About skills in general: i m exited! I mean: the last patch was interesting, but now i feel like i want 40 skill points 
About phase ships: may be i m wrong, but i feel that they ll be even more OP now.
Hmm - genuinely not sure what you mean! I'm not seeing how any of these changes would make them "more OP".
Spoiler
About administrators: How about making specialisations? A mean: officers have different behavior (steady, agressive, etc.). Why not make admins different? For example, AI is OP, but it has no emotions. While admin can sometimes make strange decicions, but it may lead to better outcome.
Also i d like to see skills, affecting colonies in some ways, like:
- bonuses to specific industry
- bonus to pop growth
- bonus to combat
- bonus, allowing to deal with ludds/pirates better (like: admin automatically goes to bar, buys a drink to a pirate and sends a fleet to eliminate pirate base)
- bonus, adding extra industry by some high price (not money, but something else... maybe malus to pop growth)
- bonus, decreasing enviroment penalties
Also. Why not add people happyness system in future updates?
- if planet is happy, people from other planets might want to migrate there (maybe even people from different factions, if they will not prevent that). It also will allow to create colonies specially for pop export (i mean: you anyway cant get colony bigger than 7 now).
- your people will be more happy if there is no war with other factions
- admins might have skills to boost happyness
- some planets might have exotic fauna which boost happyness
- miners will have some other ways to enjoy life, not just by medicine
- higher happyness rate if luxury goods are cheap (so, you need to choose: low price and happy people or sad people, but more income)
- etc.
All possible ideas! We've actually got some ideas for roughly this sort cooking, too
I just don't want to come up with a bunch of mechanical stuff if it all boils down to "more or less credits at the end of the month"... well, we'll see.
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.
Hmm, I actually think that could be a very good idea. Not sure about any potential pitfalls off the top of my head, but it's intriguing to separate the two in order to give more spice to admins - and therefore cores as well. (Though cores are already pretty interesting by themselves.)
It also makes a bit more sense to me that the player doesn't govern their own colonies directly and rather hires administrators to oversee them, since, they aren't actually present most of the time. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the player couldn't have skills that sort of tie into colonies (like the detachment idea that was mentioned) without directly affecting them.
Yeah, the more I think about this, the more I like it.
I'd suggest, rather, making it so that colonies can't get to size four without an admin.
That sounds really good.
...On the phase ships thing, I'll just say that the current phase mastery elite bonus is very much a quality-of-life thing for me; I don't like playing phase ships without that because the fastest way to travel is using phase... and that costs you your zero flux speed boost, making it feel slow. Losing that will be annoying.
Yeah, I get that. I mean, you could get Phase Coil Tuning for half that bonus, and Unstable Injector is there, etc, but yeah. That one stings a bit but I don't think there's any good way around that.
Re: colonies/admins. It makes too much sense to simply not let the player govern. Keep colony skills as-is but up the number of base admins to 4. Make non-skilled admins plentiful and 1-skill admins still relatively common. 2 skill admins would be rare/found (as an aside, these rare ones that cost $25k a month cripple early colonies. All admin salaries need to be pro-rated based on colony size). Also, Beta Admins should be a thing (2-skills but no hypercognition). Industrial planning in Skills could just be Colony Management and increases Admin count by 2 and gives all colonies under Admin control (but not Cores) some kind of bonus to their existing skulls and/or a reduction in their cost to govern. I think Cores are simply no-brainers at this point and paying admins should have an upside.
I'll just say, if admins don't use skills the player can get, then that opens up some possibilities for what sorts of things those skills could be/represent...
I like how phase coil tuning says "Combat phase ships", which gives me hope the logistic phase ship issue has been handled.
It should be, yeah. I still need to double check but I think I fixed that.
And it feels like low tech is getting a lot of subtle buffs from some of these skills.
Indeed
It does raise the question, does the scaling armor for calculations apply to damage hitting hull (in terms of minimum armor?).
It does, yeah.
To be honest, a pair of Neural linked Onslaught XIVs with a pile of personal skills looks like they should be terrifying. Combat 7, Tech 5, Industry 3 sounds crazy to me initially, but 10 personal skills buffing them both feels like low tech ballistics with old release armor survivability and probably around 1600 flux dissipation each (and potentially with resistant flux conduits+elite polarized armor, 4800 dissipation while venting, for a 4-5 second vent from full flux).
I will say, the 25 OP cost for Neural interface isn't that bad for an Onslaught, but for say a Legion or Odyssey, 25 OP feels a bit steep. Battle carriers, which tend to feel to many players to have insufficient OP for fighters and guns, are going to probably pass on being Neural linked. I guess you're worried about double capitals being the optimal use, given the DP limits on instant swap, and the large jump in OP costs on the hull mod. I'm wondering if I'd bother to use it with an Odyssey, for example. That tends to require attention 100% of the time, the AI isn't quite as good at handling some player centric builds, plus it is a 9% hit to OP. Certainly looking forward to trying it at least getting a feel for how much of a benefit fast swap is on those kinds of ships.
Hmm, there's no one-size-fits all here, or with hullmods in general. It feels like the other concerns with using an Odyssey have more importance than the OP cost, though, maybe? Worth thinking about/keeping an eye on, though.
Why would an update with such a massive change to the skill system be titled 0.95.1a instead of 0.95b?
Because "a" stands for "alpha"
Phase Anchor seems useless.
... I mean, I literally said in the blog post that it's getting re-worked
Also, I don't think speed reduction at 50% hard flux is actually a notable nerf to player-piloted assassin builds - I rarely go above 25% hard flux in current version. Short approach ( a bit hard flux) - unload AMs (soft flux close to the cap) - short retreat (a bit more hard flux) - vent - repeat.
Just to clarify, the speed reduction *maxes out* at 50% hard flux. At 25% flux, you'd be at -33% speed. But yeah, these things are still quite doable, which is intended.
When does the forced removal of the “permeant” effects take place? i.e. if I want to swap my skills from phase ship to carrier skills do I go through that dialogue (and lose stuff) when I press the reassign button or after I have re-spent my points and re-brought the skills (therefore to no effect)?
It's done when you confirm the changes. Just pressing the reassign button doesn't *do* anything aside from letting you press some buttons.
I see no one talking about the very complicated built in hullmod undoing system.
Alex, I think you're getting yourself into a mess there - keeping an extra list of all ships that remembers what to undo when the skill is unselected? That sounds like a nightmare to maintain, and also very opaque to the player.
I suggest instead that when a player has the relevant skill and builds-in a hullmod, these are marked as "extra built-in" - so it's clear to the player that these are the ones that go away, and the data is stored together with everything else. No second master list of ships!
This makes it trivial to give ships to players that never owned them. Imagine a mod adding an event that gifts a ship - the mod creator can kit it out with the extra built-in hullmods, knowing that if the player doesn't have the appropriate skill they'll just be removed.
I feel like what you're suggesting - "marking a hullmod as extra built in" - is basically the same thing I'm doing, as far as keeping track of things. And the part about it being trivial to give ships s-modded ships to players is also already true.
Question: does Polarized Armor "turn off" when a ship is overloaded or is it passive-passive to the point of protecting you a bit during such unfortunate circumstances too? I guess it'd be weird to have a skill 'disabled' in such a way, but it's not exactly completely unprecedented (the no-flux-generate speed boost ended up doing that, IIRC?) so I could see that one go either way.
It doesn't!
(For Helmsmanship, technically it wasn't a change to the skill to make it not apply, but a fix to an oversight in the underlying mechanics!)
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.
Huh, wasn't expecting that. And how are Reapers still worth it despite getting their damage reduced to 1900, whereas an individual Hammer punches for 1800 and has two shots for the same OP as a single Reaper? Purely firing at armor rather than as a finisher against hull?
Hmm - maybe you didn't catch the part about the skill being changed so this damage-reduction effect only procs at most once every two seconds? Because with that, you fire two Reapers, the first one takes down the armor and also procs the effect, while the second one just deals full damage. Hammers... things get a lot messier trying to use Hammers. It's not just a DPS-on-paper thing, you know?
Hmm...on the surface it sounds like that gives HBI a negative synergy with that skill, but "get the benefit of two guns for the price of one gun" isn't a negative, so...playtesting needed...
I mean, getting 10 OP to spend is generally going to be better than getting 20 flux dissipation (and, what, 200 capacity?), since that's just 3 OP worth of vents/caps. So unless you're maxed on vents and caps and have flux distributor/coil adjunct, HBI is just strictly better than not having it (which isn't even a choice in the first place since it's built-in, so that's a bit of a moot point anyway). And even if flux stats are maxed, chances are you can get more out of the extra OP.
Me and sarcasm have a long and storied history of being unable to meet up somewhere sensible, so let's just call that Schroedinger's Sarcasm 
.
Hah!
Speaking as someone who prioritizes campaign QoL (meaning ADF, EO, etc.) over pure combat power I'm sure that -50OP for manual control will sting greatly. Still, I'm sure there's a budget build I can make work.
Yeah, a budget build with 4 Autopulse Lasers, a Plasma Cannon, and maybe 4 Tyhpoons to round it out...
You still haven't revealed what T4L does.
(Sadly, that notation no longer makes much sense. Maybe we can call it, like... T3C. Or just T33.)
That skill is called "Cybernetic Augmentation", but beyong that,
Any changes to Shield Shunt?
Nope.
The more I think about it, the more I think an additional speed penalty on top of the of the 1/3rd at high flux sounds like a bit too much stacking penalty. If I understand it correctly, from the pilot's perspective, a Harbinger with Phase Anchor and 50% or higher hard flux moves at a speed 13.3 (80/3 -> 26.6/2 -> 13.3), which roughly half the speed of an Onslaught for a human pilot. That's going to feel painful to pilot a destroyer at. Even reducing it to 25% means speed 20 (26.6*0.75 = 20), although which with 4x time dilation means standard out of phase speed of 80.
The benefits of 4x time dilation relative to 3x are: 25% faster soft flux dissipation, 25% faster weapon cycling, 25% faster ship system cycling, and 25% faster movement speed relative to real time. Adding a speed reduction eliminates the last advantage, literally turning it into faster gun/system cycling at the cost of player patience while trying to move.
The disadvantages are 25% faster hard flux accumulation, and 25% faster peak performance time tick down. Say it's a 25% speed penalty from the Anchor mod, so real time speed stays the same. The hard flux cost per unit distance covered in phase has gone up by 33%. Which means such a mod makes it more likely you simply get killed when it comes time to run away as your hard flux will be higher than compared to a ship that didn't have that hull mod.
...
What I'm thinking about is having it reduce the hard flux threshold instead, so that it hits max speed penalty at 25% instead of at 50%. That way you'd have a tougher time getting into an "assassinate" type position, but would have enough room to back off and vent, especially with some support to hide behing. Reducing the phase cloak cooldown could be good here, too, or perhaps just overall reducing the damage taken. And perhaps combining all this with a 5x multiplier. Need to try a bunch of things and see how it all feels, though - that's just assorted ideas at this point, nothing concrete.
