Hmm a couple of things I'll note, going through this at a first pass:
1. Damage control says the damage over 500 is reduced "by 60%" rather than "to 60%". Means over half of that amount is taken out. So previous if we expected that a 1300-damage cryoblaster shot would've done 980 damage, it now actually does 820 instead. Will have to update my damage graph but it's a decently large nerf; we'll see if it ends up being too big as people play around with it.
2. The skill system basically changed from a bunch of "choose A or B" decisions, to "choose the best X out of Y possible" decisions. So it basically gives the player more flexibility (like the ship OP system where you choose whichever hullmods/weapons you want out of a limited pool) without being overly constraining. For me, an example of a hard decision previously was coordinated maneuvers or wolfpack tactics: either my fleet gets the equivalent of Unstable Injector (without the OP cost nor weapon range penalty), or my frigates do extra damage. Realistically since the bulk of the damage was done by non-frigates, usually frigates got the shaft. Now I can get both if I want to, so frigates give me a two-fer (since they give extra speed to other ships as well), which is nice.
3. The new skill system sets up an interesting decision, in that now there are 3 possible ways to get +15% CR (though the cap stays at 100%): a ship's own Combat Endurance, fleet-wide Crew Training, or fleet-wide Hull Restoration. This means that the player can potentially use his own skill points to essentially "buy" Combat Endurance for the ship, assuming the ship doesn't need the other bonuses from the skill (such as the extra PPT), so that the ship can choose another skill instead. It'll be interesting to see how many players choose this option for essentially an extra skill on that ship.
4. I seem to have an odd issue, in that 2 of my 9 officers can still choose the old skills (such as Ranged Specialization). I'll admit though it may be because I'm editing the save file directly from a 0.95a RC15 game and may simply have changed it incompletely. I was manually editing the officers from level 6 back to level 1 to level them up again in 0.95.1a RC3. The data is:
Officer 1:
<c z="59788" id="p_27b3ca" pid="aggressive" spr="graphics/portraits/portrait_d1.png" rnk="spaceLieutenant" pst="officer" wTCRC="0" cW="1.0" fid="player" a="true" im="MEDIUM">
(stuff)
<stats z="59792" x2="0" xp="9999000" bx="0" db="0" l="1" pt="0" sp="0"> (xp used to be 168000, l used to be 6)
<s>{"target_analysis":1}</s> (used to be a full set of 6 skills)
Officer 2:
<c z="59917" id="p_765563" pid="aggressive" spr="graphics/portraits/portrait_d2.png" rnk="spaceLieutenant" pst="officer" wTCRC="0" cW="1.0" fid="player" a="true" im="MEDIUM">
(stuff)
<stats z="59921" x2="0" xp="9999000" bx="2038500" db="0" l="1" pt="0" sp="0"> (xp used to be 168000, l used to be 6)
<s>{"target_analysis":1}</s> (used to be a full set of 6 skills)
The above two could still take ranged specialization. The below officer (where the changes should've been identical) could take ballistic mastery properly.
Officer 3:
<c z="60049" id="p_191165" pid="aggressive" spr="graphics/portraits/portrait_d3.png" rnk="spaceLieutenant" pst="officer" wTCRC="0" cW="1.0" fid="player" a="true" im="MEDIUM">
(stuff)
<stats z="60053" x2="0" xp="9999000" bx="2038500" db="0" l="1" pt="0" sp="0"> (xp used to be 168000, l used to be 6)
<s>{"target_analysis":1}</s> (used to be a full set of 6 skills)
It's not a particularly urgent issue, since I can just copy-paste the officer data from Officer 3 to the other 2. But in case other people report that they can still take the old skills with their officers, this might provide some information on that.
