I've been playing for a few years now, off and on, and have loved this game from the moment I saw it- the core gameplay loop is rewarding; fight for victory in visually stunning and engaging space battles against sometimes impossible odds; jet around a beautiful and mysterious sector of interstellar space exploring ancient derelicts, crumbling planetside ruins in unique (sometimes ruinous) stellar systems, and potentially encountering deadly would-be pirates (gotta call out the scavs waiting at the ends of the slipstreams- a very elegant touch to prompt some terror in new captains and a very, very rewarding engagement for endgame fleets[Oh, you want to ambush hapless stragglers, eh? Whatever will my s-modded Onslaughts and Paragons do?]); collect, customize, and kit out a plethora of ship hulls, all with their own intended and not-so-intended uses; the huge (I respect this one so much) amount of player agency- take a commission and fight at the behest of an established military with all the perks (and ties) that brings, be a lone-wolf merc gunning for profit and glory dancing with death and destitution on the daily, be a cunning gun-running smuggler looking to flit in between patrols and earn fat stacks before the Space Cops catch you, become a pirate warlord and menace the sector with shakedowns and literal piracy (extortion interactions when?), commit your soul to Ludd and rampage against the electronic soulless (and those who would consort with them) with a ragtag group of all-or-nothing reckless vigilantes (or terrorists, depending on who the Hammers are pointed at), chart the deepest expanses with a highly-specialized exploration fleet wandering through the furthest reaches of the black uncovering ancient and priceless artifacts of a long-bygone era of the Sector's history while avoiding it's oldest nightmares, be less an admiral and more of a general by marching back and forth among the core worlds with marines and arms in tow and wreaking havoc where the money points, saying to hell with the core and founding your own faction with it's own colonies (and blackjack and hookers, free market is a thing), use and abuse your own markets for fun and profit, or lead your faction to victory against any or all of the core factions, or coexist with and support the core for peace and prosperity, or say to hell with it and abandon your people to disappear into the black once more, only to return with armies years later as a conqueror. Or do all of these things in turn. Or all at once. Or none, I'm sure there's still a lot of unexplored ways to play I haven't tried. The game is made with love and care, and seems to encourage the possibilities on its own. It's truly great.
Here's the inevitable rump, though: there's a layer missing I think. Let me explain:
When the player starts getting a few ships and trawling the station comms, they encounter officers (or candidates among their own crew) with their own skills and abilities. These officers can be put in command of a ship, and will both enhance the ship's performance if possible (given the loadout of the ship and compatible skills of the officer) as well as influence the behavior of that ship. This can be critical in tough battles- a timid officer might not push a fluxed or armor-stripped foe whereas a reckless officer in charge of a squishy carrier will be an inevitable risk to the ship's survival (though the changes to the Legion coming up might make that fun....). The right people in the right place can mean the difference between a full wipe and a total victory, even without any player input on the command layer mid-battle.
However, that's where this aspect of play stops; there's only so many officer slots (mercs notwithstanding) and only so many ships can be fielded. Their per-ship buffs are powerful, and mostly well-balanced in my opinion, but just so limited in scope. The whole system is also very reliant on RNG- from encountering available officers, to the skills they have, to the skills they can learn when they level. Finding appropriate officers for a chosen fleet is very time-intensive, and if the player wishes to revamp their fleet, things get real ugly real fast- an officer must be permanently dismissed to open up a new slot, with no option to retrain or suspend an officer until needed (Administrators, meanwhile, are now identical, but can be put on ice at lower pay, and don't incur penalties to colony management for doing so). Mentoring can only be done once, despite the heavy opportunity cost of a story point to do so. And those exacerbate the fact that finding a compatible officer can take real-world days of playtime- to date, I have found the "perfect" officer perhaps once or twice in all my hours of play, even when grinding through stations in the core just looking and hoping for them. There are at most 4 unique overleveled officers to be found in the sector- these could be incredibly powerful, or they could have every damage specialization and be timid.
Enough complaining; let's just summarize like this- the officer system as-is leaves a lot to be desired, despite a potentially having a huge impact on battles which are always going to be the core gameplay element, even if not the focus of a given run.
(one more starry-eyed shoutout, though; how great is it that we can play this game meaningfully and have tons of fun without even fighting once? It's like being able to eat a whole cake but just icing, and not getting sick after)
(don't @ me, I actually love cake and hate icing, it's a metaphor)
Here is a solution that I hope is at least considered: Instead of hard-capped officers in charge of an entire ship as acting captain, pilot, comms officer, ordinance officer, engineer etc., we have per-ship command crews.
Sounds like a lot of dev work and player time, but hear me out.
Officers as they are can still exist- but instead of the current hard cap, these elite roles are limited by a player mentoring system. The player is only one ...entity, and have their limits, both lore-wise and for obvious balance implications. The pool of mentors share a pool of mentor time to go towards the skills that currently exist, so a huge gaggle of them get less facetime (and thus less skill impact), while coaching one at a time yields more but narrow results. However, these mentored officers are still human themselves, and need to delegate. Here's where the biggest change comes in. Crew rosters, with portraited crew members who individually govern an aspect of ship operations and have their own skills. For the ace pilots who don't want to be a middle-manager in space, this can be automated and determined by the mentored officer- they can choose and manage their own roster. For the micro-manage-y among the playerbase, these crews can be hand-picked from candidates like they do now (though they'd need to be far more plentiful). The skills the mentor has can be transferred over time to their crews, allowing the player to have indirect agency over the officer skills applied to a hull even if they don't directly engage with the crew roster of a given ship. Individual ship AI need not change to accommodate this, only the way some values are calculated. Players can get a more in-depth specialization tool, or choose to use it in broad strokes only similar to the existing system.
This allows the system to address some shortcomings of the existing one regarding play styles while still maintaining balance:
Fleets that field eight-to-ten cruisers with few support ships are largely unaffected; each officer still has roughly the same impact per ship, with the same skill effectiveness. No changes, and each officer's impact still feels nice and "chunky."
Fleets that opt for more capitals with few supports (think 4 Paragons or a line of six Onslaughts) can have greater effectiveness of given skills, or more skill "slots" for each ship's officer roster to have. Lore-wise, this would mean more player-side mentoring to grow the captain as a better leader, resulting in more skilled candidates in skilled ship officer roles- a skilled field tech fine-tuning shields, a capable Tac officer managing experienced gunnery crews, an experienced chief engineer keeping the core running smoothly and managing flux, a multitasking Comms officer liaising with multiple ships to keep up a tac-net, a capable flight deck commander enforcing rapid and efficient redeployments. Stacking officers of similar skillsets might be possible, though obviously risky balance-wise; three elite field-modulating officers on a Paragon sounds silly, but maybe diminishing returns could mitigate this- they take up three times the opportunity cost in available skilled positions to manage for a given Captain but only give 150% of the bonus, allowing for hyper-specialized loadouts and rosters to synergize but not dominate stupidly or without weaknesses (giving up a capable helmsman for the maneuverability bonus or impact mitigation or weapon range might not be a great tradeoff all the time).
Fleets that really want Wolfpack with large numbers of destroyers and frigates could do that now; with each captain only having the bandwidth for a limited number of elite ship officers, specialization and tradeoffs would be the name of the game here. Want to field thirty Monitors with elite field mod for shenanigans? Do it, just know that's the only plus they'll get. Want a true Wolfpack of thirty Wolf frigates all with greatly extended peak time to dink away a hardened target? Pick your positioning right, and you could now. Want to challenge the servants of Moloch with an armada of hammers-on-a-stick that have a reload shoved in? Fly true, servant of Ludd. Want to hit hard and fast with 20 scatter-beamed, energy-mastered Sunders? I hope you like recovering, but damn will they kill SOMETHING.
The proposed system can also help with systems that have some inconsistencies or issues, too- take weird hullmods, for example. Why are expanded deck crews taking the same resource as installing guns in dedicated hardpoints? That could be a new officer slot instead, competing with other skills (though the extra crew req fits perfectly) but still allowing the ship to field more intensive LPCs without just increasing OP.
Want a phase ship to allow more stealthy campaign layer gameplay without being a hindrance or boon in battle? Officer specialization!
Then there's the opportunity for expanded gameplay for the armchair admirals among the playerbase. Officers being reworked brings with it the potential to set fleet doctrine as a behavior set and not just a generalized demeanor. Maybe a given ship crew could be ordered to vent more frequently, or maintain a position relative to other ships in a line more aggressively (line doctrine is really important in longer fights, and when piloting the tendency to focus on the target in front of you and not the tac map can be a killer, frustrating even experienced players- it still does me at times). Removing some of the micro burden of the larger battle will allow the players to truly define, and rely on, their fleet. This would both allow a well-established admiral to manage a fight solely from the overview or remote view, and combat-focused players to engage when and where they like or need to, instead of being pressured to directly intervene in a command ship or tab into the tac overlay and mother hen their hand-picked officers. I know Alex has stated before that he really wants combat to stay the core element, and tactical-overlay-battles aren't the intent- this might satisfy both camps and stay in line with his vision for the game with one stroke (well, in dev time terms, probably lots of iterated small strokes, but ykwim) This comes with the caveat of a lot of AI adjustments I'd imagine, so it's likely well out of scope for the aforementioned suggestions, but one that would really slide into place well if the above are implemented, and likely be appreciated by the playerbase... as if we aren't spoiled already.
Of note in this vein is the command point system- love it or hate it, it's polarizing and a frequent discussion topic. There's a real need to have a system of its like, else the player will at times just be staring at the tac map like I've mentioned waiting for a battle to resolve or a ship to be engaged, when they could instead be moving to accomplish an objective in their flagship as intended. Having limited command points forces the player to make tough decisions about orders given and lean into their officers' abilities and tendencies, and focus on the aspects they can determine on their own. It also pushes the player to be more engaged in battles, helping to avoid a sense of helplessness at times and keeping the player engaged is always welcome- noone wants to be tempted to tab out during the core part of the game, right? But the command point system has its flaws- It's really not tied to reality much. Why, for Ludd's sake, can't I tell my gaggle of frigates loitering behind the capitals or disengaged near the map edge to engage a flanking phase ship or support an overfluxed cruiser? Oh, right, I've told other ships to do 9 separate tasks in the last few minutes, gotta wait another couple minutes because... reasons... *clears throat*
This cooldown really should be per-ship (there is a behind-the-scenes timer for responsiveness of commands, meaning it's WAY more advantageous to foresee trouble, as expected), but how would the player interact with that? Right now, skills can give command points faster, but it still seems arbitrary. It "feels bad".
The proposed system could mitigate that- each ship could have it's own responsiveness rating based on a comms officer, potentially influenced by the command officer's personality. A timid officer would be reticent to engage despite direct orders and a reckless officer might choose to take their time disengaging from a fight they should win. But with a skilled comms officer on the flagship, the player could issue commands more frequently (or to more ships at once or both), and fleet ships would respond more rapidly if they also had good comms officers. This is more intuitive than an arbitrary system, is much more friendly to wolfpack players (as it stands, picking individual targets is a losing battle against the command point clock), and allows the player a meaningful choice- do they enforce rigid command-and-response behavior, or do they allow their captains greater agency and specialized crews but have less agency themselves? A tough pick, but an interesting one. This also opens up the possibility for dedicated command and control ships- a TRUE flagship, something I've personally always wanted. We have the hullmod, but it seems underwhelming TBH- something that appears to mitigate the CP recovery system a bit by trading a chunk of effectiveness of the player's chosen ship. This makes it so that the player can't have a highly specialized flagship they control directly and still have maximum effectiveness of fleet control- on the surface, it seems like a nod toward more fleet-action-oriented players, but realistically just gimps the player ship while making fleet control less tedious, instead of engineering out the problem. In unfair terms, a band-aid fix (don't hate me Alex <3)
Speaking of behaviors and going for broke regarding dev time, each officer on a ship could have their own tendencies- maybe even though the Captain is reckless, the tac officer is not, resulting in aggressive positioning but carefully chosen shots. Maybe the cap is cautious but the shield officer is reckless, so the shields only go up against larger incoming threats, so the ship slowly advances while POURING fire, but taking more hits than maybe need be. This would decouple positioning from firing, target selection from flux management, and open up a whole slew of behavioral tweaks- but be by far (as a guess) more difficult to implement. A pipe dream it may be, but we did get ground invasions and player colonies and multiple skill reworks and story points... Listen, you spoiled us.
Finally (this is tangentially related but still ties in) battle doctrine as a whole is a bit lacking. Being able to say "everyone go here" and "be more aggressive" and "escort these ships" is useful and needed, but some more general as well as some specialized commands would be amazing (and help the enemy fleet AI, making the player think more...). For example, I would jump for joy to be able to draw a battle line and have assigned ships spread themselves out along it, spaced according to their numbers and personality, popping in and out of range according to their officers. As it stands, enforcing this often means anticipating when a ship is about to overextend into flux-dry enemies, or herding a capital away from a backside frigate that it's escorts or intercepting ships are already engaging, or just exploiting the "leash" range on waypoints to make a ship withdraw more directly or push more aggressively if no convenient target to flag as "destroy" is available (like if I just need to give a Paragon time to vent real quick but don't want it to back off, for example). Unless the player rides in a small fast ship, intervention in these scenarios is hard. Specific orders would be nice too- vent now, focus all fire on THIS target, ignore THIS ship unless missiles incoming. Things like that. In the real world, priority targets absolutely exist, and command structures exist for this reason- battles change in a heartbeat individual commanders don't have the full picture, and the fleet's overall tactical objective takes priority over a captain's personal objective.
Overall, I love this game as it is, and still will even if none of this gets implemented- it's too fun. The writing is amazing, the looks are slick, the replayability is top-tier. But there are definitely days where it's equal parts love and hate, because there's a huge well of untapped potential on the tactical planning layer. What do you all think?
