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[BigBrainEnergy]

Overall pretty happy with the skill system after the last change. I might tweak a few things here and there but there is a variety of ways you can level up that change the game without being overpowered, the current "electronic warfare" skill being a great example, and cybernetic augmentation is a great reward for players who invest in combat skills (on top of the skills themselves being great if you are a good pilot).

[SCC]

If there's an elegant solution to keeping current flexibility versus guiding new players down a particular way to play the game, I'd love to see it.

Nerfing baseline officer level to 3. AI cores to 1, 3 and 5.
Why: currently officers are very strong and there's no need whatsoever to pilot your ship, and if you do so, most players are likely to reduce their performance in combat. And people complained that reducing baseline officer count to 4 would just lead to cap spam.
Upsides:
- Officers, by default, don't get capstones, so the player is harder to replace.
- It's cheaper for the player to reach parity with officers in skills.
- Indirectly nerfs capital ships.
- Easy to implement.
- Doesn't impact balance against most factions
Downsides:
- Melodrama about officers levels being taken away (from everyone, yes).
- Officer Management becomes worse, because individual officer quality degraded.
- AI core levels are smushed in a weird way.

0.7.2 and earlier balance was heavily in favour of piloting, 0.9.1 and earlier balance had the best balance (carrier spam aside), 0.95 and later balance is skewed towards fleetwide skills.

A suggestion I've sometimes thought of is just requiring players to have successfully finished all the vanilla missions as a pre-requisite to playing the campaign, as that would force players to learn a number of key concepts which will make them better at combat, and also pilot a ship to progress.

I don't think the issue is the existence of flagship-free playstyles, but rather the sufficient power level of officers and the rest of your fleet making the flagship worse, unless you become good enough at piloting to achieve roughly parity.

[Grievous69]

I also thought about the reduction of max officer levels, but to me the biggest downside would be the "feel" of the ships, some just don't give you enough bang for your buck when you don't have (or have little) skills for them. Easiest example to give is Onslaught vs Paragon. Onslaught being hot garbage out of the box, while Paragon is straight up strong and you could honestly have a single skill on it (Field Modulation) and it would be competitive against everything else. Not saying I would hate having lower level officers, I've just been so used to the current format, the game would feel too slow with that change.

[SCC]

I think that one (or even several) ships feeling bad to officer is a smaller loss than all of ships feeling bad to pilot when you first try it out. You can't make a second first impression.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Out of all the proposed changes, reducing officer level is the most palatable to me. I can't say that I'm in favor of it, but I do see the merit.

I think it introduces some problems balancing the combat skills against each other, though, because now those skill choices are more competitive due to being more limited. It already feels like you can barely squeeze in all the skills a ship needs, and many builds feel like they need 6-7. As it stands some skills are already higher priority than others, which is fine in the current state, but if you cut back the options even more you'll find some are consistently ignored simply because there's no room to fit anything beyond the basics. It sounds like a balancing nightmare to be honest.

[Alex]

I feel like if one were to go this way, changing the officer level to 4, removing +1 elite skills from Officer Training, and leaving AI cores alone might be a more restrained approach. I'm not sure I'm sold on it, though, though I understand the rationale.

*Are* fleetwide skills actually stronger? I'm not sure that "how many Ordos can this take down" is a particularly useful metric for this. I mean, if that's the metric, then sure, we can say one or the other is "stronger" by that metric, but an endurance fight like this distorts a lot of things.

What about something like, "how easy is it for an average player to take down 1-2 Ordos"? I feel like the skillset required for creating good AI ship loadouts, understanding both your and enemy AI, understanding the tactics to use, the orders to give - that seems more difficult to figure out than than learning to pilot a ship reasonably well while your fleet just kind of does its thing (yeah, you need to make some reasonable loadouts doing that too, but not to the same degree). And, with a smaller fight, your personal impact is magnified.

Another thing to consider here are the Omega weapons. You can certainly make AI loadouts capable of using them well, but the player would still get more out of using them personally, and they're quite the force multiplier.

[SCC]

and leaving AI cores alone might be a more restrained approach.

I wrote that officer nerfs should include AI cores on the basis that making Remnants harder wasn't the goal.

*Are* fleetwide skills actually stronger? I'm not sure that "how many Ordos can this take down" is a particularly useful metric for this. I mean, if that's the metric, then sure, we can say one or the other is "stronger" by that metric, but an endurance fight like this distorts a lot of things.

I am definitely too lazy to go through all the posts on the forum and look for indication whether people play with a flagship or not. Not to mention that people on the forum are just a part of the Starsector playerbase, with Reddit and Discord communities also being sizeable. One useful metric is interest in threads about splitting flagship and fleetwide skills, and another is how these threads are always framed as "it sucks I have to sacrifice better fleetwide skills for worse combat skills" and never the reverse.

Another thing to consider here are the Omega weapons. You can certainly make AI loadouts capable of using them well, but the player would still get more out of using them personally, and they're quite the force multiplier.

Omega weapons RNG is a comparable dose of pesky randomness similar to getting perfect officer skills every time, I suppose. Though there at least you can spend a story point to widen your skill selection.

[Alex]

I wrote that officer nerfs should include AI cores on the basis that making Remnants harder wasn't the goal.

That's fair, yeah. FWIW, I feel like the difficulty of Remnants can be fairly flexible, there isn't a super specific target for it other than an ordo or two shouldn't be *too* hard. Which is pretty vague to begin with.

One useful metric is interest in threads about splitting flagship and fleetwide skills, and another is how these threads are always framed as "it sucks I have to sacrifice better fleetwide skills for worse combat skills" and never the reverse.

I think a large part of this is just the existence the true-*feeling* argument of "boosting more ships is better than boosting one ship". (Edit: which, to be clear, isn't necessarily wrong, but it depends on the player's piloting skill, and can't be considered in a vacuum as a purely mathematical exercise.)

[Megas]

Weaker officers would make it more like pre-0.7 releases without officers - I like it!

[Beep Boop]

One useful metric is interest in threads about splitting flagship and fleetwide skills, and another is how these threads are always framed as "it sucks I have to sacrifice better fleetwide skills for worse combat skills" and never the reverse.

Well, worth noting is that "fleetwideness" is rarely a binding constraint and you can usually compensate for poor "fleetwide" by throwing more fleet at it, while combat is strictly bounded by factors like DP limits. And where it comes to fleet combat boosts vs. personal combat boosts, the thing is that when you take a fleetwide combat boost, you, personally, are not deriving much benefit from it, so you don't really experience this effect personally, while flying without a personal combat skill is a direct penalty to YOU, often in ways that may critically break your ability to do a thing. Breakpoints are a big factor here: If your gun does 90 damage and enemies have 100 hitpoints, doing 9 more points of damage per shot does precisely *** all while doing 10 points more damage completely changes the game, because that 1 extra point of damage has crossed a critical breakpoint. A larger personal boost may cross a critical breakpoint while a smaller fleetwide boost fails to clear this threshold and thus has no meaningful effect.

I think a large part of this is just the existence the true-*feeling* argument of "boosting more ships is better than boosting one ship". (Edit: which, to be clear, isn't necessarily wrong, but it depends on the player's piloting skill, and can't be considered in a vacuum as a purely mathematical exercise.)

Well, it's more like the question of "greater effect applied to a small number" vs "smaller effect applied to a larger number". The difference is, how large the numbers are is not a constant determined by you as the developer anymore, as "how good a player is" isn't a number you can tweak from a developer position. That makes this an uncontrolled input that's very hard to balance for. It also tends to lead to a vicious cycle: Better players buy skills that buff themselves, and engage in personal actions often, becoming even more overpowered, while worse players get little benefit out of these skills and see them as low value, and thus rarely use features of the game that rely on their personal involvement, getting worse at it.

[Hiruma Kai]

If there's an elegant solution to keeping current flexibility versus guiding new players down a particular way to play the game, I'd love to see it.

Nerfing baseline officer level to 3. AI cores to 1, 3 and 5.
Why: currently officers are very strong and there's no need whatsoever to pilot your ship, and if you do so, most players are likely to reduce their performance in combat. And people complained that reducing baseline officer count to 4 would just lead to cap spam.
Upsides:
- Officers, by default, don't get capstones, so the player is harder to replace.
- It's cheaper for the player to reach parity with officers in skills.
- Indirectly nerfs capital ships.
- Easy to implement.
- Doesn't impact balance against most factions
Downsides:
- Melodrama about officers levels being taken away (from everyone, yes).
- Officer Management becomes worse, because individual officer quality degraded.
- AI core levels are smushed in a weird way.

This is a reasonably self-consistent approach.  Similar alternatives I've seen is just disconnect officer combat skills from player combat skills, which allows you to scale the player skills harder to make the fleet vs pilot balance better, if that is something that is perceived to be off.  If combat skills are in fact not attractive enough, then make them individually more attractive for the player character only (and not officers and AIs as well) makes sense to me.

This is kind of what the elite system tries to do, but then allows for 50% elite skills on officers anyways for skill picks, or in the case of cores, 100% of the skills are elite, so it never feels like the game fully commits to the idea.  Is a 6 combat skill with 6 elites really that much better than 6 combat skills and 3 elites (the 3 most synergistic).  Plus the existence of 7/4 officers as well.

You could for example instead of reducing officer and core levels, simply multiply the effects of skills on the flagship (and only the flagship) by a factor of 1.25, or 1.5 or even 2, in concept similar to how carrier skills get a 1.5 multiplier on officered ships.  So 3 skills act more like 4.5 or even 6 skills.  Same 3 skill investment in this proposal gets you the same relative performance as a level 5 or level 6 officer, plus the elite effects.  Which would be like a level 3 combat skill player character versus a level 3 officer.  Has the advantage of not changing any of the current "your fleet vs NPC fleet" dynamics at all, and just purely affects the flagship.  Or just as you say, limit everyone else's maximum officer level does something similar in the other direction.  Fleet vs fleet stays the same, while flagship vs fleet is stronger.

Of course, all of this only makes sense if the game is too hard when using those combat skill picks instead of fleet wide skill picks, or alternatively, the game is too easy when you go fleet wide focused.

Which comes back to my original question to the posters in the thread: Is the game too hard, too easy, or about right in difficulty?  How much does it depend on skills picks and personal player skill?  I think we'll continue to get these types of discussions so long as we've only got 2 difficulty levels, simply because it is really hard to balance for multiple player skill levels simultaneously.  A "heroic" difficulty, where you are playing a "hero" after all, that had all flagship skills effects doubled would be one way to approach it and likely easy to code up.

[Alex]

It also tends to lead to a vicious cycle: Better players buy skills that buff themselves, and engage in personal actions often, becoming even more overpowered, while worse players get little benefit out of these skills and see them as low value, and thus rarely use features of the game that rely on their personal involvement, getting worse at it.

I'm not so sure about the "vicious cycle". Playing with fleetwide skills also requires player skill, just of a different sort, so it's more likely self-selection into preferred playstyles. The game is nowhere near hard enough that someone with a bit of experience with a fleetwide-heavy style couldn't afford to put 5 points into Combat and do fine in the vast majority of the game even if they screw up their personal piloting all the time.

And if the problem is "but I feel bad because I could have spent those points in fleetwides and made the rest of my fleet better" (which, I get it), then CyberAug is *right there*!

You could for example instead of reducing officer and core levels, simply multiply the effects of skills on the flagship (and only the flagship) by a factor of 1.25, or 1.5 or even 2, in concept similar to how carrier skills get a 1.5 multiplier on officered ships.

One thing I'd been thinking about for a *while* is finding items that, when right-clicked, grant the player a unique combat or two. Something very limited - you wouldn't get amazing at combat off those alone - but it could be a fun way to approach this sort of thing.

And, yeah, it's a fair point about officers having too many elite skills; that definitely got a little out of hand. I've pulled it back a bit with CyberAug going from +2 elites to +1, but 3/6 elites is still a lot.

[Megas]

Re: Cybernetic Augmentation.
The problem with getting that for me is I cannot get the Automated Ships DLC unless I spend three more in Tech for double Tech capstones.  I get Automated Ships primarily to enable recovery of automated ships, even if the ships not named Radiant seem no better than human ships.  For power, getting Cybernetic Augmentation instead of Automated Ships seems like a no-brainer if I do not want to use Neural Link Radiant flagship or do ECM shenanigans with frigates.  Now if I could recover automated ships without the capstone (even if they still have -100% CR without the capstone), then I would dump Automated Ships for Cybernetic Augmentation unless I feel like using a Radiant flagship and get Neural Link along the way.

[FooF]

So what is the point of Officers? Is it to concentrate fighting power into individual ships or are they intended to be force multipliers for the whole fleet? How you approach that question can net wildly different results.

If we go with the latter idea, I could make the argument that Officers shouldn't have combat skills at all. They should impart a single fleetwide combat attribute or a series of small buffs to all ships. Then you mix-and-match them depending on the kind of fleet you're trying to build and as they gain levels, you're able to tailor or improve the buffs. It's not like Officers are killed anyway, so them not being assigned to a discrete ship really isn't that much of a departure. I'm thinking Officers are more like the battle staff of a commander and have their own personalities and expertise that they drill into the fleet. Leadership skills would increase their potency, or increase the number you can have. I could compare it a bit to the Governors in Civ 6, where you know what each offers from the start and all are available but context makes you value one's abilities over the other and the decision is to improve one versus get another.

What that does is remove the direct comparison between officers and the flagship, removes the "haves and have nots" of ships being Officered and, perhaps in a new wrinkle, allows Cores to be assigned to individual ships which makes them qualitatively different. Remnants would operate on a fundamentally different level and having Autonomous Ships in your fleet would also be quite special, rather than just super-officers.

[SCC]

Which comes back to my original question to the posters in the thread: Is the game too hard, too easy, or about right in difficulty?

Too easy for no flagship playstyles.

I think we'll continue to get these types of discussions so long as we've only got 2 difficulty levels, simply because it is really hard to balance for multiple player skill levels simultaneously.  A "heroic" difficulty, where you are playing a "hero" after all, that had all flagship skills effects doubled would be one way to approach it and likely easy to code up.

It isn't impossible to play with a flagship focus playstyle, it just feels uncompetitive for many people. I don't think there's an issue with different playstyles arriving eventually at a similar power level, if those playstyles rely on different skills.

One thing I'd been thinking about for a *while* is finding items that, when right-clicked, grant the player a unique combat or two. Something very limited - you wouldn't get amazing at combat off those alone - but it could be a fun way to approach this sort of thing.

It's similar approach to omega weapons, though omega weapons suffer from randomness that seemingly hardly anyone plans for.