That change makes me sad, actually. I would love for different admins to be, well, different, so there's some excitement in finding particularly good ones. But that means having lots of different skills (less powerful and more specific than current ones). Going to no skills except one is a bit disappointing, so all admins are totally generic.
Obviously I don't know, but this could just be placeholder until some more interesting Admin skills are cooked up. Might not have been worth the Dev time this pass.
I'll just say that this is something we've talked about internally - but, don't want to go into details in case nothing comes of it. But I also don't think that having a 3 skills total is *that* much more interesting, given that the skills are all fairly general-purpose boosts anyway.
I was going to make basically this exact point, but it would appear that others have beaten me to it. However, it does beg a few further questions regarding implementation/patching. Is the current code/colony skills going to be kept in the code as legacy in case someone wants to mod admin skills back in for admins while waiting for whatever the eventual decision is/next patch?
Also, how is/which current admins will get/keep the only skill (Industrial Planning) still available? Admins that already have the skill, or just any two skill admin? I only ask 'cuz I recently started a new run to hopefully update to the new patch with no/few issues, and am already dragging around some found admins while looking for that optimal colony location, need to decide which ones to fire and which to keep... and I double-checked your July blog post regarding this, it seems pretty ambiguous regarding who keeps what (maybe it was answered in the blog forum thread somewhere, not gonna reread that entire thing if I can just ask here).
Does any here believe that fighter/carriers will be less viable than before?
Prolly not less viable, but kinda hard to tell with the giant info dump, including changes to fighters/fighter weapons, skills, ships, etc. However, the PD weapon range nerf seems like it will definitely help make carriers more viable again. Plus the additional command option for escorting ships should help with better protecting carriers, don't just have to rely on xyphos anymore...
The only thing i dont get: were energy weapons OP? Why so much buffs for ballistics? I mean: ok, plasma was good. But what else? I understand the asymmetric balance conception, but anyway...
The changes to High Scatter Amplifier have plenty of new ramifications to energy weapons. I think both weapon types were buffed and it will take a lot of data to show which came out on top. Even missiles got a teeny buff with the elite MS skill.
Spoiler
NEW High Scatter Amplifier
- Reduces the base range of beam weapons to 500/600/700 on frigates/destroyers/larger ships.
- Beams deal +10% damage.
- Beams deal hard flux damage to shields.
It perfectly synergizes with EWM skill now.
On paper, it terrifies me to think about an SO Sunder with HSA, 2 Graviton Beams and a HIL
Finally, I will say that the changes to the High Scatter Amplifier are extremely interesting, basically splits energy weapons into two categories via absence or presence of a single hull mod (beams doing hard vs soft flux damage to shields, but basically inversely proportional to energy weapon range). Are there a bunch of code tags/hints to modify ships AI behavior when High Scatter Amplifier present/used vs. when not? Seems like ship/energy weapon AI might still end up being too timid otherwise (although this prolly also may vary due to officer temperament).