I definitely like the thought process I am seeing here! I think skills are going to be in a much better place after all of these changes.
Thank you! FWIW I do too, so here's hoping
- How does the new phase mechanics impact the AI from what you've seen? We have a fairly competent phase AI at the moment, imo, and I'm slightly concerned that the slower speed is going to revert phase ships back to being overly timid since the time to get to the target is longer - so there is more opportunity for the ship AI to go "oh crap I'm in trouble better start retreating" except now that is harder too. Have they been made even more aggressive to compensate for this? Or are they otherwise more willing to use their armor to tank in order to get damage in since that value is higher?
I did tweak it a bit to be aware of what it's actual speed is/is going to be, for the attack runs calculations. It seems... fine? I haven't spent *that* much time with it but also haven't seen any obvious problems. And for example a pack of phase frigates was just rapidly deleting remnant frigates I right-clicked them on.
- Is it possible that admins could just have skills (similar to cores) that the player doesn't have access to? Please forgive my ignorance, but what would a 0 skill admin do, exactly? I was under the impression the skills were the main point but I haven't played around with colonies all that much and I'm a bit unfamiliar with the mechanics other than the general stuff.
These are already a thing - what they do is take away the stability penalty from having too many colonies under your direct personal control.
- How are these changes reflected under the hood? Is there now just a section for the number of skill points required per tier in the JSON, or is this stuff hardcoded in the skill line itself - since it varies from skill line to skill line?
I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Oh, "line" being "aptitude"? If so: the skill points required etc are in skill_data.csv.
mm. Not sure how I feel about the phase speed thing.
On one hand, it's good to have a balancing aspect to make overextending matter more, since they just don't have any consequence to it as it stands unless you well and truly blow it out. But on the other, it feels like it may make them a lot less enjoyable to play.
Sure, they're still effective. And externally they're still just as fast.
But if you're piloting one and you're gradually taken down to 1/3rd the speed your ship normally has, I'm concerned it might feel as crippling as when engines blow out and you're left limping along at a fraction of the speed you were working with a moment prior, which could easily both discourage engaging and, as mentioned, simply make it feel very slow and "boring" to pilot.
I hear what you're saying! Flying around in a stock Afflictor, without Adaptive Phase Coils, felt fine. I mean, obviously it's not as zippy, but I didn't find it painful, either. It also encourages you to cloak later and cut some things finer, which isn't a bad thing. A Harbinger with Phase Anchor on the other hand felt truly awful to pilot, which is why I've got a TODO to re-work Phase Anchor.
And, heck, maybe Unstable Injector will find a place on some phase ship builts. And they'd meaningfully benefit from Coordinated Maneuvers. Now that their speed isn't off-the-charts, speed modifiers actually matter.
This is definitely going to be subjective, though. If you're used to them feeling a certain way, I mean, this is definitely a change to that, no two ways about it.
Yes. Going from 1x speed at 3x time flow to 0.5x speed at 4x timeflow is an effective speed reduction by 1/3 (3x "outside" speed vs 2x "outside" speed at zero hard flux), while with phase coil tuning and phase anchor, a ship is just as fast while phased as a phase ship without the hullmod or skill.
If you wanted the hullmod to have zero effect on "outside" speed while phased, it'd need to only do a 25% speed reduction while phased (0.75*4=3), but I do not know if that would be a good design goal or not.
Right now I'm thinking of having it reduce the threshold to 25%, so the ship still hase a window where it's fairly mobile, just not a "drive behind any enemy" window. Need to try it and see though!
Would it be possible to have officers placed 'in reserve' (unusable and you pay their salary but they are not removed or altered) if the skill is respecced out of? Also, the same thing for ships with s-mods (CR is set to 0) would be nice.
Hmm - things are really not set up for doing that easily, unfortunately.
It will also be interesting to see how the phase mechanics play out. It seems like there are a ton of bonuses now that might offset the changes and not actually weaken phase ships.
I'm curious to see exactly how it'll play out, too.
Phase anchor sound really weird to me. It makes phase ship impossible to escape and tick down PPT much faster. It sounds like ... uh... bad life decisions.
The main purpose of this hullmod is for brawling phase ships right?
How about let a phase ship vent hard flux prior to soft flux when unphased? (Is it possible?)
Hah! Hmm, that's an interesting idea, actually. It's not currently possible but it's *likely* doable without too much trouble - I'll see how my threshold-altering idea goes, then maybe try this too, if needed. I mean, reducing the "lowest speed" threshold to 25% hard flux should hopefully hit some of the same goals - enough mobility to get away if you're part of a battle line.
For Polarized Armor, I see that part of it is hard flux only so doesn't work for unshielded ships unless they have other ways to drive up hard flux. Good for phase ships! Would a converted shield shunt ship have something?
Right, it's hard flux only so that e.g. just firing guns randomly didn't give you more of a bonus. A shield-shunt ship would not benefit from these, no. Which, I guess - a bit unfortunate? Maybe the skill could do with some kind of effect for when the ship is at 0% hard flux, hmm...
For Ballistic Mastery, it has a great shot speed bonus. Is the recoil reduction still part of gunnery implants? That to me is the other half of the ballistic gun skill buffs.
GI's recoil reduction is at 25% now, with another 25% potentially coming from Armored Weapon Mounts.
For the previously unremovable skills that can now be respecced: I absolutely think this is the right call in terms of the design of the skill system, but my god does the backend work you put in look like a pita. Thanks!
(You have no idea!)
I think the only thing I'm particularly hesitant about is the max speed reduction of Phase Anchor (though you've mentioned it yourself) which sounds a bit excessive at -50% speed. It feels like it's going to be in the same ballpark as High Scatter Amplifier - a relatively costly hullmod with significant downsides that outweigh its benefit). I haven't really found a good use for HSA and I sort of have the feeling that as-is I likely wouldn't bother with Phase Anchor either.
Yeah, same page here. I've got a TODO item to reduce the HSA range penalty a bit, btw.
- ooh, the Neural Link status info icon is pretty
- what are the costs of the Neutral Link/Integrator hullmods? Is it going to be an easy choice to s-mod the latter? 
Neither is s-moddable! This and SO are really kind of playstyle-changers and outliers and it wouldn't make sense to be able to s-mod them. Otherwise the high cost is just about meaningless.
Neural Interface is, off the top of my head, something like 3/6/9/25. Neural Integrator is 4/8/12/50. The higher cost for capital is to provide a bit more of an incentive to use smaller ships.
(And, the Radiant is *extremely* capable with an Integrator...)
- unmentioned in the blog post but I kind of want to complain that Point Defense's +100% damage against fighters is rather extreme (granted I'm not a big fan of very high damage multipliers in general -
That's actually down to 50%!
- feels a bit strange that the Phase Coil Tuning fluff is a Brother Cotton quote, but it's a good line.
The skill screen strives to provide differing viewpoints
- Ordnance Expertise is going to like 1.5x the Onslaught's base flux dissipation and I am so for it
Yeah! It's one of those that sounds great - and I mean I think it's pretty good! - but it does also take up a skill point, so it needs to be good.
Ballistic Mastery:
+10% Ballistic Weapon Range
+10% Ballistic Weapon Damage
+50% Ballistic Projectile Velocity
Dakka:
+10% Ballistic Weapon Range
+10% Ballistic Weapon Damage
+25% Projectile Velocity
+10% Ballistic Weapon RoF
So close! When this update it out I'll be amending the projectile velocity to Ballistic only (that was the original intent) and let the insanity stack!
Haha! (I tend to stay away from RoF modifiers in skills especially since it increases flux generation and so isn't a completely unqualified good, which imo skills should try to be.)
The good: I like the removal of colony skills, and Field Manipulation is a great roll-together.
*thumbs up*
The bad: Combat endurance is imo forgettable (PPT is *really* generic/binary/boring when it's all in one place), and I think Ballistic Mastery looks very OP (effective damage application through the roof!).
Hmm - it's not the most exciting skill, perhaps, but I think it's pretty handy depending on your choice of flagship, and for frigate/perhaps phaseship officers.
The fuzzy: Phase ships are probably cut out of any large battle because they'd eat all the attrition while retreating, but being pushed out from that environment may not be a bad thing. I'm not sure this address their strengths/weakness (hyper-impactful ship systems) directly, and that may not resolve their balance problems in smaller engagements.
FWIW, I had some phase frigates survive to the end of a win vs the Ordo from the blog post. To be fair, I was using them together with the Neural Integrator Radiant, and that was... really something, when it comes to just rolling stuff up.
Admins, officers, NPCs, etc will all have their old skills converted to new equivalents/best matches, as appropriate
How will this handle officers with non-vanilla skills at the time of the patch?
They should keep them.
Is that base hull or modified hull? Basically if I have a Sunder (4000 hull) with Reinforced Bulkheads (+40% hull, from 4K to 5600) will that effect cap at 2000 (50% of 4K/2K, whichever) or 2800 (50% of 5600)?
Modified!
I still think this is too much of a kick in the teeth to those types of finisher weapons. Reapers especially exist to do a ton of single hit damage, with this skill turning that into a gamble (does any given officered ship have this skill yes/no?) there's not much argument I can think of to take a Reaper over a Hammer.
If you really need to know, you can actually tell what skill the enemy officer has when you target it! Anyway, from experience firing a ton of Reapers recently vs things that ALL had elite Damage Control, they're still fine and great and Hammers don't really compare. Just not enough raw damage.
Just to clarify, is this based off of the base OP cost of a weapon or the actual cost that any given weapon takes to equip? Basically did the Onslaught/Conquest and their Heavy Ballistic Integration get put on stage to be laughed at by the High Tech audience again 
.
Actual equip cost. And yeah, this interacts with HBI.
That does answer the question of "how is my vagabond wanderer of a captain able to do the work of multiple Alpha cores simultaneously from the other side of known space". How rare are these new skilled admins, compared to how hunting down a decent admin was such a pain previously?
I forget exactly. Not too rare?
While a good idea on paper these new hullmods very much feel like "mandatory OP tax" territory, depending on what type of build you're going with. Than again with hull and armor increased across the board you can maybe forgo Heavy Armor, noted king of OP costs and prime S-Mod candidacy, so perhaps it all balances out. Still curious, though: What is the OP cost of these new hullmods?
I forget exactly what the cost is. Right now APC is pretty cheap and Phase Anchor (in addition to needing a rework) is more expensive, but we'll see.
Did the two new logistics phase ships get civilian tags, or will they still cripple this skill if you try to go full phase raiding party?
IIRC I'd tweaked that a while ago.
Right, because of how powerful it is in player fleets. Not because it has better stats and guns than a Paragon along with the mobility system of a Wolf, but because a player is now able to control it. That is why it's worth 60DP.
The resulting wrecking ball after making sure they consistently had decent guns was...not unexpected 
.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but it's really for both of these reasons, so if there's sarcasm, I'm not sure it lands
Disappointing, although I do agree with this being a better solution than gutting either the Radiant or the whole Neural Link mechanic entirely.
Trust me, it's not!
Everything combat/ship related sounds fascinating! Concerning the colony skills being effectively removed though: What about coming up with some quick back of the napkin administrator-only skills? Surely there's some possibilities there?
Just as a quick addition, I do want to echo Morrokain's question about Administrators. Is it possible to let them retain a unique set of skills that the players dont have access to, thus keeping the same skill system for admins we have and increasing the diversity of administrators? I 100% agree with the colony skills discussion(which will likely be in my wall of text on this) but I think reverting admins to just be weak expansions on the number of colonies rather than definable skillful(or weak) admins is also reverting a system that makes players think about their administrators(or seek out constant improvements) isn't a wise idea.
Plus now that I write this and thus think about it, it likely adds in potential later down the line to have a more expansive colonization system without toying with player skills.
Hmm - I'm not *generally* into giving other NPCs skills the player has no access to. There are exceptions - like the new Hypercognition skill for Alpha Cores - but it's for stuff where it makes sense the player couldn't get it themselves. I think it'd feel bad if the colonies you ran yourself were just always worse than skilled-admin ones.
If colonies were completely excised from the player skill system, though, and if running colonies yourself was just not an option - you *had* to have an admin... hmm. This sort of thing could make sense and be good.
We were discussing phase ships on the unofficial discord (we do this a lot for everything lore related), and I wanted to ask you: how does movement in phase work? The phase coils anchor ships to realspace, right? But otherwise the rest of the ship is in phase space, as it no longer becomes affected by objects or energy in realspace.
So what is the ship moving in that allows normal ship thrusters/mobility to function as normal? Is phase a medium? Harsh entropy? Is it empty space?
Hmm. You'll note that engine glows fade out when a ship is phased, so I'm not sure I'd describe that as "functioning as normal".
Phase lance per its name shoots a beam that partially exists in phase space. Why wouldn't it not be possible to develop a weapon that shoots a beam of energy into phase space and melt phase ships? And why wouldn't the opposite also be possible?
"... in laboratory settings the p-space components of a beam exceeding 6.66 giga-watts will sometimes flicker - as if blocked. Weapon mounts never use such high energy levels..." etc. It's perhaps reasonable to suppose that achieving meaningful damage to a phased object would require higher energy levels. Also, the idea that just getting something into p-space is enough to let it *actually* hit something in p-space is demonstrably false - see: phase ships being able to fly through each other while both are phased.
I mean, the entire concept of phase is purposely shrouded in mystery, but at what level are objects in phase still obeying the physics of realspace?
And then there's the Doom that can teleport mines from phase space into realspace. That creates even more questions!
It is, indeed, a mystery.
While I like it for the purposes of balance, it's going to be a bit lame personally piloting a phase ship. I guess that's a part of the reason why you made Adaptive Phase Coils...
(See: my earlier comment about piloting an Afflictor! And, yeah.)
Re: Whatever phase hullmod that slow ships too much?
Just make their time shift speed up your ship instead of slowing down the world. Part of the reason to use phase is a poor-man's teleport.
Hmm, it's a possibility, but it'd feel weird to put that on a hullmod. And it totally doesn't work as a general mechanic for all phase ships, they'd be way too fast to control well.
Re: Colonies...
So we lose the skills but get nothing back?
I'm not sure that's how this works
