 2^n) per colony, player will need all the points he can get for improving colonies.  Then, up 2 or 3 times how much ships the player wants in his final fleet, plus more for possible replacement ships.

Geometric growth on colonies is insane.  Should be like s-mods for ships, or the cost growth less extreme.  I know I will hoard story points for colonies and ships, and maybe a respec or two.  (Also, officers, but they get +100% xp after use.)  Anything else that does not give +100% xp does not matter.

There should not be anymore sinks for story points.  The ones we already have are excessive.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2021, 06:19:58 AM by Megas »
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speeder

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #151 on: April 06, 2021, 06:32:14 AM »

Another option instead of shufflign the skills around could be if Alex insists on tiers, to have each tier require some amount of X points previously, doesn't matter where.

So industry tier 3 for example can accept you buying tier 1 and 2, or tier 1 twice.

This could help, a little. (it wouldn't fix for example the issues with colony skills being all tier 5)
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Dex

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #152 on: April 06, 2021, 06:58:39 AM »

I think we already have loads of story points. I mean, these are EXTRA things. i comfortably reached a hegemony smashing end-ironman-game fleet and had 10 story points in hand. There is an infinite amount of story points available to acquire, so yeah, i argue we do indeed need more story point sinks. These are meant to be 'valuable choice fulcrums' after all. No elite skills are actually required and the only combat skill i personally used till the end game was helmsmanship at which point i shifted ALL my skills in industry into combat (stared long and hard at reliability engineering). Of course, i only have MY experience and approach to share, but you guys also only have your own too.

In my fleet, id only build in s-mods into ships that i would prioritize, the fleet centrepoint (eg. odyssey) my flag ship (varies but that fury is ****hot at the moment) and maybe a couple favourites (FEERSUM ENDJINN, have i mentioned her?) and everything else in the fleet is 'disposable screen shipping' to cover retreats or act as ablative shielding in fleet actions. IF you treat every ship as a special ship, then thats a lot of special ships dead and a lot of story points wasted.
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ValDeez

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #153 on: April 06, 2021, 07:13:32 AM »

It has probably been suggested before, but could the gamers have the option to keep unlocking skills by using story points after the skill points have been depleted. For example 10 story points for every 1st extra skill in that skill tree, 15 for 2nd, 20 for 3rd, and so on. Or maybe 10 for 1st, 20 for 2nd, and so on.

I love having 3 built in mods on my ships, but somewhere down the line I would also like to put my AI cores to good use and have my AI fleet terrorizing the Luddites (Luddics?).

I mean it would take an awesome amount of grinding, but it can be done, if the gamers choose to do so.
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Dex

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #154 on: April 06, 2021, 07:17:24 AM »

Hello Valdeez, welcome to the forum.

Ive not seen that and its a good idea and i like it, but i dont see how thats not mechanically similar to just increasing the level cap?
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ValDeez

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #155 on: April 06, 2021, 08:21:42 AM »

Hello Valdeez, welcome to the forum.

Ive not seen that and its a good idea and i like it, but i dont see how thats not mechanically similar to just increasing the level cap?

Sure it is, but on a 10-20-30 scale it would take 550 story points to fill up your skill tree instead 10 skill points. On a normal playthrough it wouldn't be sensible, but still possible if the gamers chose to do so.

I assume the level cap and the 15 skill points was calculated with certain purpose (ie that's how Starsector is meant to be played) by the devs and that way the skill points would still retain their value compared to story points, while the freedom to unlock every skill would still be theoretically possible, but impractical.
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Dex

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #156 on: April 06, 2021, 08:26:24 AM »

Well i like the idea of more story point sinks, im in.
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #157 on: April 06, 2021, 08:52:17 AM »

I know it depends much on the exact details but would it be better if the skills sets were 3x4 (with a raised level cap) instead of the current 2x5?
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Mordodrukow

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #158 on: April 07, 2021, 06:28:37 PM »

Updated my starting post after playing some time (around 80% of one playthrough, i guess... seen everything but colony management).
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Drazhya

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #159 on: April 08, 2021, 02:14:42 AM »

I'm getting the strong feeling that there should be a minimum on the scaling skills. Bulk Transport is a good example here. +50% Cargo Capacity divided by current cargo capacity divided by 2000 is not a bonus that scales with the size of your fleet, it's a flat +1000 cargo capacity if you meet the minimum requirement of 2000 base cargo capacity. If you're a big transport fleet with 20000 cargo capacity, you don't care about this skill, it's +5%. If you're a big-time trader that wants to carry a lot of cargo, spending your level-up on the skill that lets you carry more cargo is not very helpful.

I like that the skills scale with fleet size - or more precisely, I like that they mean a small, elite force is more elite than a big, fat fleet. I like that I can take Weapon Drills, and if I'm a little fleet, I get a big bonus. But they need to not scale into nothing. Currently, that skill would give me +2%. It's a joke.

More specifically, what I want is for the bonuses to be upped a bit, maybe 20-50% (so Weapon Drills would cap at +12-15% fleet damage) and have a minimum of around one-half to one-third of that (so it would bottom-out at +4-7.5%). So a big fleet commander would actually want the fleet commander skills, and a big merchant fleet would care about the added cargo skill, and also a small fleet can get bigger bonuses.

(I also think that combat skills should give bigger bonuses to pilots in smaller ships. NOT huge bonuses, because that would make them really aggravating to fight, but like, an additional +5% top speed on helmsmanship when piloting a destroyer or frigate, something like that.)
« Last Edit: April 08, 2021, 02:22:21 AM by Drazhya »
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sotanaht

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #160 on: April 08, 2021, 03:27:29 AM »

Hello Valdeez, welcome to the forum.

Ive not seen that and its a good idea and i like it, but i dont see how thats not mechanically similar to just increasing the level cap?
Increasing the level cap also makes story points harder to earn.  The XP per level keeps increasing, so the higher your level, the more XP it takes to earn a story point.  I'm also pretty sure that there are things in the game that scale off of character level, maybe bounty fleets? 



My impressions on the system:  Too few points, I don't like the scaling, and I don't like being forced to spend those extremely few points on useless skills to progress the tree.
« Last Edit: April 08, 2021, 03:36:48 AM by sotanaht »
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Euripides

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #161 on: April 08, 2021, 05:02:49 AM »

I don't really like the skill system, and I didn't really like the one before either. It's there and works I guess but I don't care for it. There's not many meaningful choices, especially with being locked into one tree. I don't really like most of the skills either. Too many stat++ skills like extra damage or range that don't meaningfully change how you play. Free hullmod for learning a skill is kind of neat I guess, but the hullmods aren't unique so you aren't actually getting anything interesting out of it. Most of the time I already had the hullmod learned by the time I unlocked the skill that gave me the hull mod. Just pointless.

Story points on the other hand are really nice, but they are also very limited. I see often that I can spend story points for extra cash and xp on a mission for example, but I absolutely NEVER spend a story point on these things because 1 story point = 1 free hull mod on a ship which is easily worth 300k+ credits in rough value estimate, maybe even upwards of 800k. Meanwhile when spent on a mission reward its like +30k credits. Dinky. Don't want. Lame style of bonus anyway. Better would be RNG lootbox roll for using a story point and maybe getting some really interesting tech, blueprint, whatever that is much more rare and hard to acquire than $15k+ credits would be.

The story points for s-mods is very nice because it fundamentally changed how my ships works in a big way. There's a lot of ships I've never used safety override on for example, simply because the OP cost was hugely prohibitive and prevented the ship from being useful. Many of the hullmods beforehand were simply too expensive to bother with, they might've been nice but I'm not sacrificing half my firepower just to add an ECM module or make the ship turn 50% faster. Now I'm sometimes using these lesser hull mods because the really important practically mandatory ones like integrated targeting unit get built in and I now have the OP to spare on fun small ones.
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Malignity.

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #162 on: April 19, 2021, 04:19:33 PM »

personally i liked the old system better now its very hard to get even just 3 of the 4 colony nodes at the same which extremly limits what you can do with your colonies. i dont like that you have to pick every alternative node in a tree to grab the second tier 5... overkill! have to spend 4 skillpoints on nodes i dont really want just for that one node i actually do want
« Last Edit: April 19, 2021, 04:22:34 PM by Malignity. »
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Nameless

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #163 on: April 19, 2021, 04:27:47 PM »

I feel like the old system is more versatile while the new one encourages extreme min/maxing.

The new one also makes officers a lot more boring.
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Thaago

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Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« Reply #164 on: April 19, 2021, 04:44:23 PM »

The old tree was nearly the definition of minmax: you could maximize the advantage of one aspect by taking every single skill related to that aspect and stack them all together, with minimal cost (only aptitude points from cross aptitude combos made it not a pure minmax system, but those were a lot less onerous than the current structure).

For all that there are quite a few tweaks needed, and probably 1 or 2 skills reworked entirely, the new system does not allow that maximization for so little cost. It doesn't let players hyper-specialize without 'dead points' in 'bad skills', both because of the looping requirement and having potentially amazing skill combos share the same tier. (And a lot of player complaints come from the fact that they can no longer take every skill they want for their playstyle all at the same time). For all the valid critiques of the new system, including how restrictive it is, its not a minmax one.

personally i liked the old system better now its very hard to get even just 3 of the 4 colony nodes at the same which extremly limits what you can do with your colonies. i dont like that you have to pick every alternative node in a tree to grab the second tier 5... overkill! have to spend 4 skillpoints on nodes i dont really want just for that one node i actually do want

Like this for example: Malignity wants to maximize their colony skills for minimal cost. In the old system thats easy; in this system its impossible and pretty costly just to get to 3. Thats not great for players that want to stack all colony skills, but its a pretty clear example of a NON minmax system where maximizing a certain path is impossible/very costly.
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