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[Megas]

I did not have much time to read and study the blog, so here is something quick for now.

I think this was a nerf, previously you could pick up hull restoration for another 15% CR (reaches 100% with support doctrine, frees up an officer skill otherwise).
DP cost reduction is a very strong effect ofc, but at 10% it's at most a sidegrade to a fleetwide damage/durability buff (Alex regretting posting numbers right around at this point).
Like the new version better thematically, no way to get deployment cost reduction on pristine officered ships any other way.

Losing +5% CR per s-mod for lower DP cost seems more like a sidegrade at best and a nerf at worst.  I have used Hull Restoration as a Crew Training substitute, and it looks like that option will be gone.  (I cannot take Crew Training or anything Leadership when I have Combat 5/Tech 5/Industry 5.)

Pristine NPC Radiant (with Alpha core) needs two among Combat Endurance, Crew Training, or current Hull Restoration to get above 40% CR.  Similarly, Ziggurat needs more than 90% CR to be able to be deployed and fight twice in a row without getting malfunctions in round two.  Once Hull Restoration gets updated, Combat Endurance and Crew Training will be the only two options left.

Also, with the loss of CR boosting from Hull Restoration, civilian-grade hulls (like Venture and Atlas 2) will need Militarized Subsystems to qualify for the CR bonus from Crew Training.

Hull Restoration is not good at immortality (while remaining pristine) when player has too many d-mods to be removed, like more than a dozen, which is easy when I recover a lot of ships from the enemy (and occasionally my own if I lose most of my fleet but win and recover).  Enemies drop a lot of ships that are nice to recover, especially automated ships (since player cannot build those).  In rare Derelict fights or the first Remnant fight, I recover every ship offered (and I have gone over the 30 ship limit in case of Derelicts just to haul them home).  People who use Derelict Ops. say they do not care if the fleet wipes as long as they win.  I do not find that to be the case with Hull Restoration once I have more than a few d-mod in line to be removed.  When I have lots of d-mods to remove, I find myself reloading games as much as if I did not have Hull Restoration when I take casualties just to try again for the flawless win and not add more d-mods to the list waiting to be removed.  I still have to Restore the cheap ships that do not cost more than a 100k to restore.  Do not get me started on Executor and other ships whose special d-mods can only be removed with Restore (i.e., Hull Restoration has no effect).

So, it looks like Hull Restoration will remain underwhelming for both combat and campaign.


As for Target Analysis, more damage to weapons and engines is a huge deal when Remnants use it against you.  It seems like a graze or sneeze from anything will knock out something on my ships that are unprotected, and I need either more durable weapons/engines (like from Impact Mitigation) and/or s-mod Automated Repair Unit for super-fast repairs just mitigate elite Target Analysis from the enemy.

[Princess of Evil]

With EWM being an overspecialized skill and the nerf to vents, I wonder what a flagship energy capital (that isn't Paragon) build actually is. With ballistics, there are so many skills you can barely take them all, with energy? *crickets*

EDIT: All the tiny damage buffs, and like a quarter of other tweaks, definitely make my balance and game design sense cringe. And I do think Neural skill is still nigh unusable. No AI skill changes isn't weird to see, although there are still only like four AI ships worth taking.

EDIT EDIT: I love how by trying to make smaller ECM worth it, Alex actively made tiny ECM increments worse and big ones even stronger. I still think ECM is a meme, though. And even if it goes to 15 max while still being 0.5 each, the skill would literally be the only source of ECM in the game worth taking and there are three.

[Lortus]

The "piloting skills are better for good players" argument is unhelpful, untrue, and borderline ad hominem.

As Alex said, investing into piloting skills for less mechanical players is just not viable, leaving a large group of the playerbase with a worse game experience. But even if you are good at piloting you are still punished for investing into piloting skills. Even if you assume that the massive powerboost your fleet gets from having several superships is equal to the powerboost your flagship gets (it's not. Some of the most impressive piloting skills I've seen is Doom soloing a couple Ordos, which can be done on full assault with zero commands with fleetwide skills. And any non phase ship is incapable of doing that), you are still worsening the game experience because you are forced to play a high value ship like a Doom or Onslaught (literally just the Doom if you want to make full use of the skills) to make your skill investment worth it. I hope someday the piloting skill points will be a separate resource from the fleet skill points

Also why make the game easier again? The game was already pretty easy and has been progressively getting easier every update. Players are now forced to pick harder fights on purpose to have some kind of challenge. I hope AI factions will get to use those fleet skills.

Also the ECM changes could have the opposite effect I think. Previously, you would only need 40-60% ECM when fighting Ordos and only a bit for other factions. Now you literally cannot get enough ECM as you can never un-gimp your range.

Also the neural link skill requires a big skill point investment (especially if you wanna pilot automated ships), so that you can spread your skills out, but then you don't actually have any skill points left to use on skills. I get that it's a tradeoff and the changes to cybernetic augmentation is a good start but I think it will remain unviable if the "extra piloting skill value" skill literally reduces your overall piloting skill value.

[Megas]

Even if the player is good at piloting his ship, he now has to choose among four trees to spend 15 points to play a hero game.  Someone who plays the units game only has three trees to spend his 15 points.  It does not matter how good the player is if getting combat skills means locking him out of campaign or QoL skills if he has to get the fleet skills with his remaining skill points.

Currently, a good fleet is a must regardless how good your flagship is, unless it is one of the super overpowered ones.  Something like Eagle or Onslaught or even Paragon is not overpowered enough, it needs to be Ziggurat or something similarly over-the-top.  If I dump the flagship, I have enough points to get a good fleet and enjoyable campaign skills.  If I dump fleet skills and get flagship and campaign skills, my fleet is sub-optimal and weaker than the commonly posted meta character, no matter how good I pilot my ship if it is anything short of Ziggurat, and even that option has been nerfed for xp gain purposes.

[Mishrak]

After reading through all these changes, the only thing I don't completely understand is losing the Combat Readiness from Hull Restoration. Do we just lose the 5-15% CR entirely, or is it made up elsewhere and I'm not seeing it?  Or is the intended effect to tone down having literally everything* at near max CR?

There's definitely a fair amount of CR options via officers and other skills, but this does hit *automated ships pretty hard.  They're losing 15% CR right off the top with zero option to get it back.

[Alex]

First off, I want to say thank you to everyone for their feedback! Won't be able to respond to every point individually, for obvious reasons, but I've read it

I kind of see the point about damage bonuses on Damage Control/Field Modulation/Impact Mitigation. The more I think about that one, the less I like it - I mean, it "works", but, hmm. Maybe there's something better.

Overall I think these changes look good. Do you plan on doing anything to Officer Training as it also increases the number of elite skills on officers?

Wasn't planning on it, no. Just wanted to dial the elite skills on officers back a little bit, not a lot.

Very interesting changes to Hull Restoration. I know some of the 'meta' admiral builds used that 15% CR with BoTB to take Combat Endurance off their officers, saving an officer skill point - I like the 10% reduction better. I feel like Industry got the least benefit other than this from these tweaks (and one moderate nerf), but both its capstones remain quite strong for the right play styles.

That makes sense, yeah. Part of the reason for the change was to synergize with other stuff better than with BotB, which is strong and really doesn't need to *also* have great synergy there.

Good day Alex and Devs can you atleast give the Salvaging skill In the industry tree some little bit of love by giving an increased 5% chance to find Rare items like colony items, rare blueprints etc.( to ease a bit of pain of finding a pristine nanoforge)?

Hi! I specifically don't want to do that - if the Salvaging skill increases rar drops, you'd feel like you *had* to take it before salvaging anything of consequence, or you might be missing out on a major find. It'd just be a skill tax to eventually spec out of when you've salvaged everything.

Before commenting on individual changes, this post leaves me a bit concerned about power creep. Feels like base unofficered ships are becoming more and more just pure fodder. Which also makes the early game balance tricker. Feels like you kind of have to run support doctrine for unofficered ships to even be useful unless they are missile spam boats or something.

Hmm. I get that concern, yeah. But with potentially 1 less elite skill on officers, maybe it's more of a sideways movement in that regard? None of this is *major*.

And the other part is that - in most cases - you're really expected to have officers in most ships as you move through the game. Unless you're using support doctrine, or derelict operations, etc - skills that provide a specific incentive to do that, and which can be tuned to make sure they are strong enough, regardless of the relative power of officers.

An idea for damage control/impact mitigation/field modulation:
Instead of bonus damage (which I think feels very out of place on a defensive skill), what if they reduced damage from certain damage types. For instance, impact mitigation is 5 or 10% less damage from HE type weapons, field modulation is less damage from kinetics, damage control is less energy/frag damage, or something like that? Feels a bit more thematic to me, although maybe not straightforward to implement?

(I remember trying that sort of thing in a previous iteration and it really didn't work out well. I forget all the reasons, though.)

I think EWM could really just use adjustments to the range penalties. Partially because pretty much every ship has range bonuses (between ITU and skills), so while 600 range might be reasonable in terms of the base range of weapons, it's not really cutting it when your opponent is a capital ship with (60% ITU + 15% GI) bonus range on 900 range weapons. You have to get inside their PD range to get the full bonus. Alternatively, you could flip the elite/base effects (and rebalance numbers). Reduced flux cost is much more universally useful, while the bonus damage is only situationally good on certain ships, so it kinda makes sense that the universally useful effect would be the base effect. Maybe slightly buff it to 15% flux reduction, and nerf the damage effect a bit to be in line with other elite effects.
Ninja Edit: I forget the exact mechanism also, but I think have two sources of bonus reduction (range and flux level) really hurts EWM too. Most of the time you don't want to have high flux on the ships that can use EWM because they need capacity to tank damage, so you end up with half or less of the bonus from that, plus the range limit, meaning you are probably getting barely anything out of it most of the time. Especially the AI that loves to hang around max weapon range.

Swapping the effects around is an interesting idea! Made a note to think that over a bit.

I'm not 100% sold on the ECM changes. I always though it would be nice to have a total pool of range penalties, and then divide that between the two fleet based on the ratio of ECM points, so if the total range penalty pool is 20% and one side has 50 ECM and the other has 10, then the side with 10 gets 50/(10+50)*20% = 16.6% reduce range and the side with 50 ECM gets 10/(10 + 50)*20 = 3.33% reduced range. That way there is always a benefit to ECM no matter what.

Hmm, interesting! Would have to cap it somehow so that e.g. 1% ECM vs 0% doesn't mean a 20% penalty for the loser all of a sudden. (The natural thing being to cap it to the total ECM rating of the two fleets, so that if it's X vs Y ECM and X + Y is less than whatever the max is, then the math works out to make the ECM rating the range penalty.) Will think about that, too.

Cybernetic Augmentation changes feel a bit odd to me. In the past, it wasn't strong enough because getting the full benefit required too much of a SP investment, so the solution is to reduce the full benefit? I get that the elite skill buff will make it stronger, but the bonus damage isn't THAT inspiring either, and IDK if it's really tier 5 worthy. But maybe I am underestimating it.

I think you might be underestimating it, yeah.

I really like moving neural integrator down a tier, it has a much more clear use case now. Will be interesting to try that combo. I'm curious, does the increased DP from the hull mod count against the automated ships cap?

It does count for automated ships. For reference, with Hull Restoration and no Crew Training, a Radiant with an Alpha Core gets 40% max CR - just enough to stay out of malfunction range. Assuming Combat Endurance on the core, of course.

Hull restorations problem is just all the non-combat skills you have to take to get it. Polarized armor is a bit niche, so if you're not flying a ship that wants that, you're basically taking 3 non-combat skills, just to get it, which makes it clearly much worse than pure combat tier 5s. Might be interesting to try and stack the new DP reductions with support doctrine though, that seems like it could get kinda silly in a fun way.

The thing is, those "non-combat" skills take a lot of the sting out of running a larger fleet and recovering lost ships, so they're still functionally combat skills, just "soft" ones.

I would really prefer to have a big overhaul of the skill system, as it currently forces player to optimize fun out of the game.
Generally speaking player want to interact with every aspect of the game, pilot flagship, lead the fleet, explore and finance all of this. They are not different playstyles to pick one or two.

You can engage with all of these without putting any points into skills, so I don't think that argument really works.

I still have zero clue why Containment Procedures needed a nerf even with that explanation. You mean to tell me a tier 3 industry skill that's pure QoL was too strong? Come on now there's like 20 ways to break the game, it's not like everything crumbles together if someone dislikes buying fuel non stop. Why hurt the players who just want to chill and explore. To me this feels entirely pointless.

I think the part you're missing is that the skill is not "too strong". It's more that it breaks an aspect of the game - the role that fuel plays in exploration. You could make the same argument you're making if the skill reduced fuel costs to zero, so I'm not sure it really holds up. No, things don't crumble if you do that. But it's still a bit weird if a skill changes things to that extent.

And now it requires, not 2 tech skills, but 3...

It requires 2 skills and can be done with 5 points in Tech rather than 8; I think you've misread something in the post.

Same with Cybernetic Augmentation, wild that that's now a tier 5 skill. Maybe it is great, but oh boy another generic boring buff.

It kind of needs to be generic. I mean, most skills are anyway. And I think the interesting part about it is how it interacts with the rest of your build, not the specific effect it has.

(Also, the skill still does let you have +1 elite skill on officers, and since those are improved, it's a meaningful and less-generic bonus.)

Sorry I was so overwhelming negative. This whole blog post to me feels like when devs aren't sure what to do next, and so they try reinventing the wheel while thinking they'll make 2 steps forwards, when in reality it's 2 steps sideways. Many little changes but game will function the same pretty much.

Hah, no worries, I always appreciate the honesty. I don't get this part of what you're saying, though - this is all a bunch of quick, minor changes. "Reinventing the wheel" is waaaaay to drastic of an analogy. It's more like, I don't know, tweaking the suspension a bit or something.

P.S. Can't believe it's wasn't an SO rework blog post, you're killing me man.

Yeah it's in the back of my mind; we'll see. Definitely not for this release, though.

A couple of (I think) interesting suggestions: instead of making CA give +-1% damage per elite skill, why not make it something like, increase effect of elite skills by 25%. I think it both sounds a bit better and also is more interesting. And why not add a thing where each S-mod reduces the deployment cost of each ship by 5%. The main function being, that some ships just don't really need S-mods (I'm relatively new so might just be wrong about that).

Hi! Hmm, gotta be honest here, I think you *are* wrong about that And what else would you spend SP on? This is basically their primary use.

I'm pretty sure Alex just wanted to get rid of situations where ships have more than 100% CR which does nothing mechanically, and also isn't even shown in the UI I think.

Not the case, although this is making me wonder whether keeping the +CR might be ok. I mean, there are some reasons to remove it, but it does also have some nice interactions. Hm.

(I forget if hullmod unlocks from skills are unlearned when respeccing out of the skill; if not, everyone will just cheese that should it happen)

Oh yeah, that's a good point; forgot about that if we're being honest.

One thing though, you mentioned enemy fleets having fleet skills in the EW section, I had no idea they could even have those. I asked around and apparently they've been in since 0.9.1, but they're not displayed in game in any way... I think they should be, no?

Yeah, probably! But they're *generally* not a big enough deal so that hasn't been a priority to mess with.

The only issue with "Neural Link" and "Neural Integrator" was that you locked it behind too many skill points, the main issue is still here. You didn't fix anything, players still need two top skills just to operate Radiance.

(See earlier reply in this post; it does NOT need two top tier skills.)

I noticed that the Neural Link tooltip doesn't mention any exclusions any more - Does this mean that Missile Specialisation applies to both ships now?

Ah, no - I wanted to de-clutter the tooltip so it highlights the important points. The hullmod tooltip still talks about this, and it's still the case.

Hello! Figured I'd give my thoughts as the local Skills Enthusiast!

Hi!

On combat effects:
First, it's great to see the skill effects getting cleaned up. I also made my versions messy until the last patch and it feels much better again when they're focused; I think it'll be a great improvement here too. 
I notice there's a lot of things switching to use +damage and -damage taken. I have some experience (read: hundreds of hours of @_@) testing and tweaking these specific interactions and have some suggestions. When every offensive effect gives a bonus to flat damage then it stops mattering which combat skill you or an opponent have; flat damage vs HP flattens the shield/armor/hull system entirely. In my experience it is very engaging when an opposing officer is strong or weak against your specific ship based on their personal skills - I actually look to check in combat! Damage taken/dealt vs hull size could also have a fun dynamic, and it's very easy to read during gameplay, but there'd have to be new effects to fill it out from both directions.
I think stock skills would remain approachable and be more engaging if they provided damage and defense bonuses to one defense layer at a time. You could even make the effects interlocking across different skills!

Hmm. I think we have a difference of opinion here - you definitely *can* check enemy officer skills, and it's alright if skills encourage that sometimes, but in general it's something I'd rather avoid making the player do. Also, most of these offensive bonuses *are* to different defensive layers, so I'm not sure what you mean.

The push-pull effect looks great to me. When I was approaching ECM I ended up mixing and matching about every effect I could think of, but autoaim and recoil penalties felt the best in gameplay to me. I tried to spread the pain of ECM out beyond -range and I think there are a lot of options there if you're looking to change it up. The instant capture bonus might make the skill a must-take and reduce other builds, though.

Yeah - just trying to keep it relatively simple here. I could absolutely see accuracy and recoil being fun aspects to tweak.

IIRC you mentioned changing deployment rules to fix Radiants mostly spawning in big waves at the end, that could've changed it.
In the current version they basically never have <40 ECM rating for me on initial deployment (10/10 was >45 with a single fleet, default battle size).

Good guess, but no! I hadn't made that change yet, though it's in my notes. Maybe I just got lucky ("lucky") with the test multi-Ordos I ran into, but they were in the 35-37% range.

I also agree with the earlier comment lamenting the lack of carrier enhancing skills - as it stands, it feels like a waste to put an officer in a carrier.

The Leadership carrier skills factor in here. For ... various reasons, I don't think carrier-specific "personal ship" skills are a good idea. (In brief, it leaves battlecarriers in a weird place, where they need more skills to function at their peak, and it's harder to balance.)

Hello. I don't interact much because I prefer being a bit of a ghost, but I feel like I should say a few things, even if some of them are mimicry of things previously mentioned.

Hiya! Thank you for the thoughts, I appreciate the write-up! Just wanted to let you know I read all of it

Seems like a bunch of interesting changes but I have one very major problem:

Automated ships isn't mentioned or tweaked, and is in fact made pointless to a portion of players by the Hull Restoration CR improvement removal.

See the problem I have is that I get that skill purely for a single fully integrated alpha radiant, or in modded cases something larger. This makes the scaling angry, and CR goes below even malfunction risk range without 2-3 S mods. What's the point of getting this skill for one ship if it isn't gonna be maxed out?

I would even go far as to say it's a bit against the fantasy that you can't just have a Remnant allied fleet to come back and smash the Hegemony with! I feel like CR reduction is too much of a downside to using automated ships, especially to the degree it invalidates them now...

Hi! As I mentioned earlier in this post, you can get a 40% CR Radiant with *just* Hull Restoration (and Combat Endurance on the Alpha Core). And you can boost that by another 15% with Crew Training, of course. So I don't think there's any major shift here.

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?

It's halved for the capital tier, so, 25 OP.

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.

Hmm - I don't really understand this. You could either 1) retreat the other ship immediately after making the transfer, or 2) have a second, stronger-than-officered ship on the field to supplement whatever else you're deploying alongside the Radiant. That seems... really strong? Put it another way, the ability to have your "controller" ship remain on the field seems like a big bonus, since that can be an exceptionally strong ship!

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!)

I understand the theory, but I feel like this underestimates just how amazing a player-piloted Radiant is (and now, it'll be 25 OP stronger, if also more expensive). I'm not sure it's even behind the Doom. Possibly behind the Ziggurat, though much more mobile.

Player automated ships being locked into Fearless+ often just makes them suicidal unless you build the human part of your fleet around maximum aggression. I regularly see entirely preventable losses due to droneships refusing to back off despite high flux and explicit orders.

Yeah, just kind of a feature of the AI-ships. I could possibly see something that would adjust it, though. Maybe some kind of "AI Interlock" hullmod that tones it down to "aggressive". Hmmm... I'll make a note for the future.

Also, since I did notice a couple of people being worried about the elite skill effect changes heavily favoring the Remnants even more than usual, I think I'll list out the effective stat changes to the default skill-set as used by AI cores and, thus, Remnant officers:

• Gamma Cores gets these elite skills:
  * Helmsmanship - Buffed, with +5su flat boost to speed (and +5% more top speed from base effect)
  * Impact Mitigation - Buffed, with +10% increased hit strength for armor calculation purposes
  * Combat Endurance - Buffed, with hull regeneration starting at 100% instead of 50%
• Beta Cores get the above skills, plus these ones:
  * Target Analysis - Buffed, with +5% more damage to frigates (and will still keep the +10% more damage to destroyer bonus, since it's elite)
  * Gunnery Implants - Buffed, with +5% more range
• Alpha Cores on non-capital ships get the above skills, plus these ones:
  * Field Modulation - Buffed, with +5% more damage to shields
  * Damage Control - Buffed, with +15% more damage to hull
• Alpha Cores on capital ships get the above skills, except they replace Combat Endurance with:
  * Polarized Armor - Unchanged

Thank you, this is a very handy summary!

Hm. While there's some sense in the damage output buff changes being added to defensive skills, I can also see the arguments against it. So I started writing up some suggestions of an alternative - and found that my suggestion list had grown a bit past just that. Still. Here are some thoughts that might be useful.

• Damage Control: Just straight-up steal the hull regeneration from Combat Endurance. (In its upgraded form, so, regen starts at anything below 100% hull.)
• Field Modulation: Add in the 25% overload reduction that Systems Expertise won't have anymore.
• Impact Mitigation: Cut the maneuverability bonus to 25% for all hull sizes. Add: Increases minimum armor strength for damage reduction calculations from 5% to 10%. (As an extra bonus, this tells players that there's a minimum armor strength! Which they might not otherwise know.)
• Combat Endurance: Now this skill needs a new elite bonus. Simple enough: Malfunctions do not start until below 20% CR; additionally, after combat ends, restore one-half of any CR lost to extended deployment.
• Helmsmanship: Cut the maneuverability bonus to 25%. Retain the increase to 15% speed from base skill. Retain the +10 max speed for elite skill. Cut the existing zero-flux-boost modifying thing, replace with: "The zero-flux boost provides an additional +50 top speed. (For ships with Safety Overrides, this bonus only applies when actually at zero flux.)"

Hmm. I mostly like this, actually; going to have another look.

Impact Mitigation might be too much; it really takes a bite out of the ability of a whole swath of weapons to deal hull damage.

I think what I'll do is have another look at these elite bonuses and see what makes sense. Want to avoid too much of a power increase towards either tanking or damage-dealing, since that'd shift combat overall and I feel like it's in a pretty good place already. (That was actually part of the reason for giving "elite" damage bonuses to the defensive skills. Like... you don't want to have Remnant ships become complete bricks.)

I could also see just shifting some more core skill bonuses into the "elite" portions of the effect (like e.g. with Target Analysis), but that all depends on the specifics of each skill and doesn't actually work for most cases, I don't think. Hm.

Currently once you get to level 5 or so you already have the max benefit to what size fleet you can realistically operate and that just feels wrong to me

That's very much by design, I don't want to lock away the "fun stuff" from a build for too long - I think it's nice to be able to flesh out an aptitude and unlock a top-tier skill quickly.

After reading through all these changes, the only thing I don't completely understand is losing the Combat Readiness from Hull Restoration. Do we just lose the 5-15% CR entirely, or is it made up elsewhere and I'm not seeing it?  Or is the intended effect to tone down having literally everything* at near max CR?

There's definitely a fair amount of CR options via officers and other skills, but this does hit *automated ships pretty hard.  They're losing 15% CR right off the top with zero option to get it back.

It's not made up elsewhere. But for automated ships specifically, the DP reduction from Hull Restoration actually affects them, so you get some of it back in that case.

[HUcast]

I think all these changes are reasonable, some quite fun, thank you Alex!

My two notes are:

I like a few others think giving damage to armor skills a bit weird. Not neccissarily from a lore standpoint but from a worry that skills might become too homogeneonized between all four trees. The more things tweak this way the less distinct they become..


While impact mitigation was a little weird with seeing enemies take far less damage from a torp, I think one factor regarding player frustration wasn't considered. The main reason I take it on officers is so they don't get obliterated by a small ai mistep that makes them eat a reaper they could have shielded or dodged, it was a serious frustration reducer in that aspect to keep fights from snowballing due to bad fleet rng.

[Grievous69]

@Alex
Well that's a huge post so I'll be responding in a simpler way.

"Reinventing the wheel" was an overexaggeration on my part, maybe I've just been too exposed to skill system blog posts that it triggered some sort of "war flashback". Hey at least we didn't have an economy rework in a long time.

About the skill requirements for piloting an Automated ship: I think that whole section of the blog post was a bit confusing, you were writing in hypothetical scenarios so it wasn't clear enough on what you settled on. At least that explains why some of us misunderstood it. So the current implementation is, you need only one capstone skill, and Neural Integrator has reduced OP cost, but the ship you're flying will have +20% DP cost. If that's correct than it ain't so bad in the end I suppose.

[SafariJohn]

Hitting the character limit, Alex?

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.)

retreat the other ship immediately after making the transfer

When Radiant is the player's "true" flagship, having to deploy 2 ships and do the transfer every battle is pretty tedious.

[Siffrin]

With EWM being an overspecialized skill and the nerf to vents, I wonder what a flagship energy capital (that isn't Paragon) build actually is. With ballistics, there are so many skills you can barely take them all, with energy? *crickets*

The Odyssey does make use of EWM and I'm looking forward to surrounding it with Medusas with Escort Packages new S-Mod bonus.

[Rattlesnake]

I love current ordnance expertise because it allows me to realistically fit more guns.
I hate current target analysis because it’s boring, too strong and doesn’t increase the amount of dakka on my screen (or at least indicate the significant damage boost in some other way, like EWM).

Naturally, I’m not a fan of having even more stackable +% damage skills. It reminds me of some RPGs where better skill with guns somehow makes you shoot harder.
That being said, it would be hilarious to see an Onslaught with something like +60% damage dealt (thus, 60% better flux efficiency and armour penetration. And imagine the missiles…) and -40% damage taken (meaning crazy shield efficiency, and unexpected jumps in armour damage reduction) in action.

[Princess of Evil]

I'd be afraid of going melee with Oddy. It has very "midline" defenses. Not to mention the shield bubble bigger than the red planet.

[HyperNova]

Soooo launch sooon...? I kid I kid, need another 10 years....

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

"Ballistic Mastery improves ballistic weapon damage and range. The elite effect increases projectile speed – a “soft” bonus (i.e. it’s hard to quantify), though quite good in practice. Still: let’s just throw in an extra 5% damage here, why not. It feels good to have something tangible to go with the soft bonus, to feel like you’re always benefitting in a concrete way."
Energy Weapon Mastery needs a concurrent buff then as its main effect really only works as a get off me tool, and its elite effect is frequently worse than ordinance expertise.

"Target Analysis"
The changes will make it harder for frigates to fight destroyers, so maybe make damage dependent on the ship type being piloted.

"Systems Expertise is a weird one, I just had trouble coming up with a nice bonus for it, so it ended up as a grab-bag of underwhelming effects like reducing malfunctions and overload duration."
Elite SE is required for useful SO builds, and frigate builds as it dramatically extends combat time as ships can stay in combat until 20% CR thanks to minor malfunction risk being made irrelevant.

"Helmsmanship is just broadly a bit weak – nothing really wrong with it. So, a quick boost to the percent speed bonus the base effect provides, and another boost to the flat speed bonus the elite effect provides (up to 15% and 10 su respectively), and, done. Again, not trying to do ground-breaking things here – rather, making “safe” changes that shouldn’t break things but still nudge everything in the desired direction, when taken all together."
That will help. However, elite helmsmanship will only ever be chosen on support ships due to the changes to Cybernetic Augmentation.
 
"Field Modulation boosts shields (and phase cloak), and tacking on a 5% extra damage to shields to the elite effect feels just about right."
It's already a main pick due to hard flux dissipation. You can add the extra damage to shields if you want, but it's not required and is fine as is. Honestly maybe give the extra damage to shields to Energy Weapons Mastery as energy weapons universally struggle against shields.
Just in general try to keep offensive stats to offensive skills, and defensive stats to defensive skills as that makes everything cleaner.

"Neural Link
Moving it down a tier resolves that, I think – it’s still a strong skill, it still works. There’s just less pressure on it to perform at the absolute top level – and on you as a player, to utilize it to that degree."
Good. That opens up a lot of possibilities from 12(+) officer fleets, to Radiant or Nova led fleets. It also makes Automated ships more useful. For 120 ASP, you can get three gamma core Scintillas, and one player piloted Nova, 24*3+48=120. Three Scintillas with sparks very nearly completely cover anti fighter duties so 156 DP can be spent purely on combat and non-PD support ships. At 156 DP, you should only need 8 officers max, so everything works out in terms of skill points.

"Hull Restoration"
The problem will always be it is locked behind at best two skills that do not help with combat, which diminishes the combat potential of the entire fleet. It might work due to the decrease in deployment points, which makes it a better support doctrine as it applies to officers as well. The cost of course will be sacrificing the combat tree.
It's good for people that don't like piloting, and bad for those that do.
It also may be slightly broken when paired with Support Doctrine due to the changes to SD.
30% DP reduction I.E. a max of 342 DP if no officers are used, on top of all ships having at least level 4 officers, is pretty insane.

[FooF]

Hm. While there's some sense in the damage output buff changes being added to defensive skills, I can also see the arguments against it. So I started writing up some suggestions of an alternative - and found that my suggestion list had grown a bit past just that. Still. Here are some thoughts that might be useful.

• Damage Control: Just straight-up steal the hull regeneration from Combat Endurance. (In its upgraded form, so, regen starts at anything below 100% hull.)
• Field Modulation: Add in the 25% overload reduction that Systems Expertise won't have anymore.
• Impact Mitigation: Cut the maneuverability bonus to 25% for all hull sizes. Add: Increases minimum armor strength for damage reduction calculations from 5% to 10%. (As an extra bonus, this tells players that there's a minimum armor strength! Which they might not otherwise know.)
• Combat Endurance: Now this skill needs a new elite bonus. Simple enough: Malfunctions do not start until below 20% CR; additionally, after combat ends, restore one-half of any CR lost to extended deployment.
• Helmsmanship: Cut the maneuverability bonus to 25%. Retain the increase to 15% speed from base skill. Retain the +10 max speed for elite skill. Cut the existing zero-flux-boost modifying thing, replace with: "The zero-flux boost provides an additional +50 top speed. (For ships with Safety Overrides, this bonus only applies when actually at zero flux.)"

And a freebie bonus suggestion:
• Cybernetic Augmentation: Explicitly cap the effect at 10%. This gives some encouragement to not just go all-in on 12 flagship skills with it, and, more importantly, means that its balance isn't going to get too absurd for players with modded skill cap increases. (Why 12? Well, you need Sensors to unlock rank two tech, and Cybernetic Augmentation itself isn't elitable either, and Crew Training is just too good to pass up even if you're going all-in on your flagship.)

I'm also, the more that I think about it, not entirely happy with the plain 10% damage reduction as the Systems Expertise elite effect. On the other hand, while I do have ideas for what one might replace it with... none of those ideas fit into the paradigm of "things you can do real fast and are unlikely to break".
For example: x1.5 flux dissipation for six seconds after activating your ship system. Powerful, feels more thematic to me, but probably complex to code, difficult to balance the numbers, and would promote a "flicker fortress shields to keep the flux buff rolling" playstyle that we probably don't actually want to encourage. So. Uh. Don't do that. It's an idea, that might maybe lead to more good ideas, but certainly isn't a good one on its own.

I overlooked this but there are some things in here I really like. Damage Control getting the hull restoration effect from Elite CE makes perfect sense. Overload reduction of Field Modulation also makes a lot of sense and fits thematically.

Increasing minimum armor strength for the calculation to 10% for Impact Mitigation would make getting through hull with lighter weapons much harder, especially against existing bricks. If you're going that route, it really only needs to be a +2.5% increase.

Combat Endurance: I so rarely see my ships get down to low CR that I don't see myself valuing anything that merely mitigates CR decay. I do like the idea of restoring some CR, though.

Helmsmanship: I personally like the "get 0-flux boost if not generating flux" bonus because it means I can hit X and go faster. I'd rather have reliable speed than more speed that is harder to achieve. That said, I'd really like to see the Elite effect boost the 0-flux bonus of bigger ships. Something like +5/10/15/25 su/sec depending on hull-size. Frigates need it the least but Capitals with +75 0-flux boost can get into battle and across battlefields quicker but immediately lose it when engaged. (Not going to lie, this could also make an excellent hull mod, too)

As an aside, I'm not sure why cutting the maneuverability bonus is necessary for any of these ideas.