I’ve been using Automated Ships a lot lately, but it’s felt rather overall limited in what you can do given it seems balanced mostly around the power of a Radiant - otherwise feeling like a vastly weaker choice compared to the alternative skill. I was trying to consider what would be a viable, lore-friendly way to buff the skill’s cap whilst demanding some investment from the player. To that end, I came up with the following idea:
Have Automated Ships made into a permanent skill, and have it give the player a hullmod for non-automated ships that increases the deployment point limit of Automated Ships in your fleet.
This could be balanced by high OP (think like Operations Center, allowing players to invest story points to build them in if desired), adding some increase in crew requirements to any vessel with the hullmod and of course having it scale based on ship size (so someone isn’t just bringing a ton of junk frigates with the hullmod). Lore-wise the hullmod could simply be flavoured as the vessel having specialized equipment to help maintain/support automated ships in the fleet.
