Re: Damage Control, hmm. Let me actually make it so this effect can only proc at most once every two seconds. That still keeps it impactful, but no longer stops an alpha strike in its tracks.
Well, the bonuses from Point Defense and Missile Specialization along with the damage bonus from Strike Commander were enough to make a reasonably dedicated carrier officer, what with extra range, bonus damage vs fighters and destroyers+, and better missiles. With the removal of Strike Commander, it's really just not worth it anymore. If it was a bad idea to put an officer in a carrier before, now it's even more so. Feels weird to have an entire class of ship just be a no-go for officers, but if that's the intent, then alright.
And Helmsmanship good on carriers now? I'm guessing there are changes to how getting the skill's 0-flux boost works, because currently, that bonus gets removed when setting fighters to Engage.
Maybe not "good", but perhaps "useful"? More so than a bunch of other stuff, anyway; even without the 0-flux effect, more speed on a carrier is good to help keep it out of trouble.
I think a dedicated carrier is just fundamentally a support ship. If it's *not* then it's a battle-carrier and the other combat skills help it. But having dedicated carrier skills... the more I think about it, the less I like it. It's the same issue as with Phase Mastery right now, you either have it and only fly phase ships, or don't and never fly them. I mean, it doesn't *have* to be this way, but it just feels bad. Plus it makes you feel like you have to pick those up to personally fly a battle-carrier, so all in all I think it works out better to have most of the fighter boosts be fleetwides.
Hmmm. I admit, skills like Weapon Drills or Carrier Group could be made Technology skills, and Electronic Warfare could be made a Leadership skill, with nothing but a change of flavor text. They aren't qualitatively different. However, most of these skills have an additional component that seems to fit a common theme for their tree- like Wolfpack Tactics' damage bonus being conditional on such a high level of abstraction that it seems easier to explain as the result of crew tactics, rather than an immutable property of the machine; or Phase Corps having a flux generation reduction that seems more like a product of per-ship tweaking than something a crew could do with sheer operational skill.
I think the way I look at this is driven by the trees in 0.8 and 0.9, where Tech was "where you go for more vents, caps, and ordnance points"- the stuff that would make ships better even without the same commander skills, as you say. While 0.9.5 has made the distinction muddier, to me it felt like it maintained the same spirit, with Special Modifications being the prime example. It's less that my biases were formed by Special Modifications, and more that Special Modifications being where it is reinforced my existing bias from years of playing the older versions.
Ah - I mean, that makes sense! But also the lines get awfully blurry between stuff like "operation skills" and "tweaking", you know? Again, I think it's a reasonable/interesting distinction to make. I don't think there are enough of definitively "improving the hull" kind of effects to go around, though, and all in all, this is just how stuff *is* now.
I'm not saying that redefining the trees by a more strictly game-mechanics-driven meta-organization is wrong or anything, I just don't like it as much as what we're used to. I suspect that Technology will still be the player's first stop if they want to make their ships into hotrods (now that I'm thinking about it, will Tech still have a +10/10 vents/caps skill?), and having the ultimate hotrod skill in a different tree, one that feels less focused on this kind of tweaking, seems pretty weird when you're not looking at it in relation to the whole design philosophy.
Fair! The 10/10 effect is now 5/5 and rolled into Flux Regulation, btw (which gives +10% instead of what it used to).
Well, that's kinda what I was getting at, trying to determine just how much officerless ships are supposed to be worth. "Speedbump" may be overly dismissive, but what I mean is, I find them good only for delaying the enemy while my "real" ships finish whatever else they're doing, and they often get chewed up while doing so. I do use some un-officered ships out of necessity (not just Omens, haha), but the few times I've been desperate enough to expect them to actually kill anything, it's been pretty rough.
I think they're good for a kind of leavening - if they're left without officer'ed ship support, they can get in a bad spot. But a few here and there letting officer'ed ships take a breather? Really handy. It also depends on the type of ship; missile boats (and by extension many low-tech ships that are just heavier-than-average on missiles) can be really good and don't as much *need* an officer to get a lot out of. Carriers can be useful, too.
One other thing that I dislike about the current officer dominance is how it gravitates naturally toward running multiple capital ships. It seems like everyone who's serious about getting things done in "endgame" is running three or four or more, and it makes sense as the objective best choice for maximizing your gain from each limited officer slot, while still having some left over for Wolfpack Tactics frigates or whatever. I like a capital anchor or two but I prefer smaller ships, and I'm only hampering myself with that idiosyncrasy. Is it okay to need a top-tier skill just to effectively go wide instead of tall? I don't know.
I don't think you really need that many capitals. I mean, that can be a way to go, but at that point you're likely looking at lower fleetwide bonuses *and* lower bonuses from stuff like Coordinated Maneuvers and EW. So I don't think you're really hampering yourself there. I mean, heck, people have absolutely rolled everything in the game with pure frigate swarms, too. And I don't think support doctrine will be *needed* to go wider - in my experience/from what I've seen, officer-less support ships are already viable.
Ah, I should've noted in my hypothetical rework that I'm fine with the limited target numbers as stated. As a player, I like having micro options a lot more than you do as a designer, but even so, feeling like I'm not getting the most out of my fleet if I'm not giving myself whiplash seems exhausting. I'm okay with switching between two, or at most, three ships.
When I wrote that about getting ships out of trouble, I had missed the part where the switching requires a hullmod (not sure how, not like it wasn't clear), and was under the impression that you would just select any officer-less ship on the field, but wouldn't be able to make a third ship switchable after making your choice for that engagement. So my thoughts about wanting to micromanage officered ships with it don't make much sense; there wouldn't be much reason to keep an officer in a ship that you're modding for this beforehand.
Ah, gotcha.
It's comfortable to play on a gamepad, but my ability to aim with a thumbstick has deteriorated so much since the old days of Xbox Halo that even with aim assist, I end up falling back to the mouse for the harder challenges. 
(Urgh, gamepads! Never could get a handle on them.)
Also i noticed... I never used 3rd S-mod on Paragon. The only (useful) 40-point mod left was Heavy armor, and i was not quite sure i will not want to remove it. So, may be Best of the best is not an autopick...
Hmm - seems like at worst you could build in a Flux Distributor or something, that's still an extra 20 OP and would never be entirely useless.
P.S. Hope Systems spec will remain the same (or become better). It is pretty good on Odyssey and Fury. Maybe on some other ships too, idk 
Haha *cough*Doom*cough*
(It's unchanged as of right now.)
* With the change to the skill system, from a design perspective, it also means that now there's no need to keep each aptitude at 10 skills each. You certainly can, for symmetry purposes, but might be something to keep in mind if you're having trouble trying to balance out all the different aptitudes.
Ah, good point/something to be aware of. <looks at Bulk Transport> (I actually kind of want to replace that one with something more interesting; right now it's definitely a bench-warmer.)
To give a concrete example: Currently, I size my fleet so that the Remnants can have at most 4 Radiants on the battlefield at one time. Thus, 60% of battlesize < 200 DP (the cost of 5 Radiants), so battlesize max is 330, so my fleet, at 55% of that, can have at most 182 DP. So 2 Dooms and 7 Furies (175 DP) fit the bill, and is enough to handle 2 Ordos fairly easily and 3 Ordos fleets with some difficulty (no real need to do 3 at once, since I max out the +500% XP bonus with 2 Ordos fleets, this is simply what it's capable of). With the new changes, including that a Radiant costs 60 DP, then I could theoretically set the battlesize up to 490 (I know, it's capped at 400), and have a fleet of up to 294 DP, and still only deal with 4 Radiants at once. Or more likely, I change the battlesize to 290 (so that they're limited to 2 Radiants at once), and use this same fleet except probably change a Fury out for something cheaper or have one be unofficered, and use this same fleet. It'll steamroll through 2 simultaneous Radiants easily when it can currently handle 4 -- so the endgame fight will become much easier.
To be quite honest, you're just cheesing the battle size mechanics at that point - that's not something I can really worry about as a balancing concern. I think ideally the game would be played at battle size 400.
* Hull Restoration vs Derelict Operations: Both are interesting; would there be a way to disable Hull Restoration's d-mod-repairing ability? Since not all d-mods are terrible; so I could see some advantage to ships having d-mods "on purpose" to reduce their deployment cost, plus with s-mods for the extra CR. After all, not all d-mods are debilitating. (My flagship having Compromised Hull is something I don't mind, since if I'm taking hull damage then I'm likely doing something wrong in the first place.) Or I don't know if this is intentionally closed off as a fleet composition trick.
There's no way to disable that, no. I specifically don't want to enable that sort of thing.
* What will happen in terms of enemy fleet commanders having the same skills? For example if they have Support Doctrine and/or Derelict Operations, then they can potentially actually deploy more ships than they can now.
That'd be how it would work, yes.
Actually, I think a concern may be -- which may crash the game if it's not coded around -- what happens if some mod author puts Neural Interface on a module for a station? But yes, if it ends up on a ship's module, then would the ship still be piloted by the AI yet the human controlling the guns, etc. Haha there may be all sorts of potential crash issues if this isn't planned for in the code.
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I don't think that'd crash it, but that'd be for that mod to sort out!
This gives a wayyyy better feeling. Thanks for considering the change.
*thumbs up*
This will give an enormous boost in own strength! Having a fleet of two piloted ships could become really cheesy. But no matter, which cheese can be found in abusing this skill, i will try my very best to find and abuse the living S*** out of it.
I'm looking forward to seeing what can be done with it
A question on Support Doctrine - does this mean that a player with 0 personal skills can now be worse than un-officered ship?
0-8-5-0[+2] (AI spam) sound like a strong build, but would leave player very little to do in combat. Like, take a cheap frigate and pretend you're helping. Even an Afflictor completely without skills is only a pale shade of it's better self.
That's right, yeah, the flagship would be worse off. But, I mean, if you went 0-8-5-0 you could pick up 2 combat skills and one of Gunnery Implants/EWM, which can let you pack a reasonable punch.
I really like what i'm seeing so far. The derelict contingent/operations got reworked into exactly what i hoped for.
Neural link i clearly the really big one. It's something i wished to see in a mod for a while, but i did not expect it to happen in vanilla. The opportunity to fly two ships "at the same time" is incredible, it radically change the way the game can be played, both in the way one can outfit a ship and how it is used on the battlefield. First thing i'll try is a pair of Neural Linked Harbinger to see if a chain-stun strat is viable. Depending on how the mercurial scythe of balance fall in the next blog post.
and
The problem for me isn't that personal combat skills can't compete with fleetwide combat skills, it's that personal combat skills can't compete with campaign/logistics skills. No personal combat skill, or officer for that matter, will allow my fleet to get +1 base burn on the campaign map, passively repair D-mods, give me +1 S-mod on my ships (which is very nice QoL on logistics ships), etc. The same pretty much goes for fleetwide combat skills in fact: No officer in the game is going to pick up Wolfpack Tactics for me, only I can do that, so unless I'm not going to be using any frigates at all what personal combat skill can compete with that? And after all is said and done what points are left to invest in personal combat skills? Unless I'm a skilled enough player to solo entire fleets on the wings of the Combat tree (and Neural Link), obviously, but, eh...I'm not 
.
Conversely, none of those skills are going to let you have an amazing flagship. And if you spend say 10 points in Leadership/Tech/Industry, you can easily pick up the majority of what you really want out of that, the relative utility of further points spent on stuff like that will be lower (i.e. if you have 10 hypothetical fleetwide boosts an 11th one matters less), and I think it'd be generally more optimal to put those points into combat skills.
+1 s-mods is mostly just a fleetwide combat buff, btw - I mean, it's not *just* that, but in terms of how it compares to a combat skill, it's something like less than half of one, if that - since it's a third s-mod where high-OP choices are sparser (but of course to all the ships in your fleet).
And something like Wolfpack Tactics... it's great, but you don't really *need* it to run some frigates. It seems like you're considering the opportunity cost of everything *except* for the quality of your flagship and the impact it can make. I mean, I'm not particularly good at piloting, but just for the testing I've been doing, putting 8 points into combat (rather than the IIRC 3 I had before, with more in other aptitudes) made the fights I was trying ridiculously easy compared to how they were with a less-combat heavy build, to the point where the cleaner fights would offset a *lot* of campaign costs. It's true that it's fairly midrange stuff right now (a 1-Radiant bounty), but then, the fleet I'm using is pretty subpar, too. And I was running a bunch of frigates, too - not only sans Wolfpack Tactics, but also sans officers.
Honestly, I would encourage you to give combat skills a closer look. I absolutely understand why they feel like a poor pick, I actually struggle with that myself. But in reality, they're far, far better than they seem.
Oh, also - only of interest for modded games, but raising the level cap will no longer mess with the SP gain rate once you reach max level.
That is great to hear, but what about the XP curve past level 15 (I'm assuming that cap hasn't changed)? Is it as crazy as it was in 0.9.1, or more reasonable?
It's totally different than what it was in 0.9.1a. And it can also be changed by a mod.
Support doctrine looks like a great addition, ships without officers felt like wasted potential in most cases (Monitors/Omens excluded).
Same for derelict operations, emphasizing the difference between junkers and superships feels better than making junkers the superships.
Neural link also sounds fun.
TL;DR excited for all of the changes mentioned in this post, didn't read anything I don't like.
*thumbs up*
* What about the other Industry piloted ship skill? Does this affect strike craft?
It doesn't, no.
* Is T4L the new Ground Operations?
Hmm? Not sure which you mean but I think it's one of the fighter skills.
0.9.1 had 31 skills + 4 levels, which makes 35*3=105 options to invest a skillpoint, while offering 52 skill points that was ~1/2 of all skills, the new system offers 40 skills and 15 skillpoints, how about raising this a bit.
Hmm, I think 15 feels just about right here. If it's 16 then you'd possibly feel forced to pick two aptitudes and get both top-tier picks in them. I suppose if it was 20 it might be ok? But something about "you can decide to get a top-tier skill in every aptitude" doesn't feel right.
IMO, the best thing here is (hopefully!) this time there won’t be a 18 month delay between the blog post and the release, so that the actual player feedback loop will be shorter this time.
Hahah, we can only hope!
I like that the existing 5-tiers-each-having-2-choices is being broken in such a sensible way. Seems like a good balance between the old choose-whatever and the current approach, retaining the important high-tier skill required commitment.
Thank you, glad you like it!
That said, UI-wise I still feel like those “swimming lanes” are not the best way to convey information, choices, and progression. Having a vertical progression from bottom to top would feel more natural, IMO. And replacing the contextual “Requires at least X lower tier skills” by something always visible for all skills at once would clarify how progression to higher tier works and what choices are actually available.
Possibly! But honestly, the layout's already there and, as you say, we don't want an 18 month delay...
Best of the best increasing DP budget will allow player fleet to be less at a disadvantage when NOT using fast frigates. Which is fair.
Yeah, I didn't mention it, but that was another part of its intent!
Support Doctrine is a going to have interesting consequences on fleet composition. The trade-off decision between putting an officer and not putting an officer further rebalances the wide-vs-tall game. As an example, looking at my 239 DP fleet in my last campaign:
Depending how you count, that’s a potential 10% to 20% fleet strength increase.
Bold of you to assume the Fury will still be 15 DP
But, right, yeah, this makes sense.
Although, to be honest, Neural link almost sounds like a "game changer" combat tree skill hiding in the technology tree. It certainly gives you a good reason to spend points in the combat tree. Not that I'm complaining about the location. Putting it opposite the Automated ships sounds about right. I expect to see Monitor + Radiant solo player fleets.
I thought about putting it at combat at one point, but, yeah. The problem with "forcing a playstyle", plus it'd synergize entirely too well with every single other skill in the aptitude.
I like how there's some clear mixing and matching to be done. Assuming we are still limited to 15 skill points, and just the top abilities, the combinations look fairly varied. So we've got the combat tree in general, best of the best, support doctrine, neural link, automated ships, hull restoration and derelict operations.
Keeping in mind that neural link gives you the most benefit when combined with combat, and hull restoration and derelict operations don't mix, you've got something like 14 reasonably distinct combinations that look like they should play differently. Sounds pretty good to me.
I'm sure some will end up stronger than others! But hopefully most/all would be viable and have a unique feel to them.
Although I do have a few questions. Given we now have percentage reductions in deployment points for ships, will they be allowed to be fractional, or will they be rounded? For example, does a Lasher without officer and under Support Doctrine cost 3 DP, 3.2 DP or 4 DP to deploy? And does Support Doctrine add with or multiply with the reduction from Derelict operations (20+30=50% off DP costs?). That will allow for some interesting fighter saturation attempts. Assuming they add, and if you get choosy with your D-mods, you can get something like 18 Herons worth of fully operational fighters in 180 DP (or 36?! Condors).
They're rounded so e.g. 5.5 becomes 6, while 5.4 becomes 5. The Lasher thus costs 3 points. That does means that some ships will benefit a bit more or less than they "should" but I really don't want to get into fractional deployment points!
The modifiers from DO and SD are multiplicative, as with other reductions. (Though under the hood, the SD multiplier is flat, while DO is a multiplier, but functionally it amounts to them being multiplicative...)
Hmm, the fighter thing could get a little weird, yeah. I suppose we'll see! (36 Condors would require increasing the number-of-ships cap...)
Well hot damn. Aside from individual skill balance, which will be debated forever, this solves the core problems I believe everyone presented. Perfect doesn't exist but this is a giant leap forward.
It also leaves the door open to adding new skills in the future without creating secondary problems. So you fixed our concerns, mine at least and planned ahead for the future.
I didn't see this solution coming.
Thank you, happy you like how it's shaping up!
(And this is a good opportunity to say thank you to everyone for the assorted feedback about the skill system, too. I appreciate it!)
you know whats funny is I was halfway through typing a post comparing the current skill system to heroes of the storm's talent system & discussing its pros & cons and what lessons can be learned from it, took a short break from typing it then saw the blog post lmfao
Ha, I'm guessing it's similar? Never played it
I find it somewhat ironic that now, when you have more officers than need majority of the time, do we get a skill that buffs unofficered ships specifically.
You can always put officers in small ships, so I don't think "getting all your officers on the field" would really be a problem. In fact, if you have more officers than you need, maybe it would be better to use more small ships?
And that you rolled shields and phase skill together after you made the Phase Mastery entirely optional, had it still existed.
That wasn't the issue with it, though. The issue was it either feeling bad to use phase ships, or to use not phase ships, depending no whether you had the skill or not.
Another thing on my mind is that since almost all combat skills are useless to carriers, why don't you just make their effects apply to fighters? Perhaps not all of them, but e.g. Missile Specialisation could give fighter missiles more durability, Targeting Analysis could give them damage bonuses against targets, Damage Control or Impact Mitigation could make fighters a bit more durable, so on.
Hmm - one concern here is having enough room on the tooltip
It's an interesting idea, though.
This nerf reminds me of A&W failing to sell one third pounders, because people thought they were smaller than quarter pounders. I really doubt the marine buff is important enough to warrant the nerf of the damage bonus to smaller fleets.
<this is why we can't have nice things dot jpeg>
I do like cherry picking my skills, and i don’t mind being all-powerfull-do-it-all if i spend time ingame rising my skills.
Honestly, that's where I feel comfortable saying "you can mod the game to do that"! Nothing wrong with wanting to play it that way, but that's just not the design I'm aiming for.
And this hurts because it closes off a style of play where you grind down the opponent’s CR. The new derelict operations might push down the DP so I can enter a fight, destroy ships until I get a clean disengage, and then retreat for a limited engagement bobus.
First off, hi and welcome to the forum
Second, that sounds more like an exploit than a style of play! And I'm fairly sure you only get the "limited engagement" recovery if you win the engagement; it's a mechanic meant to prevent an exploit where you'd deploy a frigate, retreat, and have the enemy ships suffer the full CR cost for deploying.
