A naive divvying-up of the current skills into flagship / non-flagship skills with, say, seven picks from flagship (to match the best NPC officers) and eight from fleet, would not be ideal, I'll give you that. Obviously some additional changes would be needed, and insisting that we use exactly the current building blocks and change nothing else is a bad place to try to argue from. So please don't.
Fair enough. I was hoping for something that would be easy to mock up in a personal mod, or at least fake it with a changed max level, console commands and self-discipline. Using the current skill blocks is something even I can test for myself quickly. But I can see how my requirement might be unreasonably limiting to show off how a split system might be done properly if designed from the ground up for it. However, without such a system in front of me, I'm having difficulty envisioning the benefits such a system would bring to offset the benefit of playstyle diversity that the current system brings.
I gave an explanation for why I thought you were wrong. Which, again, has nothing to do with what you're complaining about, because that specific comment of mine that you're arguing about here was in response to Hiruma Kai, who seemed to be claiming that the current skill setup is perfect and any change that either added or removed capabilities was obviously bad.
The current skill system is not perfect. Any attempt to improve it is going to result in things the player can do now being removed and/or things the player can't do now being added.
Now to be fair, I didn't say the system was perfect. To be honest, I doubt any skill system can be perfect, in the sense it makes players with a wide variety of personal gaming skill happy with it all the time. As I said before, I could see changes to the combat skill strengths depending on whose skill level you wish to balance against as being reasonable. Which I think is one of the great strengths of Starsector, since Alex supports modding quite strongly which allows players to change the game to suit their tastes (or at least download a modder's take that might be closer to their own).
However, I do weigh having a flexible system which provides more playstyle choices as being better than one with fewer play style choices, if the fewer play style choice appears to be presenting a subset of what we can do with the flexible system. Now of course, if skills are poorly balanced, the flexibility is not supported in actual play as people are corralled into a small sub-set of options. On the other hand, I don't think people not realizing how good certain skill picks are, or alternatively not having the skill to utilize a particular playstyle, is not a failure of the skill system per se. It's either a failure of information presentation or the fact that a skill system balanced against a single skill level is unable to accommodate multiple skill levels well, which is inherent to any game which is intended to provide challenge, but not a selectable level of challenge.
Since I'm a singular player with a given level of play skill, the only feedback I can give is I find the combat skill strength currently acceptable.
Now, since you asked, my personal preference is to just say "Yes, this game is built with the player as a fleet admiral", make the player-accessible skill list be just the fleet-affecting skills, and then let the player assign a 'flag officer' to their flagship. Simple, makes sense, uses gameplay to set the expectation that the player has a fleet rather than setting the (wrong) expectation that the player can be some kind of elite solo pilot, gets the job done.
(How many fleet skills would the player get in this implementation? Do I look like I care? I do not. That is not an important detail. You would get some appropriate number of skills.)
I guess it's a fundamental perception or playstyle difference. I personally think you can be an elite solo pilot currently. Although perhaps it comes down to what you define as an elite solo pilot. For me, being an elite solo pilot requires is the ability to dictate engagements and the ability to deal out enough damage to destroy a single target in a limited time window. Which does generally limit it to the high tech playstyle, so using a ship like a Scarab, Shrike, Medusa, Hyperion, Fury, Aurora, or Odyssey. It's not that hard to take on 5 to 10 times your DP in enemy ships (including officers) if you've got a pure personal combat skill character build in such ships. See for example attached pngs, from an 8.2 to 1 DP ratio fight I just ran. Took my Neural Link Radiant save which happened to have an Odyssey, spent the story point to respec into even more personal combat skills, ran out of story points on elite skills, and then went and engaged a ~300k bounty with a base Odyssey (no s-mods), and no hot seat silliness to get Combat Endurance +15% CR and Missile Specialization +100% missiles for free. Even got 2 story points out of the fight with a +412% experience bonus.
If you limit me to 5 or even 7 combat skills, with only 1 or maybe 2 elite of them elite, I wouldn't be able to do that fight. It really does take quite a bit of bonuses to push the Odyssey in this case over the edge to being able to handle the missile spam (8 large launchers, and too many Sabot pods to be honest), as well as deal with ships faster than itself in a timely manner (Furies and Shrikes). Point Defense and Integrated PD AI were key here, with 673 missiles shot down. Not to mention maneuverability bonuses from Helmsmanship and Elite Combat, range bonuses, vent speed, and just general flux buffs.
Now, I will admit, against something like an Ordo, or a pile of Onslaughts since the burn drive change (they keep together much better these days, I can't bait them into separating), what I typically do is solo wipe out the frigates, destroyers and cruisers, retreat to reset PPT, and then come in with a sufficient number of distraction ships. Or alternatively, start with the Odyssey and then deploy the 8 officered ships halfway through the fight, after the enemies have been thinned, and if I'm feeling particularly mean, with the enemy ships positioned between me and the relief forces. You don't need fleet bonuses when you defeat 50% to 75% the enemy fleet yourself.
Ah, yes, the age-old challenge of... killing a pirate Buffalo? Pirates tend toward junkers, yes, but will that pristine-but-unskilled Hammerhead survive against pathers? How about pirate bounty targets that are using Hegemony XIV hulls? No, if you want an apples-to-apples comparison, you put your pristine-but-unskilled Hammerhead up against a Hammerhead with a level 5 (or occasionally 7) officer, and then you mostly just lose.
I think there may have been a miscommunication here. I wasn't approaching this from an apples-to-apples comparison. I don't see how that matters in regard to a player who is poor a piloting learning how to pilot. I was approaching it from how players learn to pilot better and I had thought you had meant there were no easy targets to learn against?
And if you're not a good pilot and focusing on non-flagship-boosting skills, then how are you going to get to be a good pilot if your flagship is just trivially outperformed by every random two-bit pirate or pather (nevermind high level AI cores)?
I guess my point was if a player doesn't know how to pilot their ship, there is a natural progression that they can go through against easier enemies first to learn basic piloting skills, starting with a level 1 character where the skill tree barely matters, and then move onto harder and harder enemies as they pick up the skills and concepts (both player and character) they need to pilot better personally. Do 40k-50k "two-bit" pirate bounties ever even include pristine Hegemony XIV hulls? I didn't think they did. If they're running around with pristine ships and rare hulls, isn't that like 200k and up bounty territory?
So all I'm saying is that starter Hammerhead you get out of the tutorial has some easy options to start learning against, i.e. Buffalo Mk IIs, progress up against Mules, then Shrikes, Enforcers, and then against pristine Hammerheads, and then moving on to bigger but slower D-mod cruisers.
That is what I mean by 'fleet admiral' - my total combat power depends more on having a fleet than on what I do with my flagship - and, yeah, about seven flagship combat skills is where I tend to end up, too. (Again, Ziggurat shenanigans excepted.)
Thanks for the clarification, I had misunderstood but that makes it clear. Depending on how I'm playing, I find my personal experience can be significantly different from that. Certainly, early game I'm typically pulling far more than 50% of the work. Mid-game depends on what I'm trying to do and my exact fleet composition, and to be honest what I sometimes find as derelicts - one game I found a 4-dmod Aurora floating in hyperspace early on - that was a quick jump to mid and late game bounties since a combat skilled SO Aurora has no problems overpowering a Conquest or getting behind an Onslaught.
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