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[Wyvern]

I think the suggestion (from Wyvern, where they went into a bit more detail) to have the CR boost from the skill be instantaneous and raise the max/min/current fixes things, right?

Hmm, maybe? I'm not crazy about the case of the ship getting a minimum CR of 15% (or 30% if Crew Training and Combat Endurance combine). It's rather non-trivial to implement, though, with the in-combat officer switching handling, the places where the game expects 0% CR to mean something specific, etc.

Well, there are a few other ways of handling that. Scaling the bonus to current CR with percent-of-max CR, for example. Or just allowing "less than zero CR" as a valid state for a ship that was at zero CR and then had its officer moved elsewhere.

Kind of a pain in what way? If you mean the UI, that seems fixable; put the officer list on one side, put the fleet display on the other side, and allow drag-and-drop rather than the current 'click on one specific ship, pick an officer off the list, close the officer UI, click on the next specific ship'.

Just more generally - it feels to me like "what officer is this ship assigned to" ought to be a more long-term decision and that shuffling officers around to optimize for a specific encounter - no matter how clean the UI - is just fundamentally annoying. This is, of course, subjective.

(... actually, this makes me wonder if going through officers might not be a nice way to bring back a different take on crew veterancy. Having the officer gain XP *on that ship* along a separate track, with some kind of basic bonus to ship performance... hmm. And you'd lose it/it'd take a hit when the officer is swapped out.)

That's actually one of the reasons I run with the Starship Legends mod: it provides exactly that sort of bonus to keeping an officer on a given ship - though, notably, it remembers that progress, so you can swap your fleet around and experiment with new or different hulls without losing it and having to start over from scratch on swapping things back.

Re: Officer swapping

I tend to leave officers on a ship and tailor the officer to the ship, rather than the other way around, but an XP system that incentivizes long-term attachment would have to account for acquiring a plain better ship. An officer tailored to an Enforcer is going to work really well for a Dominator and I shouldn’t feel like I’m losing something by moving that officer to a superior hull. If the benefit is fairly minor, no big deal (and I doubt you’d go over board with it anyway).

I'm actually okay with this. If an officer tailored to an Enforcer gets moved to a Dominator, then they have to start over with learning how to get the best out of that specific Dominator. (But if I do change my mind and put them back in their original Enforcer, it'd be nice if they remembered how to get the best out of it.)

That being said, I really like the idea of officer “veterancy” improving basic ship function. That could be a way of increasing CR without it coming in “chunks” via skills. Heck, you could replace the +15% CR from Combat Endurance with something more interesting and just make having an officer (over time) achieve the same result via experience. Skills could also improve veterancy gain or veterancy benefits rather than fleet wide buffs (looking at you Crew Training).

Oh, I like this idea. It's rather more effort than my suggestion was, and involves some more complicated design stuff, but it does sound neat.

...You'd probably still need a mechanism for "swapping an experienced officer out reduces both current and max CR", though. As well as, at a minimum, misclick protection of some sort, be that allowing negative CR, or perhaps even just a confirmation window for "Swapping these officers will reduce X ship's CR by Y, and will require Z supplies to recover if you swap the officers back, are you sure you want to do this?" - I've definitely accidentally moved officers between ships before when I was, for example, only trying to check what skills they had.

[Alex]

I tend to leave officers on a ship and tailor the officer to the ship, rather than the other way around, but an XP system that incentivizes long-term attachment would have to account for acquiring a plain better ship. An officer tailored to an Enforcer is going to work really well for a Dominator and I shouldn’t feel like I’m losing something by moving that officer to a superior hull. If the benefit is fairly minor, no big deal (and I doubt you’d go over board with it anyway).

I think in that case, the benefit is putting that officer in a Dominator, so you'd probably get by on the emotional high of that until the hypothetical veterancy kicked in I think... being able to lose it to some extent, or have to start over, is a key part of actually building the feeling of attachment - I don't think it'd work without that.

That being said, I really like the idea of officer “veterancy” improving basic ship function. That could be a way of increasing CR without it coming in “chunks” via skills. Heck, you could replace the +15% CR from Combat Endurance with something more interesting and just make having an officer (over time) achieve the same result via experience. Skills could also improve veterancy gain or veterancy benefits rather than fleet wide buffs (looking at you Crew Training).

Yeah, something like +15% max CR and giving CE another effect might do the trick. (Though, a knock-on effect for Support Doctrine...)

Just limit the high CR bonus to the maximum CR. So if a ship has 100% CR but its max is 85%. Just give the 5% damage, speed … bonuses and not the full 10%. They still get an extra minute of time with high CR but that’s such a small bonus that it’s not going to be an issue even for the OP.

... hmm. That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it. I'll take a look!

My main concern is that any sort of potential veterancy mechanic doesn't become a chore. Either taking up too much time so it's a grind, or the effects being too good.

Yeah, I hear you. I had the thought of making s-mod effects based on a "veterancy" sort of thing and scrapped the idea for basically that reason. Still...

...You'd probably still need a mechanism for "swapping an experienced officer out reduces both current and max CR", though. As well as, at a minimum, misclick protection of some sort, be that allowing negative CR, or perhaps even just a confirmation window for "Swapping these officers will reduce X ship's CR by Y, and will require Z supplies to recover if you swap the officers back, are you sure you want to do this?" - I've definitely accidentally moved officers between ships before when I was, for example, only trying to check what skills they had.

Yeah, for sure! I'd probably want to do something like have the ship-specific effect decay over some sensible amount of time. So if you did it with the game paused, there'd be no change. If you swapped back after a month, maybe half the effect for that ship would be gone, or something.

[Wyvern]

Just limit the high CR bonus to the maximum CR. So if a ship has 100% CR but its max is 85%. Just give the 5% damage, speed … bonuses and not the full 10%. They still get an extra minute of time with high CR but that’s such a small bonus that it’s not going to be an issue even for the OP.

... hmm. That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it. I'll take a look!

So, let me just make sure I'm understanding this right:

The notion here is that max CR is always 100%, but that high CR on its own doesn't offer damage/speed/etc benefits, and the current skills that would grant bonus CR instead grant combat bonuses if you're at high CR?

Yeah, I like that.

[FooF]

Well, I think what is meant is that you can have 100% CR through shenanigans but the combat improvement can only be increased by the limit of max CR. I also think that’s a good idea

If the effect of officer/ship veterancy is only the max CR effect, yeah I’m not going to sweat changing officers to a new/better ship. It does, however, incentivize *not* swapping them out willy-nilly, which is a good thing.

[Alex]

... I understood it as something simpler: the CR value used to apply the effect of CR is MIN(current CR, maximum CR).

So if for example the current CR is 100%, but the maximum CR (because an officer got added and SD has no effect anymore, let's say - or if the player specced out of Crew Training) is 85%, then the bonus is applied as if the ship has 85% CR, not 100%.

[Wyvern]

... I understood it as something simpler: the CR value used to apply the effect of CR is MIN(current CR, maximum CR).

So if for example the current CR is 100%, but the maximum CR (because an officer got added and SD has no effect anymore, let's say - or if the player specced out of Crew Training) is 85%, then the bonus is applied as if the ship has 85% CR, not 100%.

Hm. Arguable if that's simpler or not.

I mean, it absolutely is simpler from a game-dev-implementation perspective (assuming that max CR will update on the fly when the player does a flagship transfer, of course), but from a player perspective, "This skill gives me benefits at high CR" is probably simpler than "I get benefits from high CR, sometimes, except when I don't."

Plus, the way I rephrased it would also remove the issue of supply costs for taking Crew Training, and mean that Neural Link would properly give both flaghips the full benefit of Combat Endurance.

[Alex]

Ah - are you suggesting that max CR would be increased to 100% for everything as baseline, and then skills would make that grant bonuses? That first part wasn't clear to me from what you wrote. Penalties need to happen regardless, though...

(assuming that max CR will update on the fly when the player does a flagship transfer, of course)

That does sound a bit annoying, doesn't it. Not implementation-wise, but "yeah your CR is high but no bonus sorry" UI wise. It'd be easy to make clear out of combat, but in combat...

Yeah, see, this is why it's like this - all the potential solutions are significantly worse than the "problem"

[BaBosa]

My idea was mostly to address the problem for officers rather than the flagship. As for the flagship changing in combat, if someone is that desperate for a 5% bonus on their own ship I don’t see that as a big problem. At least that way it makes the game more fun for the player rather than just making the fleet stronger.
This way also costs the player a fleet spot as well since the player needs to be in a ship so it’s not totally free.
This exploit isn’t that big anyway so it’s not really worth the effort to perfectly fix it. A single simple MIN(current,max) function before combat is really easy and fixes most of it.

[Wyvern]

Yeah, see, this is why it's like this - all the potential solutions are significantly worse than the "problem"

I don't agree! I've suggested several variations on "increasing max CR also increases current CR", any of which I think would be significant improvements.

As would the notion of 100% CR max being baseline, and then certain skills make high CR grant combat bonuses.

(Yes, penalties for low CR would remain as they are.)

I don't feel that any of these options are even bad, nevermind 'worse than the problem'.

Even BaBosa's suggestion of just capping effectiveness is still an improvement on the situation as it is now, in my opinion. (Maybe not the best solution overall... but as has been noted, very simple to implement.)

[Alex]

I feel like the complexity being added is not worth the benefit of "fixing" the nearly-non-existent issue. I don't think there's *room* for "significant improvements", if that makes sense At least, not in the sense of addressing the specific issue we're talking about here.

I mean, the stuff you're suggesting could work but e.g. the cases of making a non-zero CR the minimum, or allowing negative CR, or whatever - it's all stuff that would come up more than the thing it's fixing. Whatever solution there might be to address this, it needs to be super, super clean, or imo it's not worth it. E.G. capping CR to maximum once the game is unpaused - that's possibly an option. I could see how that might be annoying occasionally, though, so probably not worth it for that reason, either.

Edit: the notion of making 100% CR the baseline and having some skills give bonuses is probably the nicest option, though; it has some things going for it!

[Candesce]

It seems to me just giving a bonus to captains who've gone through a "shakedown" cruise - they've been deployed for at least one fight since the last time they switched ships - would be plenty to discourage this behavior. And probably a couple other edge cases where the player can get a pretty minor bonus for a whole lot of fiddling with their officers.

So long as the bonus for not fiddling is bigger than the bonus for fiddling, why bother?

[Wyvern]

I feel like the complexity being added is not worth the benefit of "fixing" the nearly-non-existent issue. I don't think there's *room* for "significant improvements", if that makes sense At least, not in the sense of addressing the specific issue we're talking about here.

Yeah, I think where we disagree is that I definitely don't see this as a "nearly-nonexistent" issue; it's something that, to me, has been a consistent nuisance to deal with since we first got the current iteration of things like Combat Endurance. It's not always a problem, but it is something I have to worry about at least a half-dozen times every single game. Do I have enough supplies to take Crew Training now? How many supplies am I losing by deciding this officer with CE needs to be on that ship instead?* Do I have a spare officer with CE that I can put on this ship that's intended to be an alternate flagship for specific types of battles?

Individually, the issues aren't a big deal; in the context of a single run through the game, even, it's not a serious problem. But I just keep running into places where the current implementation annoys me, and over the course of many playthroughs, that adds up.

*Edit: Often the answer is "Not a relevant amount, I can just eat the cost and not really care", but every time it comes up, it's something I have to actually think about, and then it's annoying me again even if it wasn't a serious concern this time.

[Alex]

Ah, that's fair. I was thinking just in terms of the SD "exploit" and similar.

[Wyvern]

Yeah, my perspective is that fixing the exploits is a secondary benefit, and the main advantage is just reducing pain points in normal gameplay.

At least when it comes to things that manipulate max CR.

Missiles are a bit of a different matter; most of the time it's not (for me) worth the bother of swapping to a ship that started the fight with a missile-specced officer... but when it is worth it, it's really worth it. XIV Legion for attacking stations is my specific example of where I'll do that in the current game; gaining 50% more hammer torpedos makes a difference, and you can't leave that ship under AI control and have it actually do its job right. (At least, not with any variant I've put together? I suppose there might be some possible shenanigans with putting the hammer barrages in with PD weaponry or something so that the AI just leaves them on autofire... ...Edit: But then it'd still target unarmed station flange bits, or fire guns into the central bulk, so maybe that isn't such a good idea to lock-on weaponry with limited ammunition.)

[BaBosa]

Just having max CR always be 100% and the skills add the high CR benefits sounds good. The only potential issue I see with that Alex is that people will constantly question why the bonus is capped at 10% and demand that the bonus be uncapped.