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[SCC]

The choice between Support Doctrine and Ballistic Mastery is more of a function of "do I put all my officers in cruisers or capitals and run out of DP before I run out of officers?" - if yes then BM, if not then, SD.

[Hiruma Kai]

I don't think raising the level cap fixes the issue. It just results in you taking more fleet wide combat skills IMO. I think it's fair to argue that splitting combat skills off would eliminate some possibilities (taking no combat skills), and there are probably better approaches. I guess my favorite idea is making skills cost different numbers of skill points as way to balance them without having to gut the strong skills, or try to make all skills equally strong.

I think it's coming down to play style differences, different evaluations of skills, and different fleet compositions.

Generally I grab 5 skills in the combat tree, simply because on the right ships I consider System Mastery to be a literal game changer on the right ships, and Missile Specialization isn't that far behind (although the later can be partially duplicated by having an Combat Endurance/Missile Spec officer sit in the ship and swapping at the start of combat, which also frees up a combat endurance pick on player character).  So in some play throughs, I nominally trade 5 (or 6) officer skills for 2 half skills on my personally piloted ship.  On the other hand, I might only have 8 combat ships filling out 240 DP in such a run, at which point am I really trading anything away if ships are actually DP balanced?

From my experience in vanilla, you can be successful with the no personal skill style as well as the 13 player skill style, or anything in between, assuming you have an appropriately designed fleet for the skills you chose.

Success is a super poorly defined term.

I define success in Starsector as the ability to use a 240 DP fleet (on a 400 DP default combat size setting, since on smaller settings personal skills become more valuable relatively speaking) to defeat a pair of [Super Redacted] at a Hypershunt, a single triple Radiant Ordo after farming a red system for awhile, and take out the [Super Redacted] bounty, with the outcome never being in doubt (3 out of 3 replays result in victory).  In addition, being able to get to that point in the game on iron man with a spacer start without taking a commission or respecing, and in a short enough time frame I don't lose interest in the run.  Others may have different definitions of course, but I feel like that one covers most of the bases in terms of end game content.

I agree the direction that balance moves you in is important, but the problem is you have different players with different styles at which point different skills are going to pull on players differently.  I highly value personal ship skills, but then again, my default or typical combat play style is issue a few move orders at the beginning, engage the enemy, and cancel all my orders, and rely on my support ships to survive and essentially be distractions, while I fly around picking enemies off.  I'll sometimes pop up to the tactical map, or if I'm not in an end game fleet and I feel the battle is close I'll actually issue further orders (harass a capital, eliminate that flanking ship, etc). I guess what I'm trying to say is what appears strongest to a player is going to depend on how they actually approach the game.

RE 'my good fleet can't use these strong fleet-wide skills'
From the perspective of pure optimization, the response would be that the fleet is probably worse than another fleet that can use those skills, and you should just use different ships (for instance just remove some capital ships and add more hyperions to use the extra officers). You can of course do many things that will work, but I am trying to talk about what the game is incentivizing you to do, which is the 'strongest' thing.

I’m very good at combat but when comparing the benefits of adding Support Doctrine (with my 10 unofficered ships) vs. Ballistic Mastery for my flagship, the impact of the former is magnitudes higher than the latter. And this a real choice the game gives you. All Tier 0 Combat Skills ultimately compete with T3/T4/T5 skills for your skill points

It's easy enough to say in general and in vacuum, but you really need to have a concrete example, since there's always tradeoffs.  For me my end tier leadership skills are competing with Missile Specialization and System Expertise, not the tier 0s.

So for example, your optimization choice for my proposed fleet is unclear to me.  Swapping, say an Onslaught and Fury for more Hyperions to get more benefit of 2 more officers comes at some cost. It's another 9-12 story points to s-mod the Hyperions and mentor/elite skills the officers for example, on top of the already spent 58 (8 for mentoring, 2 elite skills per officer, 3 s-mods per ship times 9 ships, 7 personal elite skills).  The former requires 2 story point past level 15.  The later requires 15.  If story points are no object, and we're doing pure optimization why would you ever take the +2 officers skill when you can just hire two mercenary officers? 

So to make it concrete, lets assume I'm piloting an Onslaught XIV, my baseline fleet is 2 Onslaught XIV, 2 Legion XIV, 1 Fury, 4 Hyperions, and my skill selection is:
Combat Endurance, Impact Mitigation, Target Analysis, Ballistic Mastery, Missile Specialization
Wolfpack Tactics, Crew Training, Carrier Group, Officer Training, Best of the Best
Navigation, Gunnery Implants, Flux Regulation
Field Repairs, Ordinance Expertise

Dropping Missile Specialization defeats the point of piloting the Onslaught since the plan is to drive up flux at long range with 4x Squalls and 8x Longbows from escorting Legions, and Thermal Pulse Cannons at 1950 range, and then burn drive in and drop 4 Reapers at point blank (and a 2nd salvo if necessary 10 seconds later within the overload duration, such as against Radiants). 5 other smaller ships tends to be enough to keep the rest of the enemy fleet distracted while I quickly focus fire down capitals and cruisers.

I suppose you could drop the Field Repairs and Ordinance Expertise, but it's not clear to me the two extra Hyperions are really that much better than an Onslaught in such a fleet, and the loss of flux on the player ship is quite noticeable.  The extra capital provide some nice staying power in long slogs (like against multiple large pirate fleets or the like which just take time to churn through all the hullpoints) that the Hyperions lack.

So assuming the player wants to use a shiny Onslaught XIV, and found 2 Legion XIV (like I did in my last play through - it admittedly doesn't always happen), how would you respec the character and rebuild the fleet with minimal player skills and 11-15 fleet skills, while keeping that 3 ship low tech core, working under the assumption that fleet skills are going to be superior generally?  That'll let me try flying around both setups and at least I'll have a personal testing experience against a hypershunt and Ordos I can relay back.

[SCC]

Generally I grab 5 skills in the combat tree

Right, I forgot one thing: combat tree's usefulness falls off hard after getting 5 or 6 skills, simply because that's how many skills are really useful to the ship you're piloting. Getting Impact Mitigation for Hyperion won't really change all that much. There are still good skills in Technology and Industry trees.

[Megas]

EDIT: Random idea: ok so if a chunk of people think personal skills are meh, just make them a slightly stronger version of officer skills?

That is probably the reason for Elite level.  Officers only get one or two (with Officer Training), unless they take Cybernetic Augmentation for two more.  (Then eventually, player fights Remnants with a massive skill advantage.)

Part of what makes Neural Link attractive (when I have four in Tech for Ziggurat and do not care about Automated Ships) is getting an Alpha+ core equivalent in another human ship to emulate a Remnant ship piloted by Alpha core, except the Neural Interface hullmods are a stiff OP tax, when OP budgets are already tight enough without the tax.  Does not help that the AI is locked at Steady, when most should have Aggressive+.

Generally I grab 5 skills in the combat tree

Right, I forgot one thing: combat tree's usefulness falls off hard after getting 5 or 6 skills, simply because that's how many skills are really useful to the ship you're piloting. Getting Impact Mitigation for Hyperion won't really change all that much. There are still good skills in Technology and Industry trees.

I would like to get about six or seven in Combat but limit myself to five when I want capstone skills in two other trees.

My general-purpose Combat skill selection is Helmsmanship, Combat Endurance, Impact Mitigation, Point Defense, and Ballistic Mastery.  There are other skills I would like to get but cannot when I have ten in Technology and Industry.  If I get enough Omega Missiles on Ziggurat, I swap Point Defense and Ballistic Mastery to Target Analysis and Missile Specialization.

[Wyvern]

I have, personally, been in favor of a split between flagship skills and fleet-wide skills for some time now.

But I'd like to draw attention to a point that others have brought up in passing: A major factor in the pain of how skills are set up right now is that fleet sizes - both for the player and for their opponent - are significantly larger than they were in earlier versions of Starsector.

I would very much like to see a return of the player's fleet being limited by deployment value - though ideally, this time, with several skills that play around with that limit (boosting the maximum value, or offering discounts for certain ship types, or even easing the over-cap penalties.) And a slightly higher base limit to start with, too; back when this was in the game, the base limit was small enough as to make taking the skill to boost it effectively mandatory.

_____
As for elite skills - yeah, the player gets to elite everything they take, which is nice. But a lot of the elite perks are just kindof meh at best.

* Helmsmanship: This one's... okay for the player. Not the best choice for AI, though, since the AI doesn't know how to use it.
* Combat Endurance: Trash for the sorts of ships I prefer to field; if your Aurora is below 50% hull, it should be retreating.
* Impact Mitigation: Surprisingly useful as an elite effect; I'll sometimes take this skill just to get the elite bonus on otherwise shielding-heavy hulls.
* Damage Control: Even for armor-tanking ships, I'd rather install enough PD that torpedos don't connect in the first place. Pass. (I'd also note that this effect is one that just feels bad - for your ships it only triggers if something has gone horribly wrong already, while for enemy ships what you see is "Oh, I got a solid torpedo hit in! Wait, why is it not dead?")
* Field Modulation: This one's good.
* Point Defense: This one's also good.
* Target Analysis: ...I guess maybe if you're kitting out a support ship with a bunch of ion beams or something? Definitely not a good choice for elite effect on a general-purpose officer, though.
* Ballistic Mastery: Eh. It's okay, I guess? Probably better choices for your limited officer elite skills, though.
* Systems Expertise: The elite effect here does a lot of things! And I don't actually care about any of them. It's a nice bonus for the player, but the sorts of ships where these bonuses really matter are ships I'd never give to the AI in the first place.
* Missile Specialization: Generally good, but also kindof situational - this matters a lot if you've got large missile slots, not so much if what you're working with is a bunch of smalls.
* Gunnery Implants: The poster child of bad elite effects. What does this do for your individual ship you're flying? Basically nothing. Can be useful if stacked... until you run up against someone who's stacked it more than you (Hello, ordos,) at which point it's useless again. Just a bad investment unless you're planning on not fighting the remnants.
* Energy Weapon Mastery: Decent. Not great, and generally less important to elite than, say, Field Modulation or Point Defense, but still decent.
* Ordnance Expertise: Eh. It's not bad, but it's also not good, either. Not an exciting skill to elite.
* Polarized Armor: Surprisingly one of the better choices for a skill to elite. The AI still won't always vent when they should, but a faster cycle time on venting makes it at least a bit more likely that they will.

So that's about three-to-five good picks, four-to-five decent-but-not-exciting picks, and the rest are generally not worth considering for your officers. (Outside of special situations like deciding that you're going to go all-in on ECM.)

[Thaago]

Generally I grab 5 skills in the combat tree

Right, I forgot one thing: combat tree's usefulness falls off hard after getting 5 or 6 skills, simply because that's how many skills are really useful to the ship you're piloting. Getting Impact Mitigation for Hyperion won't really change all that much. There are still good skills in Technology and Industry trees.

I kind of agree with this, kind of disagree. Some of the fleetwide skills are also good personal combat skills, and some of them are just powerful enough I want them anyways, so there is some balance to be had. But in general the more combat skills I can stack on what I'm flying the more of a murder machine I can be. I find that the combat skills are more general than they first appear - the shield boosting skills are good on low tech because they do use shields, just less often; the hull/armor/repair skills are good on high tech because the more hull/armor tanking you can do the more aggressive you can be and the less opportunities are wasted, particularly for incoming kinetic firepower (I'm constantly taking hull damage when flying high tech, partially because I'm too aggressive/mess up my shield timing, partially because its a resource that I have so I'm going to spend it killing things faster).

[Megas]

* Helmsmanship: This one's... okay for the player. Not the best choice for AI, though, since the AI doesn't know how to use it.
* Combat Endurance: Trash for the sorts of ships I prefer to field; if your Aurora is below 50% hull, it should be retreating.

I would want elite Helmsmanship on a non-SO high-tech ship like Shrike or Fury so it can run away more easily to vent.  Although I would not take it on an officer.

Combat Endurance is good a few ships, like Neural Link Onslaught.  It gets worn down by lots of chip damage.  I have tried Onslaught flagship and second AI Onslaught with level 5 officer.  The AI Onslaught dies sooner from chip damage.  If my AI Onslaught is Neural Linked, it survives more easily like my flagship.  That said, Combat Endurance does not compete for the single elite skill.

Field Modulation is a must-have for normal phase ships.  Phase cooldown is normally too long.  eFM cuts cooldown time to something more acceptable.

The skills I consider making elite are either Point Defense or Missile Specialization (or Field Modulation for phase ships).

[SCC]

A simpler way would be to just formally bump max level ... (yes, I know it's in settings.json)

You might want to check out a mod for that instead, as just modifying the settings.json values will make levelling past level 15 way too slow.

the shield boosting skills are good on low tech because they do use shields, just less often

I always take this one anyway and I included it in the "5 or 6 useful skills" I mentioned earlier.

the hull/armor/repair skills are good on high tech because the more hull/armor tanking you can do

While that is true, you probably will want the Polarised Armour skill for faster venting, in addition to better armour tanking. And it's a yellow skill, instead of a red skill.

Elite skills are supposed to help with this - even with a few combat skills, you'd still have more elite effects than most of your officers. Hmm. What's "quite a few" that if you make them all elite, you still feel weaker than let's say a level 6 officer with 2 elite skills?

Regardless, though, the solution to that - if required - would be to shift more of the combat skill power into the elite effects, imo, since that's what they're there for.

My experience with combat skills so far, is that for regular warships (and probably carriers), 091 skills were preferable to 095 skills. Missile-heavy and gimmicky ships are better off in 095. A part of that difference might be that Remnants get more skills than human officers and than they used to, and that they are more aggressive now. 7/8 elite combat skills might be around the same as a character that goes for best flagship bonuses, not the most combat skills.

[Thaago]

Oh I see what you mean - I was thinking all the personal combat skills, not just the red ones, but you specifically said combat tree. My bad!

[Megas]

My experience with combat skills so far, is that for regular warships (and probably carriers), 091 skills were preferable to 095 skills. Missile-heavy and gimmicky ships are better off in 095. A part of that difference might be that Remnants get more skills than human officers and than they used to, and that they are more aggressive now. 7/8 elite combat skills might be around the same as a character that goes for best flagship bonuses, not the most combat skills.

Not only more skills, but more officers (cores) too.  Every ship in an Ordos fleet has a core, and the cores in about half of the ships are Alpha grade.  Human fleets do not have officers in all of their ships, and none of them are as powerful as an Alpha core.

[Vanshilar]

I don't see why having more piloted skills and less fleet skills automatically equates to more "fun". In fact right now I see what is "fun" as being very poorly defined here, relying on some vague notions of ship power or strength (i.e. implicitly assuming that buffing your personal ship is more fun while buffing the fleet is less fun by comparison), so it's unclear how to even go about trying to discuss what makes the game more enjoyable. In other words, proposing solutions without actually clearly defining what the problem is, why that's a problem, and how the solution addresses those problems. I would argue that in many circumstances, more fleet skills actually make the fight more interesting, i.e. more "fun", over more combat skills.

As an example, let me first define what I personally think is fun, i.e. my personal playstyle. Generally, I prefer to pilot a fast ship that goes around beating up and taking out weakened, vulnerable ships. So that means say LP Brawler with dual Assault Chainguns, or SO Medusa with dual Cryoblasters (current favorite), or Doom with a bunch of Antimatter SRMs prior to the latest patch (i.e. before phase got nerfed). I recognize other players have different playstyles, but that's how I prefer to fight the battles.

I the human pilot am also much better than the AI at gauging the risk vs reward of jumping into the enemy fleet to finish off a weakened ship. So my flagship tends to have extremely high burst damage (and particularly, anti-hull), and then slink back into the fleet while I recover. Meanwhile my fleet is geared to be more anti-shield (to weaken enemy ships) and more fleet support-oriented (such as Xyphos) so that I can duck behind them when needed. So this works out well because I the human player specialize in doing what the AI is poor at doing, rather than trying to duplicate its strengths, thus making the battles as smooth as possible.

So my current fleet is me in a SO Medusa, with a bunch of LP Brawlers using Support Doctrine, and a couple of Falcon XIV's as support. Since I also take Best of the Best that means 8 points into Leadership, so 7 points remaining. The temptation here might be to say well then I should go top tier in Combat for Systems Expertise since that'll double the range of my Phase Skimmer and make me more maneuverable, thus more "fun" since I can zoom around the battlefield more.

But if I take Flux Regulation instead, the LP Brawlers can gain an additional 1300 flux capacity, which is huge considering they start with only 3000 flux capacity. They're very squishy. So if I spend that skill point on Flux Regulation, then the LP Brawlers being more tanky means 1) they can do more damage before they have to back off, so I get more weakened ships to kill (instead of having to weaken the ships myself by slogging through their shields before I get to the fun bit) and 2) I spend less time having to rescue some errant LP Brawler from imminent demise when I'd rather be killing stuff.

In this case, putting the point into a fleet skill means I spend more time doing what I feel is "fun" and less time doing what I feel is "unfun". I generally end up doing around 20% of the overall damage, with the bulk of my time jumping around from weakened ship to weakened ship to finish them off, which is what I find "fun". Meanwhile, the LP Brawlers and Falcon XIV's do the other 80%, of driving up the enemy ships' flux (to weaken them for me), or chasing down frigates (which I don't find that fun and I suck at pointing the guns at fast-maneuvering targets anyway). So I do 20% of the work, most of it the "fun" bits, and get 100% of the benefit.

Similarly, while it's certainly possible to solo through battles with a Ziggurat, I've always felt that's not particularly fun, because you the player have to chase down and kill every single ship. Too tedious. Much better to have a fleet with you to take care of all the annoying stuff like chase down the scattered frigates around the battlefield while you do the fun stuff. So beyond taking some of the highest impact skills for your ship, it ends up being better to spend points on your fleet instead.

So I don't feel splitting up the skill tree into dedicated "piloted ship" and "fleet" branches, each with their own set of skill points, is needed. Part of the decision process itself is figuring out how much of one or the other (or colony skills or campaign skills if that's your thing) you the player prefer to invest in. Having the skills share the same pool of points gives the player the flexibility to adjust where they spend the points to their preference.

Another idea is to just have some skills be worth more than one skill point, and increase max level to compensate. That would let you make it cheaper to grab combat skills, and just gives another lever for making skill balanced overall.

That's what the tier system essentially does.

[Fotsvamp]

What if experience was split into two kinds of experience, one gained (fighting experience or combat experience or called anything really) from personally dealing damage in combat used to fill out a tree of personal combat skills,

and another kind of experience (fleet experience, leadership experience or whatever) gained from trade, exploring salvage and subordinate ships dealing damage in combat which is used to level up a tree of skills made up of skills having an effect on map activities, logistical and fleet wide effects.

That way both sides could be fleshed out without having to "take" from the other, yet you can tailor how you build your skills and what to pick and at what point.

This would probably neccessitate expanding into more skills, so there are choices in both trees, but I think this type of system of becoming good at what you are doing adds flavour to a game and would fit this game quite a bit.

This would be similar to the systems of experience in elder scrolls games and mount & blade but not quite as excessive.

[Megas]

I would very much like to see a return of the player's fleet being limited by deployment value - though ideally, this time, with several skills that play around with that limit (boosting the maximum value, or offering discounts for certain ship types, or even easing the over-cap penalties.) And a slightly higher base limit to start with, too; back when this was in the game, the base limit was small enough as to make taking the skill to boost it effectively mandatory.

I would prefer this to the DP caps in skills if it means removing DP pools in full fleet skills like Field Repairs, Flux Regulations, Crew Training.

Alex tries to force this through lowered max map size, skill DP caps, and maybe bonus +xp%.  Just simplify the mess with classic DP limits used in 0.5 or 0.6 releases.

If we consider what modern skills do, player would probably start with 100 DP and have skills that boost it by about 25%, not start at 25 DP and boost it to 100 or 125 DP in a 0.6 era release.

Also, no return to crew adding to fleet DP limits (Logistics in 0.6x).

[robepriority]

I might be a bit weird, but I've played starsector without being able to pilot the flagship for quite a while, and instead just using command points/tactical map in battle. I suspect a lot of new players might not be able to utilize a combat buffed flagship, either.

[SCC]

I would prefer this to the DP caps in skills if it means removing DP pools in full fleet skills like Field Repairs, Flux Regulations, Crew Training.

Alex tries to force this through lowered max map size, skill DP caps, and maybe bonus +xp%.  Just simplify the mess with classic DP limits used in 0.5 or 0.6 releases.

If we consider what modern skills do, player would probably start with 100 DP and have skills that boost it by about 25%, not start at 25 DP and boost it to 100 or 125 DP in a 0.6 era release.

Also, no return to crew adding to fleet DP limits (Logistics in 0.6x).

Limiting everyone else so drastically, just for the sake of making personal skills better, makes no sense to me.