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[Thaago]

I was thinking basic OE because in many ships the effect of flux regulation for dissipation is less than half of what Ordnance Expertise gives (and generally capacity is valued less than dissipation, though capacity is really important too), but there are some exceptions to that. There's a class of high tech ships with high base dissipation but low OP where I'm wrong and Flux Regulation is better than OE.

[Vanshilar]

I feel like there are two related but separate issues at discussion here, and that it'd be worth disentangling them. The first is the skills system itself, and the second is the relative power of the player-controlled flagship relative to the power of the other ships in the fleet, including other officers.

Skills System

One of the biggest advantages of the current skills system is its flexibility, which is exactly what you want for a sandbox single-player game. Each player has different perspectives on how they want to play, and different strengths and abilities, and these will change over the course of them playing Starsector. So giving them more flexibility appeals to the widest possible audience and gives the most replayability out of the game.

You can broadly separate each skill as affecting the player-controlled ship (i.e. flagship), affecting the other ships in the fleet, and/or affecting the campaign layer (affecting non-combat related mechanics, or only indirectly affecting combat mechanics). So there are three dimensions to consider. However, they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the majority of fleet skills also improve the flagship. The only fleet skills which do not improve the flagship are Officer Training, Officer Management, Support Doctrine, and arguably Neural Link and Automated Ships, depending on how you want to count those. So it's wrong to think of fleet skills as somehow exclusive of the flagship for the most part; most of them will also help the flagship.

So why would someone want to take a flagship-only skill over a fleet skill that improves every ship in the fleet as well as the flagship? Because many of the flagship-only skills give unique advantages that are not achievable through other means, or are very expensive to get outside of those skills. Also (to be addressed below) controlling the flagship gives the player fleet specific advantages that can't be gained elsewhere, in terms of maintaining the flow of the battle to ensure victory, so it's worth giving more advantages to the flagship to that end.

Also, certain skills actually help along all three dimensions. For example, Tactical Drills gives +5% weapon damage to all combat ships, which improves the flagship and the fleet, and also gives bonuses to ground operations such as raids, which help with the campaign layer.

The current skills system gives you a common pool of points that you can allocate toward any of those dimensions any way you like, up to the limit of 15 total points. That lets the player explore the widest possible space of possible choices when playing. This is a good thing. Every proposed alternative thus far ends up constraining this space (limiting the player's flexibility) and thus would not take the game in a positive direction:

* Giving the player 1 combat and 1 fleet skill per level up forces the player to spread those points evenly along those dimensions, even if they prefer a stronger flagship or would rather be more fleet-oriented instead.
* Some sort of "flag captain" option means that the flagship is limited to whatever skill point cap the flag captain is limited to, which will be much more limited than the current game if the flag captain has to obey the same level caps as other officers in the fleet.

Yes, you can rebalance the skills for a proposed new system, but that misses the point: the player is still forced to spend a certain amount of points along one dimension that they wouldn't necessarily want to. For a Starsector-centric analogy, it would be like taking the current OP system for ship loadouts, and then telling the player "you have to spend 40% of the OP on weapons, 30% on offensive hullmods, and 30% on defensive hullmods". Anyone who prefers a different mix of OP usage would like the new system less.

I haven't seen a proposed system thus far that lets the player command a super-buffed flagship if he wants, or a super-buffed fleet if he wants, with as wide a flexibility as the current system. The proposals thus far have served to limit the power of the player-controlled flagship, which seems sketchy when the other theme of this thread is the view that the flagship isn't powerful enough. Any proposal to replace or change the current skills system should consider how it changes the player's flexibility to explore different options.

Flagship vs Officer Power

The second theme is the relative power of the player-controlled flagship versus that of other ships in the fleet. I feel like back in the days of Drover spam, the fleet was decidedly more powerful. Nowadays though I think the flagship vs fleet balance is in a pretty good spot. The best fleets are not flagship-centric nor fleet-centric, but rather, a hybrid approach combining the two while maximizing the strengths of each.

The flagship is the only ship on both sides that do not have to follow the AI subroutines of all the ships. The human player is much better at understanding battle formations (even though Starsector does not have formations per se), predicting behavior and outcomes, and so forth. The human player performs much better under pressure than the AI (the AI struggles with what to do when it's overburdened, often leading to disastrous outcomes). The flagship is also the only ship that is instantly responsive to the player's commands. As such, the flagship is much better at directing the flow of combat to ensure a victory.

The other ships provide the bulk of the fleet. Even the biggest flagship peaks at 75 DP, out of the 240 DP that you can put on the battlefield. So in general (unless you're deliberately short-manning), the player fleet will always be dominated by AI-controlled ships in bulk and in numbers.

It's a bit difficult to quantify just how effective the flagship can be. In general, I estimate that the player-controlled flagship can be around 2-3 times effective as the AI controlling the same ship. Furthermore, the flagship can do what no AI-controlled ship can in terms of influencing the outcome of the battle, and thus acts as a force multiplier on the entire player fleet.

So the reason why someone would want to put more skills on the flagship is specifically because of the outsized influence the flagship can have over the general fleet. If the flagship is influential enough, it makes more sense to put skills toward improving that specific ship than toward improving the fleet as a whole.

In terms of the current game, any fleet which is too flagship-centric suffers from simply not enough bulk -- not enough DP shooting stuff at the enemy (or not enough ships doing so effectively), increasing how long it takes to kill the enemy fleet. Any fleet which is too fleet-centric suffers from a lack of direction and cohesion, again increasing how long it takes to kill the enemy fleet. This is pretty evident in the various videos of both types that have been posted.

-----

With that general stuff out of the way, let's talk specifics; I'm just going to quote one each for length although several posters raised the same points:

In particular, that's not a division that falls into the 'fun trap' where a player who isn't great at piloting their flagship is going to want to lean towards non-combat skills, at which point their flagship performs poorly, which then feeds back into them not gaining skill at piloting and not wanting combat skills.

I don't buy this idea of a "fun trap". Pretty much by definition, when a player is new, they don't understand how the game works and they're going to do poorly at just about everything. So yes, the stock AI is going to be better than them at controlling the ship at first. That's true for nearly every video game, whether you're talking about Mario Kart, or Street Fighter, or Starcraft, or Quake, or whatever. The way new players are incentivized to improve is to start easy and then gradually increase the difficulty of the challenges and to provide feedback as to what areas they could improve on. In Starsector, this takes the form of tutorials, the combat simulator, the bounties (which escalate in difficulty as the player does more of them and more difficult ones), and that the campaign starts with a bunch of d-modded pirates with the difficult challenges gated behind having to travel long distances and/or behind quests, etc., while giving the player a "get out of jail free" card through SP for too-difficult fights if needed. And as the player understands more about the game, he starts seeing more limitations of the AI and weaknesses to exploit, and with that it starts becoming better to pilot the flagship himself. That's the nature of the learning curve with nearly every video game. Changing the balance of various systems in the game is not the way to go if improving the new player experience is the justification given.

*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 don't find "how many Ordos" to be particularly useful. I certainly commend people for taking the time to do it, but I feel like it's more like climbing Mt. Everest -- fun to say you did it, but not useful for game balance, and not particularly relevant to the game as a whole. It's little different than doing a themed playthrough like a Low Tech-only playthrough or a playthrough where the player only uses ships that have the letter "e". Interesting to do and to discuss, but not something to balance the game around nor something to consider for game balance.

To start with, fighting more than 3 Ordos means the player has to do shenanigans with the player fleet just for it to be possible in the first place (specifically, raise the player fleet's FP, by either carrying extra junk ships that they don't intend to fight with and/or by editing ship_data.csv). So it's already out of the regular player experience and something the player has to know specifically how to make it happen.

Also, even a full 240-DP 8-officer player fleet maxes out at +500% XP bonus at around triple Ordos, so there's little point to going beyond that game-wise except for bragging rights.

Thus far, going beyond 3 Ordos has for the most part been endurance fights, which distorts player fleets toward larger ships, or cycling out smaller ships as they run out of PPT/CR. It also distorts player fleets away from limited-ammo weapons such as missiles, even though those weapons are perhaps the strongest when playing the game "normally".

So I personally feel like roughly double Ordos is about the maximum in expected difficulty for the game. In fact the fleet that I use reaches the maximum XP bonus already at around 1.95 Ordos, so there's no point to going beyond that. Obviously the player can basically "choose" the difficulty by just going for single Ordos, or sticking with faction fleets, etc., and the balance will shift somewhat depending on what the player chooses as the enemy fleet to compare player fleets to (right now I'm having fun fighting against PL fleet spam). But balance-wise I find little reason to consider anything beyond double Ordos.

Cap'n Hector's various "5 ships vs 5 ordos" videos (Legions, Onslaughts, Paragons, , Draba's various fleet comp vs 6 ordos videos, Rainy's (on Discord) ordo hunting escapades, Legionhead's (also on Discord) ordo hunting fleet (I don't know if he ended up getting 5 points in industry or not) and yes, even my own experiences after playing the game for quite some time.

If anything, those examples actually show just how limited in power it is to go for fleet-centric player fleets without using a player-controlled flagship. Most of them involve the player fleet losing one or more ships, and most of them are long endurance fights lasting 20 minutes or more, sometimes taking multiple rounds. CapnHector also talked about how he had to try multiple times and experiment with a lot different ship loadouts just to get one successful completion; those completions were not "routine". For example, the best of the screenshots you posted from Rainy took over 35 minutes, had at least 5 player fleet ship deaths, and (assuming an initial 45 seconds of 0 damage done for the two fleets to merge) killed around 80 DP's worth of ships per in-game minute.

In contrast my 5-Ordos video taking a hybrid approach of using a player-controlled flagship leading a full player fleet took less than 14 minutes against a 2130 DP, 10-capital 5 Ordos fleet (compared with Rainy's 2782 DP, 13-capital fleet) with no player fleet deaths, and on the first try (I didn't bother to iterate to look for better ways to go about it nor to try to get a better result). That's killing the Ordos fleet at a bit over 164 DP per minute, more than twice as fast as Rainy's. Your own "2 Radiants & Co vs 5 Ordos" video came in at around 116 DP killed per minute, and it's arguable whether it should be considered a flagship-centric fleet or a hybrid flagship-leading fleet, but it was definitely not a fleet-centric player fleet.

So even if we look at multi-Ordos fights, right now the evidence points toward having a player-controlled flagship as being significantly stronger than taking a fleet-centric approach toward building the player fleet. The evidence you cited shows that the player can use fleet-centric player fleets to get completions, but in no way that it's better to do so, which is what we're looking for when discussing balancing flagship vs no flagship fleets.

Officers are strong enough to make the no flagship playstyle the playstyle of least resistance. It's better to improve your strengths (officers) than weaknesses (the flagship). Or, to put differently: why "separate flagship skills from fleet skills because I can never justify taking them" threads exist, if officers are so strong you don't have to buff them more and can focus on the flagship instead?

Is it? Relying on officers without a player-controlled flagship means you're putting the fate of your fleet on the AI subroutines, which I don't think anybody really understands. It's essentially rolling the dice for a good outcome. I have a pretty good understanding of my playing abilities and strengths and weaknesses as a player in just about any game (namely: I do a lot of analysis but my actual playing ability, i.e. controlling units, predicting what's going to happen, thinking on my feet, reacting to unforeseen events, etc. is pretty pedestrian -- I absolutely suck at any PvP games specifically because of that, and prefer PvC games because it's easier to understand and come up with successful strategies against a static, predictable opponent), but I still struggle with just what the AI in Starsector is trying to do in just about every battle. (Mostly when the AI does something dumb that I didn't expect.) Is trying to be successful using an AI system that you don't understand actually easier than improving your own skills as a player, which you do understand and can directly change? I personally find figuring out what the AI is doing to be much more difficult.

I can similarly say there are plenty of threads complaining about the AI, which leads toward piloting the ship yourself as the better option.

Now this doesn't take away from the discussion about decreasing officer skills (or officer elite skills or capstone skills), which is entirely valid for discussion; I just don't see the evidence for why it's needed.

-----

One idea that I've seen tossed around is to change the officer system to where each officer has only one or two skills, but you can put multiple officers on a single ship (perhaps limited by ship size, i.e. say each ship can have 1/2/3/4 officers by size or whatever). The player fleet can have a max total number of officers (and therefore a max total number of skills) but (perhaps other than ship size) can distribute them as he sees fit. The skills system can then be changed to focus specifically on fleet-wide and campaign layer benefits.

* This would more clearly disentangle the skills system from the flagship-centric vs fleet-centric combat issue, while still giving the player the flexibility to have a super flagship or super fleet as desired, thereby addressing nearly all of the above points.
* Specifically, this would also remove the concern that the player wouldn't want to learn to pilot the flagship if the player feels like he gets more out of putting skill points toward the fleet instead, i.e. the "fun trap".
* Also, for those players who want to have a really super flagship with a bunch of combat skills over fleet skills, it's easy enough for one or more of the new skills to simply be "this skill lets the player put more officers on his flagship" or similar. This effectively uses a skill point to put an additional combat skill on the flagship instead of spending the skill point on the fleet, just like the current system, so it retains much of the current system's flagship vs fleet flexibility.
* This would also more easily allow the player to place officers in wide (many little ships) versus tall (fewer big ships) fleets as desired. Right now there's little point to putting an officer on a low-DP ship such as most frigates (with certain exceptions like the Hyperion or the Monitor) because most low-DP ships don't impact the battle as a whole enough to be worth it, and you only get 8 or 10 (or more but then you have to spend SP) officers to distribute amongst the entire fleet, when you can use up to 30 ships. Again it gives the player more flexibility.
* This would make it easier to acquire the "ideal" set of skills for a given ship. Right now the player has to abide by RNGesus when leveling up each officer to get the desired skills, or save-scum to get it, and then it can't be changed afterward except by dumping the officer and trying for a new one, rinse and repeat. Making officers a bit more like equipping weapons or items (find frequently, equip and unequip at will, in piecemeal amounts) makes this process easier. There is still some work involved in hunting around to get the right mix of skills, so there's still the long-term process of gradually improving the fleet, but it wouldn't be as unforgiving as the current system.
* Also, with some officers having one skill while others having two (i.e. the "better" ones), but with the max total number of officers capped, there is still the process of finding all two-level officers, of the right combination, for each given ship. So again there's still the journey of gradually improving the fleet over time in each playthrough.
* Elite vs non-elite officer skills can be easily handled: if you want to limit the number of elite skills per ship, then if say each officer can have 1-2 skills with 0-2 of them being elite, then you can say that a ship can only designate one officer as the lead officer, allowing its elite skills to apply, and allowing its personality to be the one that dictates the ship's behavior, while all the other officers only contribute their skills (but not elite effects) to the ship. Thus each ship is limited to a maximum of 2 elite skills.
* Similarly, it's easy enough to say that the player flagship is the only one, by virtue of the player character as the fleet admiral being on it (regardless of if the player is personally controlling it or if it's on AI-controlled autopilot) to have all the elite effects from all the officers onboard apply to it, and/or have more officers than usual on it. So the player can still have one super ship, whether player-controlled or AI-controlled, to center the fleet around (i.e. make it "special" as the flagship, to "personalize" the story in a fashion, like the Vindicator in Star Control 2, and just like in the current game), while limiting the number of elite effects in the fleet generally for balance purposes. No more needing to put the player on a Kite or Dram because the player dumped combat skills.
* With the player having one super ship, this gives the game more of an adventure feel (like Star Control 2) rather than an RTS, send-a-bunch-of-faceless-units-to-their-death feel. From a UI standpoint, the player is following along the view of this super ship, even if it's on AI-controlled autopilot, again providing more of an adventure feel instead of an hands-off RTS overworld feel if the player does not have his flagship deployed or is giving orders from some Dram in the corner of the map.
* As a corollary to the above, it's easy enough to have enemy fleets also have the same one super ship with all elite skills thing, without ruining immersion, i.e. "why does only the player get it" issue in the current version. The answer, of course, is for gameplay purposes, but there's the immersion issue of why can the player have over 10 combat skills, all elite, when even integrated Alpha cores can only have up to 8 combat skills.
* As another corollary to the above, AI cores can be easily balanced the same way, in terms of total number of skills and elite skills, as desired.
* The combat skills can stay mostly as-is; there doesn't need to be an overhaul of the combat skills for this.
* The skills system, while it would have to be reworked, is already mostly set up for this; it could just be the current Leadership, Technology, and Industry trees, with some modifications for the current tier 2 combat skills in the Technology and Industry trees to be replaced with something else, and then changing the max number of skills to something suitable to account for the reduced number of total possible skills.

The biggest disadvantage, of course, is the time it would take to overhaul (and recode) the skills system and the officer system to do all this, and to rebalance everything, and I'm not sure if it would really lead to better results in the end, to change a system that IMO mostly works about right. But I found the idea pretty interesting and it does seem to address most of the issues that people have raised about the current skills system and about the officer system in this and similar threads.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

Oh damn I really like the multiple offciers per ship idea. It even fits thematically, i.e. if you have, say, an Engineering Officer with Ordnance Expertise and Polarized Armor you instantly understand that's the "I'm giving her all she's got cap'n" guy.

The biggest disadvantage, of course, is the time it would take to overhaul (and recode) the skills system and the officer system to do all this

And drawing all the extra portraits since the average number of officers per fleet would double/triple/quadruple!

[Wyvern]

The current skills system gives you a common pool of points that you can allocate toward any of those dimensions any way you like, up to the limit of 15 total points. That lets the player explore the widest possible space of possible choices when playing. This is a good thing. Every proposed alternative thus far ends up constraining this space (limiting the player's flexibility) and thus would not take the game in a positive direction:

This is not something you can just claim is obviously true. Constraints and limits are what makes a game a game and not just playing make-believe. Any change to the skill system (short of just granting more skill points without doing anything else) is going to take away some options that previously existed. Should we therefore decide that changing the skill system is inherently bad?


I do like your take on the flag officer thing, though; multiple small officers seems like a pretty solid idea.

[FooF]

The officer idea has merit but I have a few reservations:

If you went with a hull-size limitation with the max number of officers allowed, you’ve capped the ceiling of the smaller ships. Something like Wolfpack Tactics might bump them up one more officer, but even then, you’ll never see a Frigate with like 8 skills. That’s not necessarily a negative but a consequence of the system.

I’m unsure I would want a Pokémon mentality to officers. Gotta catch ‘em all. To imitate the same base level of power of 8 Level 5 officers as current, you’re talking 30-40 of these lesser officers. That’s just swimming in them. Again, not negative per se but has implications.

Also, would officers level? If so, what does that look like? If not, it sounds like it’s more about amassing them than developing them.

If I could tweak it, I think it might be more beneficial to have officer types (Weapons, Armor, Nav, etc.) that have 3 skills each in their respective speciality. They add one skill per level and have an Elite effect if they’re the primary officer. The max number is still based on hulls size with a few caveats that skills unlock, as previously mentioned. The Flagship has the PC on it which gives it a few perks. Relative to current, I’d imagine you would have access to at least 15 officers to start, with some skills adding more.

[Alex]

@Vanshilar: just wanted to say, thank you for laying out your thoughts! This was a very interesting and useful read.

(The many-officers-per-ships idea is - it has some positives to it, but it's so different then what the game looks like now that it'd be pretty massive trying to rework all of it, and it's also way, way more complicated. Fun fact: a very early idea for officers including ships getting a "second in command" that somehow contributed to the skills used by the ship - I forget the details. That idea got ditched for being too much of a headache.

I feel like maybe this sort of thing would be more compelling for a game where the player manages fewer ships at a time; perhaps a game where it's just *one* ship, even. Then that whole "engineering, give me all you've got!" thing makes a lot more sense feel-wise, too.)

[BigBrainEnergy]

In terms of multiple officers per ship, I suggested something similar a while ago as a way to make ship builds more flexible. Right now you need to raise an officer to max level and get a specific skill set, but if you want to use different ships you now need to fire your officers and train new ones from scratch. Not the worst problem in the world, but my idea was to make every officer only have 1 skill with each ship only able to hold up to 5 officers. With this change, your ship setups become very modular and require far less commitment. For elite skills, it's pretty simple: the officer in the first slot on each ship is designated the "captain." The captain's personality controls the ship, and their skill gets treated as elite. Officer training could increase the number of officers you can fit on one ship while officer management increases the total number of officer you can have.

This obviously never got picked up. Maybe because it would be hard to implement, maybe because it just doesn't fit Alex's vision for what role officers are supposed to play. There's a big difference between having 8 officers that level up over time, and having 40 officers that are static and unchanging. The latter has great flexibility in gameplay, but the former allows you to get attached to your officers and watch them grow over the course of a playthrough. At least, you could get attached *in theory,* but in practice I don't see anyone treat them as much more than bundles of stat boosts with a funny name.

Compared to Vanshilar's suggestion, I think each officer having 1 skill is better than giving them 2 because it would solve a lot of potential frustration with skills being bundled together that you don't want on the same ship. I never considered putting officers on the player flagship, but it would make perfect sense to be able to jam them in there and all their skills get treated as elite while the player is present (an idea which I find both thematically and mechanically satisfying). Plus the "captain" (now second-in-command) could determine your flagship's personality during autopilot.

Even with 40 officers I think it wouldn't be too hard to make the interface work, they only have 1 skill, so you can shrink down their portrait to about the same size with a name over the top like:

Then stack up 5 of these per row.
Put the personality underneath, dull and grey, while the captain's is bright white to indicate that it is active.

I actually have an idea for how to make a clean and simple interface for changing which officer are assigned to which ship, I'll edit together an example of that in a bit. Mostly for fun, though, because the whole idea would not only require a lot of work upfront, it would also disrupt the game balance a lot.

[SafariJohn]

If each officer has 1 skill, that kind of looks like officers are skills.

Captains + swappable officers
vs
Officers + fixed skills

[Genir]

In old releases, player could solo multiple fleets with any capital or even with Dominator (and Aurora if the enemy did not have a Paragon).  And small ships could solo a mid-sized pirate fleet or taking out a capital.  Today, that seems limited to specific ships (like phase ships) with specific skill choices.  It seems more limited now.

Isn't that a good thing? Being able to solo entire fleets with just one ship is a testament of bad game balance. It deosn't make sense lore-wise and gameplay-wise. Starsector is not a zombie shooter, where enemies are weaker by design (or is it?). I would much prefer being surrounded by competent allies and enemies.

[Vanshilar]

Oh damn I really like the multiple offciers per ship idea. It even fits thematically, i.e. if you have, say, an Engineering Officer with Ordnance Expertise and Polarized Armor you instantly understand that's the "I'm giving her all she's got cap'n" guy.

Yeah in some ways they become not really "officers" per se, more like "specialists", since they specialize in one or two skills, and it makes sense that a ship has multiple people who have specialized into their niche roles. I mean in some sense it's unrealistic that you get this one guy on this ship who is so good that he's specialized into 5 or 6 different areas enough to make a significant contribution to the ship's performance, and what are the rest of the crew doing? Mopping floors? My headcanon is that officers really bring a team of experienced underlings with them, and you're really hiring the whole team (which is what makes them so expensive compared with regular crew), so it's not really just they themselves making the contribution by their lonesome, but it's still a bit odd.

And drawing all the extra portraits since the average number of officers per fleet would double/triple/quadruple!

David gets to bill for overtime!

This is not something you can just claim is obviously true. Constraints and limits are what makes a game a game and not just playing make-believe. Any change to the skill system (short of just granting more skill points without doing anything else) is going to take away some options that previously existed. Should we therefore decide that changing the skill system is inherently bad?

Uh well all games are more or less make-believe, so not sure what you mean. Yes you need some constraints in a game, the question is how much, and for a sandbox game, you want to let the player decide how much they want to lean in one direction at the expense of another without overly constraining it. A flag officer, assuming it would be the current limit of level 5 or level 6, would constrain the player to basically put at least 5 and at most 6 skill points onto the flagship. Any player who prefers putting 4 or less points, or 7 or more points, would be negatively impacted by it and prefer it less than the current system. So you would need to account for the type of player who wants to play with a super ship as well the type of player who doesn't want to pilot and is fine with letting their ship be a "dump stat" so they can put points toward the fleet as a whole instead. You need to justify how those different types of players would prefer the new system more - provide an explanation for what benefit it would bring over the current system, or address how it would correct those shortcomings - instead of just saying "Constraints and limits are what makes a game a game" or "Because it's not fun".

If you went with a hull-size limitation with the max number of officers allowed, you’ve capped the ceiling of the smaller ships. Something like Wolfpack Tactics might bump them up one more officer, but even then, you’ll never see a Frigate with like 8 skills. That’s not necessarily a negative but a consequence of the system.

Yes, I'm not sure if a size-based cap on officers per ship is really needed, I think it's more just for flavor. I mean the thought of having 4 officers and yourself squished into a Kite and everything. Realistically if you're going with a Wolfpack fleet, you're likely to prefer putting one or two officers in each frigate anyway instead of dumping them all onto a couple of frigates, unless you're going for Support Doctrine, so that limitation may not even be needed.

I’m unsure I would want a Pokémon mentality to officers. Gotta catch ‘em all. To imitate the same base level of power of 8 Level 5 officers as current, you’re talking 30-40 of these lesser officers. That’s just swimming in them. Again, not negative per se but has implications.

Agree. It changes the feeling of the officers from a handful of subordinates (like say, the VPs of a company where you're the boss) to essentially a commodity like weapons or blueprints. However, it would address a number of the issues with the current system, namely with how difficult it is to get officers with the right skills you want, encouraging more wolfpack play, and so forth.

Also, would officers level? If so, what does that look like? If not, it sounds like it’s more about amassing them than developing them.

I was thinking of them as essentially static and didn't consider them leveling. Presumably the way to get better officers is to fight harder fights where more officers with 2 skills and elite skills would show up. (In other words, if you fight d-modded pirates, you'd get regular one-skill officers, if you fight Hegemony Starfortress or harder contact deserter bounties, you could get better officers.)

@Vanshilar: just wanted to say, thank you for laying out your thoughts! This was a very interesting and useful read.

Oh to be clear, I didn't come up with the idea. It was someone else who brought it up, probably BigBrainEnergy below. I just found it compelling because it addresses many of the issues that players have raised about the current officer system.

FWIW I think the current system is mostly fine as it is. The only things I feel like should be tweaked are how the officer leveling system works; I would rather choose any skill than choose from a pre-selected subset for them, since if the given options for level 5 are not what I want, I'm not going to just stick with it, I'm going to toss the officer and find a new one, or just save-scum. I just shamelessly save-scum until I get the right combination of skills for each officer.

The other is some way to "store" officers that aren't needed for the current trip at hand or change their skills. This isn't as critical now when there's basically only one type of endgame enemy, but presumably in the future when there are several different types of endgame enemies, each perhaps needing different skills to handle them, there would need to be a way to swap out officers as needed or change their skills as needed for different types of enemies that you're going on a trip to fight. Like dropping them off at your colony to retrain their skills (and take them off your roster temporarily) or something.

(The many-officers-per-ships idea is - it has some positives to it, but it's so different then what the game looks like now that it'd be pretty massive trying to rework all of it, and it's also way, way more complicated.

Well, yes and no. In terms of how ships operate, I think it'd actually be pretty similar to current, by just taking the existing code machinery, and add a layer before it that takes officers on a ship, check for whether or not any of them have each of the 14 combat skills, and then return that array to the rest of the existing code. But yes obviously there'd be a lot more code that needs to be written in terms of officer generation, putting multiple ones on a single ship, creating enemy fleets with officers, etc., so there'd be a lot of backend code needed to make it work.

Balance-wise, in some ways it'd be pretty similar to current, i.e. more or less the same combat skills (maybe Systems Expertise and Missile Specialization would need to be toned down if they're "just another skill" instead of capstones), and there's already the 3 non-combat trees, so while there may be tweaks here and there to make it fit, I don't see that as a big change. Probably fine-tuning the number of officers, etc.

I think the biggest issue is from a design standpoint, i.e. whether or not it'd fit with your idea of how officers should feel in the game for the player. As FooF mentioned above, this makes them more into a collect-em-all mentality (like weapons) rather than handpicked advisers type of feel, once they get into the dozens. Then they just become another commodity to manage. On the other hand I've always felt like the "characters" in the game are the ships, not the officers, which I treat as just bonus stats, but that's just me.

There's also the matter of priorities, i.e. there's already been multiple skill overhauls and such, and is it really worth trying to reinvent the wheel again when there are a lot of other things to work on with the game. I mean the skills system already more or less works, the officer system already more or less works, but there are a lot more directions the game can go in in terms of expanding on the story, creating different endgame enemies, etc. And of course even if it does get put in, then players would find new problems to complain about with it, etc., so it's not like it'll solve everything.

Compared to Vanshilar's suggestion, I think each officer having 1 skill is better than giving them 2 because it would solve a lot of potential frustration with skills being bundled together that you don't want on the same ship.

Oh I think of it as officers with 1 or 2 (with maybe the rare ones in the sector having 3) skills more to differentiate between them (i.e. increase the variety of officers that you can get, rather than just 14), and also to help reduce how many officers the player would need. And so yes if a ship can for example have 4 officers, in theory it could have up to 8 of the perfect set of skills if you got lucky with that, but in practice it'd be more like 5 or 6 skills, similar to the current setup. (Skills wouldn't stack, i.e. if two officers on a ship have same skill, it would only count once, so yes the second one would be redundant.) How easy it is to find the perfect set would just depend on how often you could get them; I would think it's something along the lines of after each (significant) battle, you get 1 or 2 that you can pick up, or something. Ones that the player don't want simply get discarded, so it's no big deal that way. So it's something that takes a long time to get the "perfect" set, but you should be able to get "pretty good" sets without too much difficulty, especially since you can mix and match them and you can improve on each ship piecemeal.

I never considered putting officers on the player flagship, but it would make perfect sense to be able to jam them in there and all their skills get treated as elite while the player is present (an idea which I find both thematically and mechanically satisfying). Plus the "captain" (now second-in-command) could determine your flagship's personality during autopilot.

Yeah to me it nicely ties to why your flagship can be so powerful (have more skills than other ships, and have more elite skills than other ships). It has nothing to do with your player character personally but is something that the flagship of fleets are simply able to do, by virtue of the admiral commanding the fleet onboard that ship. So in this way, yes the player can have his super ship if he wants (perhaps because the flagship can have one or two officers more than the usual limit), but since that's drawing from the total number of officers allowed in the fleet, then it means there are fewer officers for the other ships. This makes that flagship vs fleet tradeoff much more transparent, whereas right now the flagship vs fleet tradeoff happens more in the skills system, leading to the issues raised.

Also it may be interesting to fight against, since (sufficiently large) enemy fleets will also presumably have a flagship as well. So that flagship essentially serves as the "end boss" of that fleet basically. And of course since [REDACTED] are all elite skills, they're essentially all flagships, but then again, they're also endgame.

Even with 40 officers I think it wouldn't be too hard to make the interface work, they only have 1 skill, so you can shrink down their portrait to about the same size with a name over the top like:

Then stack up 5 of these per row.
Put the personality underneath, dull and grey, while the captain's is bright white to indicate that it is active.

Oh I think the interface would be the easiest part, the officers would just have their portraits and skill icons in a row next to each ship, like the current but just line up the officers for each ship in a row. I'm no good with graphics so can't really draw what I mean. The problem though is some mod or another would want officers to each have 345729 skills which would mess up the whole interface.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

If you went with a hull-size limitation with the max number of officers allowed, you’ve capped the ceiling of the smaller ships. Something like Wolfpack Tactics might bump them up one more officer, but even then, you’ll never see a Frigate with like 8 skills. That’s not necessarily a negative but a consequence of the system.

Well, this kind of works both ways. Currently you can have 10 officers tops, and the most expensive frigate is 15 DP, for a total of 150 total deployment out of 240. Anything you add above that would either suck or require you to spec into Support Doctrine(and even then it would only suck less)

With the "officer pool" idea you could put one on every frigate and field like 25 of them if you want no problem(although realistically the actual officer limit would probably be in the ~20 range)

[Megas]

In old releases, player could solo multiple fleets with any capital or even with Dominator (and Aurora if the enemy did not have a Paragon).  And small ships could solo a mid-sized pirate fleet or taking out a capital.  Today, that seems limited to specific ships (like phase ships) with specific skill choices.  It seems more limited now.

Isn't that a good thing? Being able to solo entire fleets with just one ship is a testament of bad game balance. It deosn't make sense lore-wise and gameplay-wise. Starsector is not a zombie shooter, where enemies are weaker by design (or is it?). I would much prefer being surrounded by competent allies and enemies.

Depends how the game is designed.  In Starsector, the enemy has unlimited resources, and it can wear the player down through attrition.  Any casualties the enemy takes can be casually shrugged off and replaced at no cost.  For the player, combat rewards are not enough to replace a major ship (or any ship early in the game).  Losing ships at all is effectively a loss - a pyrrhic victory at best, unless it is something like a cheap small ship in a 300k+ bounty.  Also, with the lack of skill points, if player does not boost the fleet, the flagship has to pick up the slack when the enemy has a better fleet than him.  Today, the flagship does not have significantly greater skill power than a high-level officer (6/2+ human or alpha core), assuming player took some Combat.  If the game is hard enough that losing half the fleet is the expected outcome, then either rewards need to be much higher or Restore needs to be almost free.

If a fleet is mandatory, then it seems like Leadership is mandatory, and that looks that way for most builds I see posted.  Right now, Leadership today appears to be the Loadout Design of old - you need it for critical fleet buffs, officers, and BotB (unless going for Support Doctrine).  You can still get a good flagship with a good fleet, but because you have limited fleet points, something needs to be dumped, and Industry is the obvious or least painful choice.  If player wants high Industry and enough skill power in his flagship through Combat, well... he has to dump either Leadership or Technology (or sacrifice capstones from both), which will be painful, and the fleet will be weaker than it should be.

In the old days with skills, your fleet was limited by Fleet Points or Logistics, and you started with enough to use five frigates or one cruiser, more than that and your fleet took penalties.  Also, in the Logistics releases, crew counted toward DP limit.  Back then, Combat had to be overpowered to allow no Leadership fleets to work.  It worked too well for the combat side, or rather, losing ships was even more painful in the old days because ships and weapons were rarer, and there was no guaranteed recovery of ships and weapons like today.  In some old releases, high-tier weapons like plasma cannon, tachyon lances, and some needlers were almost as rare as Omega weapons, and few ships were very rare (too rare in shops and enemy fleets).  Because combat skills were much more powerful back then, taking a loss was almost guaranteed from empowered Harpoon spam the moment a ship's flux level got too high.  The only weapons that were common back then were what was found in Open Market.  Also, buying anything from Black Market at all rose suspicion regardless of transponder, and triggered investigation that caused massive rep loss if found guilty - all to get a few elite weapons that were nearly impossible to find anywhere else.

Because Ordos hunting demands optimized officers for their chosen ships and loadouts, building toward them effectively locks your choices in and changing officers when the fleet is changed is way too tedious and costly.  It is almost as bad as no respec in the old days.  Also, if your avatar has combat skills, it too needs to adapt with the ship, and changing skills is too costly since respec has no refund, although at least it might be better than replacing an officer.  If I want to pilot a phase ship, I definitely want Phase Coil Tuning and elite Field Modulation.  If I pilot a frigate, I want Wolfpack Tactics.  If I pilot a carrier, I want Carrier Group so rate does not fall to 30% so fast.

There's a big difference between having 8 officers that level up over time, and having 40 officers that are static and unchanging. The latter has great flexibility in gameplay, but the former allows you to get attached to your officers and watch them grow over the course of a playthrough. At least, you could get attached *in theory,* but in practice I don't see anyone treat them as much more than bundles of stat boosts with a funny name.

In Starsector, the real characters or party members are the ships, at least for me.  Officers are the ships' equipment.  It is like Transformers (at least the cartoon ones).  They make toys for the robots, not the humans.  You do not get attached to the humans, you get attached to Optimus Prime, Bubblebee, Megatron, or Starscream.

[Phenir]

Losing ships at all is effectively a loss - a pyrrhic victory at best, unless it is something like a cheap small ship in a 300k+ bounty.  Also, with the lack of skill points, if player does not boost the fleet, the flagship has to pick up the slack when the enemy has a better fleet than him.  Today, the flagship does not have significantly greater skill power than a high-level officer (6/2+ human or alpha core), assuming player took some Combat.  If the game is hard enough that losing half the fleet is the expected outcome, then either rewards need to be much higher or Restore needs to be almost free.

I don't get this part at all. If you deploy a full 240 dp, that's 240 supplies to recover, assuming no ship losses or running past ppt, right? So that's around 24000 credits. Easily covered by the bounty. If you lose a paragon (and recover it, you definitely put an smod or officer on it right?) that's another 25500 credits (assuming 85% max CR, it cost 255 supplies to get back to max CR). So tell, how is losing this paragon in that 300k bounty a net loss? Even counting logistics, if it took you a month to get there and back, that's maybe around another 25k credits from supply, like 20k from crew, and around 30k for officer payroll(I am not even going to get into fuel because 1) it's super cheap and 2) it's extremely variable thanks to slipstreams and gates). So while it "cost" you around 130k to take on the bounty, you got 300k + whatever dropped. You made almost twice what you spent and that overhead carries over to any other nearby bounties. Even if you lost several paragons, like up to 7, which you can't field all at once anyway lmao, you'd STILL make profit albeit a very slim amount. You'd only be losing profit if you lost several low tech capitals since that's a ton of crew loss and ironically they cost more supply to recover to full CR. Although even that is questionable if you were specced into industry so recover costs are essentially halved.
I guess the issue here is "losing half the fleet". Who is losing half their fleet? Where is it said to expect to lose half your fleet? I think if you are losing that many ships, it is not the skill system's fault. It's your fault, either for not piloting well enough or not commanding or building your fleet well enough or picking fights way above your fleet's power level, especially against basic fights like bounties where even skill-less player should win just from player advantage (human piloting/commanding and smods).

[Megas]

A new battleship costs around 500k, maybe a bit less if built yourself.  Restoring costs more than that.  No public bounty offers that much, they top at around 350k.

As for whatever commodities that drop, I consider it offsetting travel and repair expenses for the round trip to the bounty and other targets of opportunity and back home.  I have not crunched the numbers closely to see if that wild guess is really the case.  I do burn a lot of fuel and supplies traveling around the sector with a near endgame-sized fleet once I expect to encounter similarly sized opponents (and/or if I want to scare away small fleets when raiding worlds).  I generally do not sell weapons, unless they are the two or three nearly useless ones like Thumper or DLMG.

I guess the issue here is "losing half the fleet". Who is losing half their fleet? Where is it said to expect to lose half your fleet? I think if you are losing that many ships, it is not the skill system's fault. It's your fault, either for not piloting well enough or not commanding or building your fleet well enough or picking fights way above your fleet's power level, especially against basic fights like bounties where even skill-less player should win just from player advantage (human piloting/commanding and smods).

I am talking about how Starsector is designed.  If the game seems easy because player with a decent fleet generally does not lose ships, that is not a problem because the rewards are not enough to replace significant casualties.  If the difficultly was raised higher to make it more challenging or plausible (like say maybe a true mirror match fully on autopilot), high enough that losing half of your fleet was the likely outcome if it was not hyper-optimized, then the smart thing to do would be to avoid combat altogether, if possible, to avoid losing money (because rewards are not good enough to cover the cost) and make progress through low-risk trade or other underhanded means.

[Phenir]

A new battleship costs around 500k, maybe a bit less if built yourself.  Restoring costs more than that.  No public bounty offers that much, they top at around 350k.

Well, I know just the skill that saves you that 500k lol. And you could also just not restore it and keep using it.