Impromptu writings are the best - they always offer a detailed insight into one's thought process
More seriously, though, this is much, much more that I'd expected when I saw prior mentions of a skill rework, and reading about it all is hugely unexpected for me.
First I'd like to note, re:
...A player that’s better in piloting will get a lot of mileage out their flagship being stronger. A player that’s not so good at it – or one that just elects to command their fleet and doesn’t even try to pilot a ship themselves – won’t...
I would argue that this "mileage gap" is not nearly as large as this statement (presumably) makes it out to be. I've first played this game in ~2015 and, unless a player plans on never flagshipping a combat ship (or, at least, one that would never see action outside getting pursued), investing into combat skills had always been a worthwhile investment, as even the "first tier" of bonuses would go a long way to make the player's ship more survivable and more effective,
especially if it's on autopilot. A player skilled at manual piloting can make do with their overall piloting ability, knowledge of controls and knowledge of AI behaviours and quirks, while combat skills go a long way to compensate for AI's shortcomings. The performance difference between an officer-less ship and the same one with, say, a level 7 officer is very noticeable, but a sufficiently skilled player in an appropriately-equipped ship (i.e. which doesn't simply get hard-countered and shut down, but is actually able to deal damage - the specifics of which are
not the point of this post) will be able to overcome and defeat both. One will just be a harder/more time-consuming process than the other.
To clarify, I do understand that the Combat skill tree will hold the most appeal to players who prefer to manually control a (souped-up combat) ship, I just believe there's also significant appeal for it for players that elect to let autopilot handle it. I apologize if this comes off as too hair-splitting.
As for combat skills themselves? This is what surprises me the most, out of everything mentioned in the blog post. I thought combat skills were strong enough as-is, and that the focus of the rebalance would be on other skill trees. Still, I don't have any gripes with it, either - now I'm looking forward to revisit the viability of soloing enemy fleets a lá certain older versions of Starsector, like back when Augmented Engines was just a better Unstable Injector
I'm glad about the ECM rating changes! You're definitely right, the binary nature of the system definitely makes investing into ECM skills not very appealing, if I'd rather get some other skills instead - the 15 level limit is too restrictive to have players go "oh, I'll just pick up ECM skills along the way as I level up trying to achieve my desired build". I believe the added granularity will go a ways to have more people consider getting the EW skill now. I also agree with your assesment of the Gunnery Implants skill's elite effect - have you considered making it so it gives you an effect akin to a lesser s-modded ECCM Package? I think something along the lines of conferring a
partial (not full, we wouldn't want to make the aforementioned mod obsolescent) negative ECM effect negation and/or enabling autofiring weapons to ignore flares? (preferably not both at once, same reason as before) Otherwise I agree that further range increases would be overkill - but I believe something along the lines of my suggestion would be more interesting than simply dividing the existing bonus between regular and elite skill tiers.
Last but not least, regarding changes to Neural Integrator, there's a lot on my mind about this, and my post is already getting fairly long, so I'll try and keep this short.
So: instead of having an extreme OP cost, let’s change NI to increase the ship’s deployment points instead, say by 20%.
Could you clarify how not-extreme the OP cost would now be? Does this also mean this mod can be built-in, or has that stayed as-is?
Also, more pressingly, would you please consider retouching the skill's effect prerequisites so that the player can transfer command to the neurally-integrated automated ship pre-battle, and not need a non-automated ship with neural link deployed alongside it? (Or, make it so that the player can just permanently assign themselves to a neurally-linked automated ship, should they have both the prerequisite skill and hullmods installed? Could handwave it that the player character is physically present on another, non-automated ship.)
My personal gripe with this skill is that, while the Radiant is indeed incredibly powerful in player hands, the effort and resources required to actually get to the point of being able to pilot one are rather enormous - and while the currently described changes to the technology tree alleviate a part of this cost, I believe this entire setup is still, frankly, underwhelming because of the requirements for this hypothetical neurally-integrated Radiant build to work. I could handle the severe OP penalty neural integrator placed on the Radiant itself, but needing your 'regular' flagship deployed on the field as a controller proved too harsh a requirement for me. Deploying a Radiant already takes up a large amount of points, even moreso with these changes, and whatever else I deploy alongside the required 'controller' flagship just isn't going to be up to par to defend itself against the inevitably overwhelming enemy ships, the dealing with which is, frankly, the sole consideration for me to go through the process of acquiring a pilotable Radiant in the first place. And, if one could manage to defeat a Radiant and all the other Remnant ships accompanying it in a fleet, I believe it's not a stretch for a player to reach the conclusion that they don't really need a pilotable Radiant in their fleet at all, as there's very few combat encounters in the game more dangerous than defeating such a fleet. (and if a player, manually piloting their flagship, was able to beat such a fleet, then they could just keep on flying that fleet, with their skill points spent in skills of their choosing, instead of reserving a large portion of points in skills they might not want to get otherwise (again, subject to change with the described changes which I'm very much looking forward to! But which also doesn't touch on the sheer effort needed to get to the point of actually owning a Radiant) for this one very,
very specific, niche, ultimately entirely optional thing!)
