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[Mishrak]

No Story Points, No Bonus Exp, Fleet isn't finished, Officers aren't finished.
 
I've continued to run into this issue across multiple playthroughs. It took me a fair bit of reflection but I think I finally understand why this occurs now.
There are two main categories that cause this:
 
1. SP Sinks
An SP Sink is anything that doesn't return 100% bonus Exp.  Another term for this is that the SP is sunken cost, or SP spent without gaining any (or only gaining partial) bonus exp. This isn't all inclusive, just some examples:

• Officers - Adding and Changing Elite Skills
• Mercenaries - Contract Renewal
• Character Re-specs - Elites, Initiating a re-spec
• S-Modding Ships
• Difficult Recovery of Ships/Salvaging
• Quests/Missions
• Colony Upgrades

The biggest SP sinks (excluding Colony upgrades) are:

Officers
Every SP spent on Elite skills is sunken cost.  Each officer wants 3 SP minimum, only one of which is returned at 100%.  The others are sunken cost.

Character Re-Specs
No choices yield bonus exp and if speccing out of a flagship tree, those SP are sunken cost even after the skill is reclaimed.

S-Modding Ships
Ships yield bonus exp when s-modding them at varying rates.  They yield the remaining bonus exp when scuttled, totaling to 100%.

• Class:      Bonus% / Scuttle%
• Capitals:     0% / 100%
• Cruisers:     25% / 75%
• Destroyers: 50% / 50%
• Frigates:     75% / 25%

This bonus yield is actually a main source of the problem and there's a rather substantial disparity in SP consumption when factoring in DP.
 
Consider 40 DP worth of ships, when looked at by class:

Spoiler

[close]

With this in mind, lets look at it if we scale everything to 240 DP:

Spoiler

[close]

This is an extreme example, but even so, it's very apparent that SP bonus exp favor Capital heavy fleets, even though they yield 0% bonus exp, because we gain more value per DP by fielding and outfitting less ships.  This is pretty straightforward.
 
2. Playstyle

BotB + Cyber Aug
This skill path makes the "No SP, No Bonus Exp" scenario more likely.  It adds +1 Elite to officers and +1 s-mod to every ship. 

The player is granted roughly 60 SP to start via leveling + Story rewards.
BotB + Cyber Aug requires to complete:

• Ships (3x15) = 45
• Officers (8x4) (mentored) = 32
• Total: 77 SP to finish

Of this, for ships, in this balanced fleet concept example, 26.25 SP are sunken cost  For officers, 24 are sunken cost.  So that is a sunken cost of 50.25 SP.  This is a pretty thin margin of error if the player is indecisive, before running out of bonus exp.

Spoiler

[close]

Balanced fleet vs Capital heavy
Players running a doctrine that isn't Capital heavy are going to suffer more SP sunken cost.  As someone who loves cruiser and destroyer heavy fleets, it wasn't obvious until I looked at the numbers.
 
Some opinions and thoughts:
I think giving the player more bonus exp options could make this system a lot easier for an indecisive player.  It might be worth evaluating if the disparity in hullsize bonus exp returns could be improved.  I'm not sure if this is intended or not but the current implementation seems a little out of sync with the idea that bigger ship = bigger investment.  I do realize that 1:1 is not something that's desired and I'm not a proponent for that.  However, changes also don't have to cost as much time as they currently do.  (That's a whole other sea of math)  Every change the player makes to the skill tree is sunken cost SP.  Even a snippet of one time bonus exp would help a lot.
 
For those people who would say: "Make better choices, don't waste SP, have a good plan."  I would challenge them to try and remember being a newer player and wanting to experiment with things and still trying to learn how stuff worked.  My early plays definitely slapped s-mods on random stuff, tried ship designs that didn't work, got stuck, sought help, made changes.  I was also confused (even until just recently) when I ran out of SP.  Restarting the game seemed unfathomable to me due to the time I spent on colonies/exploration/etc.  I still don't think that's a good option.  Nor did I want to just use some mods to experiment.  I just wanted to play the base game.  The second I use the command line mod my playthrough feels cheapened.

In the case of scuttling, I think this is an undesirable way to get bonus exp back.  This means either sacrificing something up front and losing what I already have, or sacrificing it when I'm finished making the changes.  I would prefer to use my ships to gain exp back faster rather than destroy them entirely before making fleet changes.  It's also not available to me at all if I want to keep the ship.

I know a common rebuttal to bringing up issues with the cost of Cyber Augmentation + BotB is "You don't need that to complete the game."  This is not really a good rebuttal.  The reason is: the game offers the player those skills.  It's a very good synergy, it's only natural for the player to want to finish out their officers and ships because the player went to 5 on both skill trees.  I bring up this cost because I think it can be less painful to finish than this currently is.  This is of course a subjective value as to what is "painful" to finish.

Overall, I hope this post is beneficial to people and might explain why some people run out of SP and Bonus Exp and others never have that issue at all.  Special thanks to SCC for listening to me ramble and helping me sort out the math.

[edit: resized the spreadsheet images]

[Thaago]

Interesting. I'll have to think about the main part of it more before commenting, but I'll note that the math/spreadsheets analysis varies by quite a lot depending on what kinds of ships are used.

For example, in your example, you used 5 DP frigates and got 10 DP/SC. But I don't really use 5 DP frigates with 2 story points - I'm putting those on things like 8 DP scarabs/shades, 10 DP Afflictors, 6 DP omens (not to mention any hyperions). If using an average of 8DP/frigates instead of 5, that 10 turns into 16 DP/SC.

For cruisers, similarly some are as low as 20, but others are bigger. Dominators and Champions turn that 13.333 into 16.666.

Destroyers are much more constrained in their DP variance than the other classes, so that looks about right. That points to perhaps giving destroyers more bonus XP %?

The elephant in the room with all of this of course is that there's no requirement to put max S mods onto every ship - in fact by your very analysis it may just be a bad deal (consider for example colony improvements: after a few they are just a bad deal). This is especially true of smaller, less valuable ships that might be replaceable fodder anyway. Interestingly, the S mod bonus of Escort Package on destroyers is so good that this kind of double dips on destroyers as story point sinks (both low value/SC and high demand for it). Using 1 instead of 2 is an option here and provides the same DP/SC as capitals. Thinking of that, I'm solidly in favor of increasing the S mod return % on destroyers.

Finally, there is some extra value to putting S mods on smaller ship classes even if they are less DP/SC efficient: Bonus XP itself carries value by making the player level faster. This isn't a thing past max level of course, but if I'm building a fleet starting with the small ships that will eventually turn into my skirmishers, a few S mods is less efficient but gives me that value. Otoh, the 8DP+ frigates, those are just great value at nearly capital levels of value AND added bonus xp value.

Summary:
I think the destroyer % return could be improved, the high DP frigates are excellent value for S mods, and sometimes adding S mods to ships could just be bad value.

[Phenir]

Character Re-Specs
No choices yield bonus exp and if speccing out of a flagship tree, those SP are sunken cost even after the skill is reclaimed.

I could have sworn if you elite'd a skill, you got the elite for free if you respecced into the skill later, as in even if you didn't take it in that respec and later respecced back into it or picked it up again after leveling.

[Vanshilar]

I think people are looking at SP incorrectly. When you spend a point of SP, it is not exactly "sunk". Or, it is, but the purpose is that it makes your fleet gain XP faster (by making your fleet better). This is no different than spending hundreds of thousands of credits on a colony industry so that the colony can gain more credits in the long run. The SP is worthwhile as long as you hold on to the changes long enough that the fleet makes back that amount of XP, compared with if it hadn't spent the SP.

So if you gain 75% of the XP back when putting an smod on a frigate, then the question is, are you going to use the frigate long enough that the frigate's improved combat effectiveness will make you back the remaining 25% before you ditch the frigate? If so, then it's worthwhile to do.

For some reason people are willing to spend millions of credits on each colony, even though they don't turn profitable (make back that money) until years in the future, but are unwilling to spend SP on their fleet (ships, officers, etc.) even though they'll hold on to them for a long time. Spending SP on skills and ships should be a no-brainer. Spending SP on stuff like colonies or blueprints is something else entirely.

If the player wants to try out different fleets but is too impatient to get the SP for it, they can just use console commands. My player test fleets are all made via console commands to test with and are entirely separate from my actual playthrough saves.

[TaLaR]

You need to spend enough SP on refundable uses until level 15 to maintain 2x leveling speed and will eventually get these SP back after level 15 via 4x exp boost.

Ship mods are semi-refundable. Part of refund is locked behind having to scrap the ship, which is often not a practical thing to do.

But non-refundable uses are truly a sink. Officers are particularly problematic with up to 3 elite skills - you need to get all 5(6) skills first, to make sure officer doesn't roll anything wrong before committing points to elite anything. And even than, that's perfect officer only for particular kind of ship, so your fleet is locked into particular build one officer at a time.

[Hiruma Kai]

I'll note there is a minor mistake about changing the Elite skills for an officer in the opening. The retrain button (change elite skills and change personality 1 step) returns 100% bonus XP.

I could have sworn if you elite'd a skill, you got the elite for free if you respecced into the skill later, as in even if you didn't take it in that respec and later respecced back into it or picked it up again after leveling.

You are correct. Mishrak is looking at it from the point of view of never going back to that skill.

Officers
Every SP spent on Elite skills is sunken cost.  Each officer wants 3 SP minimum, only one of which is returned at 100%.  The others are sunken cost.

I'm curious, what is the 3rd minimum story point expenditure?  Mentoring is the 100% returned one, and I can kinda of see the baseline 1 elite skill for a typical level 5.  Although there are some playthroughs I don't even do the baseline 1 elite skill for all officers.

Restarting the game seemed unfathomable to me due to the time I spent on colonies/exploration/etc.

This is the problem with the fact the game is not finished, and there is no end game.  After you've extensively explored, after you've got fully running colonies, and after beating the three one time fights - two Coronal Hypershunts and the million credit Tesseract bounty, what is there actually to do in game?  Fighting the same remnant and bounty fleets over and over again, getting more credits and more story points so you can get more credits and story points. 

For me, I tend to restart often. Once I've taken a type of fleet from nothing to taking out the Tesseract bounty, there's really nothing much else to do.  And I find it far more interesting going from nothing to full end game capabilities than going from full end game to full end game capabilities.

As for new players, I don't know.  I feel like there has to be some incentive to get better at the game.  If story point choices are completely fungible, then the choices don't really matter.  You can just convert one sort of thing into another, and the player never learns to make a plan, be frugal in spending them.  Because they don't need to learn to do that.

Now, that's not what you're asking for, you want it to be easier, but not trivial is the impression I get.  More bonus XP means you still have to do about 1/4 the work (post level 15).  I guess my question is, what level of effort would be ideal for you?

How much effort do you want it to be to completely swap out your fleet, change your officers completely, and respec your skills?  As I think that is what you're kind of talking about.  You were learning, you found some things didn't work for you, so you wanted to change them to things that did.

I know a common rebuttal to bringing up issues with the cost of Cyber Augmentation + BotB is "You don't need that to complete the game."  This is not really a good rebuttal.  The reason is: the game offers the player those skills.

There's a lot of things the game offers a player, but you're not expected to take them to the extreme.  Take colonies as an example.  The game lets you go above the nominal administrator limit using Alpha cores.  This is something game offers the player.  Now, you can make a positive income with just an Alpha core administrator combined with population and infrastructure.  Don't even need any industries.    Now consider the fact that given enough Alpha Cores, you can colonize every single planet in the game and still make a profit.  Its something the game lets you do.  And I think there was one player who actually did that - I remember seeing a post somewhere.

Now, I might say you don't need to colonize the entire sector to complete the game.  But the exact same argument you're making, the game offers you those skills, can be applied to the game offering you those colonies and Alpha cores.

For the same reason the colony argument I'm making isn't very compelling, is the same reason I'm not finding the argument the game lets you do something with those skills very compelling.  You can take advantage of those skills with very obvious improvements without taking them to the full extreme, and utilizing every single last possible bonus.

Plus, Best of the Best is among the most commonly taken skills I've seen in other players builds, and likely the strongest one in an absolute fleet strength sense.  One might argue that having more difficulty in maxing out its benefits is a good thing, to make other skills more attractive in comparison and result in players trying different builds in different runs.  Making it easier to max out means other skills look even less attractive in comparison, and probably means needing to buff them, or nerf Best of the Best.

Actually, that is an interesting thought.  What if like DP limits, there were story point limits on the skills.  No more than 120 DP worth of ships with triple s-mods?  No more than 4 officers with +1 elite skills from Cybernetic Augmentation?  Officer training lets you pick 4 officers to get to level 6 and +1 elite skill.  Instead of increasing story points, you reduce the expenditure options.  That would be addressing your concerns from the other side of the equation.  Now a fully fleshed out fleet needs less SP, and less SP are needed to convert from one complete fleet to another complete fleet.

[FooF]

Reading is hard. Disregard.

Putting a cap on BotB or any of these other SP-heavy skills is too heavy-handed for me. You shouldn’t nerf these skills because a minority of players can’t get their SP-addiction under control.  It’s not like the increased power from these skills doesn’t come with a commensurate investment, as you’ve already said. In fact, most of these skills confer very little until you start investing in them. Low floor, high ceiling, and all that. It’s up to the player to decide when enough is enough, not arbitrary hard caps.

I’m also not convinced “converting a whole fleet” should really be in the cards, or to put it another way, a scenario we should balance the game around. I can’t think of a time in my dozens and dozens of runs where I just didn’t start over if I ever felt compelled to try something else.

[Megas]

Another SP sink not mentioned in the OP:  Stable point creation in star systems.

In my current game, if I want another relay in a nearby system as redundancy in case pirates steal the sensor relays in another system, I need to burn two SP without refund to create another point to put a sensor relay in.  If I decide to colonize the system instead (after I embrace more colonies run by alphas), the new point would get a comm relay instead.

Given what the system has, I may create more stable points to put a gate, wormhole, or relay in a system.  The addition of slipstream detection, gate, and wormholes has put a demand for stable points that was not there in previous releases.

Few games I played before had some great colony systems but no stable points, and I would have had to burn SP for the stable point to put a comm relay in.  When I saw such systems in previous releases, the cost was 5 SP instead of 2 today.


As someone who enjoys the colony game in Starsector, I hoard points for possible colony upgrades.  (I am not talking about improving everything, but maybe about three per colony, five colonies total.)  I do not want to waste too many on officers, fleet upgrades, and commander respecs since colonies can eat far more SP than the fleet.

I would love to respec the combat skills on my character frequently depending on the ship I pilot, but without any bonus XP refund, I avoid doing it.  So far, most of my commander respecs in the past were toggling BotB to change s-mods on Ziggurat.

How much effort do you want it to be to completely swap out your fleet, change your officers completely, and respec your skills?  As I think that is what you're kind of talking about.  You were learning, you found some things didn't work for you, so you wanted to change them to things that did.

At least as easy as changing out the fleet in previous releases that did not have the relatively recent story point mess, preferably easier (I do not want to waste a lot of time grinding).  In early 0.9, there were no story points, and if I lost a ship, then building a new one was easy.  Now, if the ship has s-mods, Restoring it is more convenient (and much more expensive) if I do not have an Ordos SP farmer fleet.  Also, officers did not need to be so specialized.  All I needed for officers back then is either generalist carrier officers or generalist warship officers that were generally interchangeable among ships.

Does not help that officers need to be more specialized today, but that is not a SP problem on its own.

I generally do not restart games.  Once I start a game, I generally stick with it until the next major release.  (Then I grumble about all the grinding I need to do in the meantime to get back to where I was in the new game.)

As for new players, I don't know.  I feel like there has to be some incentive to get better at the game.  If story point choices are completely fungible, then the choices don't really matter.  You can just convert one sort of thing into another, and the player never learns to make a plan, be frugal in spending them.  Because they don't need to learn to do that.

For me, it is all about the grinding needed to change the fleet.  Changing the fleet was easier in releases without story points after player found enough ships, although commander at the time could not respec (but if the player did not take colony skills, then he could take nearly all the combat stuff that mattered and be a good generalist).

I do not like being locked into a single fleet or single character build, and I prefer to change without replaying a whole game or close enough.  Up until the endgame and Ordos grinding, my fleet is constantly changing, and I do not want overspecialized characters too early.
 

I'll note there is a minor mistake about changing the Elite skills for an officer in the opening. The retrain button (change elite skills and change personality 1 step) returns 100% bonus XP.

That requires at least one elite skill on the officer.  Officers without any elite skills are not offered to Retrain, which is lame.  There were times I wanted to change behavior, but I was not willing to spend SP to make a skill elite (because I plan on firing the officer eventually).

There's a lot of things the game offers a player, but you're not expected to take them to the extreme.  Take colonies as an example.  The game lets you go above the nominal administrator limit using Alpha cores.  This is something game offers the player.  Now, you can make a positive income with just an Alpha core administrator combined with population and infrastructure.  Don't even need any industries.    Now consider the fact that given enough Alpha Cores, you can colonize every single planet in the game and still make a profit.  Its something the game lets you do.  And I think there was one player who actually did that - I remember seeing a post somewhere.

I remember that post.  It was something I wanted to try or do myself but did not have the time to do it over and over again for each release, and I would have waited for the finished game release before trying.  Nice for the guy to actually do it recently.  It shows that mass Pop&Inf does give the high income (that I suspected).

Plus, Best of the Best is among the most commonly taken skills I've seen in other players builds, and likely the strongest one in an absolute fleet strength sense.  One might argue that having more difficulty in maxing out its benefits is a good thing, to make other skills more attractive in comparison and result in players trying different builds in different runs.  Making it easier to max out means other skills look even less attractive in comparison, and probably means needing to buff them, or nerf Best of the Best.

I would assume BotB-empowered ships will be maxed out one way or another, even if it is annoying to put in all the work to do it and/or lock-in the fleet

[Cryovolcanic]

I'll add that s-modding hullmods that come with the ship, like sensors and surveying on an Apogee, are a good way to spend 100% SP to keep your XP gain high. If you know you are going to keep the ship for exploring, it's a no-brainer to me.

I am also increasingly appreciating spending SP on destroyers and frigates. Bonus XP, and if you scuttle the ship you get 100% bonus XP. Really great with Vanshilar's Support Doctrine Brawler LPs for powerleveling.

[SCC]

What if I use expensive ships?

Well, Pegasus is 50 DP and s-modding it gives you 25 DP/SP. Radiant or Paragon give you 30. The point's more so that improvement per SP is better for larger ships (except for destroyers and frigates, where frigates make up for it with more bonus XP), so despite not getting the bonus, it's actually a more efficient expenditure.

Thinking of that, I'm
I think the destroyer % return could be improved, the high DP frigates are excellent value for S mods, and sometimes adding S mods to ships could just be bad value.

I suppose scrapping frigates is not so painful.

I think people are looking at SP incorrectly. When you spend a point of SP, it is not exactly "sunk". Or, it is, but the purpose is that it makes your fleet gain XP faster (by making your fleet better).

If you spend it correctly, yes.

For some reason people are willing to spend millions of credits on each colony, even though they don't turn profitable (make back that money) until years in the future, but are unwilling to spend SP on their fleet (ships, officers, etc.) even though they'll hold on to them for a long time.

It's easier and safer to make a lot of money quickly.

I'm curious, what is the 3rd minimum story point expenditure?  Mentoring is the 100% returned one, and I can kinda of see the baseline 1 elite skill for a typical level 5.  Although there are some playthroughs I don't even do the baseline 1 elite skill for all officers.

I guess Mishrak assumed you will always take Officer Training or Cybernetic Augmentation.

There's a lot of things the game offers a player, but you're not expected to take them to the extreme.

Taking BotB and Cyber Aug is some extreme skill combination now? Perhaps Alex should put a warning on it, to dissuade new players from accidentally making the game harder for themselves for no good reason.

Plus, Best of the Best is among the most commonly taken skills I've seen in other players builds, and likely the strongest one in an absolute fleet strength sense.

We'll see about that, if I manage to crack ~2500 DP of Remnants with my double Radiant fleet.

[close]

One might argue that having more difficulty in maxing out its benefits is a good thing, to make other skills more attractive in comparison and result in players trying different builds in different runs.

It's doing a terrific job at it currently, now is it?

[Mishrak]

Interesting. I'll have to think about the main part of it more before commenting, but I'll note that the math/spreadsheets analysis varies by quite a lot depending on what kinds of ships are used.

For example, in your example, you used 5 DP frigates and got 10 DP/SC. But I don't really use 5 DP frigates with 2 story points - I'm putting those on things like 8 DP scarabs/shades, 10 DP Afflictors, 6 DP omens (not to mention any hyperions). If using an average of 8DP/frigates instead of 5, that 10 turns into 16 DP/SC.

There's definitely some scaling that happens based on the fleet comp.  I went with math that was easy to illustrate the point and trusted that it was pretty obvious that it would scale up or down.  I'll put up a few real world fleet comps I've used in that sheet a bit later.

For some reason people are willing to spend millions of credits on each colony, even though they don't turn profitable (make back that money) until years in the future, but are unwilling to spend SP on their fleet (ships, officers, etc.) even though they'll hold on to them for a long time. Spending SP on skills and ships should be a no-brainer. Spending SP on stuff like colonies or blueprints is something else entirely.

That's a pretty good analogy, and you are correct that the player does tangibly gain performance value that can't really be expressed in Bonus Exp.  I think where things fall apart a little bit is there are scenarios where the player invests in the wrong fleet comp and has issues farming the end game fights in a timely manner enough to make a change.  I did a separate exercise where I tried to put a time figure to the farming.  It ended up being more complicated than I felt like I could present well, but it did not look pretty if that fleet couldn't farm even single ordos. This is why I started my post off the way I did.  I could change "my fleet isn't finished" to "I'm not able to fight the stuff I want to."

I'm curious, what is the 3rd minimum story point expenditure?  Mentoring is the 100% returned one, and I can kinda of see the baseline 1 elite skill for a typical level 5.  Although there are some playthroughs I don't even do the baseline 1 elite skill for all officers.

I guess Mishrak assumed you will always take Officer Training or Cybernetic Augmentation.

Yes I did assume that the player would take one of those.

[Hiruma Kai]

There's a lot of things the game offers a player, but you're not expected to take them to the extreme.

Taking BotB and Cyber Aug is some extreme skill combination now? Perhaps Alex should put a warning on it, to dissuade new players from accidentally making the game harder for themselves for no good reason.

No I don't think Cybernetic Augmentation and Best of the Best are an extreme combination.  I certainly can get a very strong benefit out of them both with an expenditure of only 56 story points, completely ignoring any bonus XP.  9 Ships x 3 = 27 story point.  8 Officers x 2 elite skills and 1 mentoring = 24.  5 Combat skills.  27+24+5=56.  That is a complete and full build using those two skills, and be done just as you turn level 15.

Now that does presuppose you know what you want, which is Mishrak's point.  On the other hand, such a fleet is complete overkill for the basic campaign as it currently stands.  You can be less efficient than that, and still beat the expected challenges as presented by the game, specifically end game bounties, single Ordos, the Hypershunts, and the million credit Tesseract bounty.  It may or may not be able to handle a 6x Ordo and 2500 DP worth of ships, but that's not an expectation of the game, nor can every fleet can do that kind of stuff.  Nor should the expected to be, as it would make the rest of the game trivial.

Even with just five ships with triple S mods (out of 9 or 11 or whatever) and four officers with double elite skills (out of 8 or 10 total officers), I feel like I'm gaining a significant improvement in my fleet compared to alternative skill picks.  I feel like maximization of the skill, which is what I'm comparing to a potentially extreme choice, is a separate consideration from are they good enough with a reasonable time investment.  In the same way that you can use a few Alpha Cores to improve your colonizes as opposed to maximizing their use and colonizing the entire sector, are two separate considerations.

Alex doesn't put a warning on colony story point investments, nor on salvaging with story points, nor on adding extra contacts, all of which can be infinite sinks, so I don't see a need to put a warning on the skills.

We'll see about that, if I manage to crack ~2500 DP of Remnants with my double Radiant fleet.

[close]

Very cool.  That's extremely close in terms of character skills for what I used for my first playthrough in 0.97, back when NL Radiants cost 72.  Although I was using Coordinated Maneuvers and a much wider fleet for support instead of Helmsmanship.  I like the Pulse/Beam build.  They come in close, pulse rises shields and beams finish them off as they move away.  I'm so used to putting missiles in the Medium Synergies, but this makes an excellent case for the cheap IR Autolances there.  I'll have to try that.

I feel like I've seen the Radiant and support Afflictor somewhere before as well...

 

One might argue that having more difficulty in maxing out its benefits is a good thing, to make other skills more attractive in comparison and result in players trying different builds in different runs.

It's doing a terrific job at it currently, now is it?

Indeed it is, as evidenced by this discussion.  On the other hand, as evidenced by this discussion, if there's a default assumption that story point costing picks like Officer Training and Cybernetic Augmentations are so necessary that everyone has at least one of them in their build, that would tend to lend evidence to the theory they need to be reduced in power, or other skills brought up to their level, so they are not an assumed picked.  If something is picked every time, its not really a choice, from a gameplay design point of view.

[Mishrak]

Indeed it is, as evidenced by this discussion.  On the other hand, as evidenced by this discussion, if there's a default assumption that story point costing picks like Officer Training and Cybernetic Augmentations are so necessary that everyone has at least one of them in their build, that would tend to lend evidence to the theory they need to be reduced in power, or other skills brought up to their level, so they are not an assumed picked.  If something is picked every time, its not really a choice, from a gameplay design point of view.

Officers are central to a lot of the game, so it seems natural that the player would pick one of those skills.  I do feel like Officer Training is the better selection than Officer Management if going with a 5/5/5 path.  A flagship also wants Cyber Aug, so that's not really that surprising a pick either.

Even with just five ships with triple S mods (out of 9 or 11 or whatever) and four officers with double elite skills (out of 8 or 10 total officers), I feel like I'm gaining a significant improvement in my fleet compared to alternative skill picks.  I feel like maximization of the skill, which is what I'm comparing to a potentially extreme choice, is a separate consideration from are they good enough with a reasonable time investment.  In the same way that you can use a few Alpha Cores to improve your colonizes as opposed to maximizing their use and colonizing the entire sector, are two separate considerations.

Alex doesn't put a warning on colony story point investments, nor on salvaging with story points, nor on adding extra contacts, all of which can be infinite sinks, so I don't see a need to put a warning on the skills.

In the case of all of those examples, the cost is definitely out in front of the player.  2 SP for a colony investment.  Wait the next one is 4?  Wait it's 8 now? okay I'm not spending that.

Salvaging is very clear "this costs a story point, it does/does not yield a bonus".  Same with contacts.  Alpha cores are quite rare until ordo farming.

BotB + Cyber Aug is a skill path choice and it's likely not immediately obvious to a newer player that it's going to cost an additional ~20+ SP to fully realize those skills on their fleet/officers and they'll run out of bonus exp before they've done it because of bad decisions they made in their playthrough.

It's obvious to us now, since we've thought about it, but it wasn't obvious to me until I sat down and looked at everything.

[Megas]

One problem with BotB is if I respec skills to another that does not use BotB, I will lose all of those third s-mods on every ship without any refund.  I am locked in.  Toggling BotB happens to be the only way to change s-mods on Ziggurat, and player gets only one Ziggurat per game, so just getting another replacement Ziggurat is not an option like it is with other ships.

P.S.
Re: IRAL on Radiant
Yes, they are nice.  I use them (and Paladin PD) to shred enemy fighters and small things that get in the way.  I also did not feel like micromanaging missiles while piloting Radiant myself, unless I wanted to use Pilums.

[Goumindong]

Toggling BotB happens to be the only way to change s-mods on Ziggurat, and player gets only one Ziggurat per game, so just getting another replacement Ziggurat is not an option like it is with other ships.

Also a particular XIV legion and onslaught