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[Gothars]

They could get big related skill bonuses to keep them attractive (and more interesting) choices.

That sounds really neat - basically, extra skills that only officers get. I've been mulling over something like that for (eventual, potential) staff officers; my main concern there is that it's yet more extra content, where there's already quite a lot of it still to add.

I also wonder if the player wouldn't wonder why *they* can't get those; might feel like "OP bonus to prop up AI" even when not intended as such.

You could also give skill bonuses within the existing system. Just give an officer with a "negative" behavioral trait an additional (normal) skill. For example, a paranoid officer could automatically gain a level in Evasive Action with every second level up, in addition to the normal skill upgrade path. Of course Evasive Action would than have to be taken out of the normal skill pool for this officer.

Custom officer skills are of course more interesting, but, yeah, the downsides. A few rare ones would be nice.


Oh, another idea!
I assume any hull mod bonuses associated with a skill would not apply to officers (like FMR/ECCM for Missile Specialization). How about enabling officers to apply specific hull mods to the ship they command, as a form of skill bonus? Could even be worth it as part of the normal upgrade path, unrelated to behavior compensation. A timid officers might have a chance to enable the Reinforced Bulkheads or Extended Shields hullmod.
Would be a great way to put hullmods that are far from the player character's skill path on single, specialized ships. Or, for new players, try the effect of a hullmod with an officer before dedicating the character to a upgrade path direction.



I like BillyRuebens idea about shared loot, btw.

[planeswalker]

Hi Alex, long time lurker here, firstly thanks for the update, I guess you are starting to 'flesh' things out for Starfarer now since as you said, most of the basic mechanics are getting done.

I would like to add 2 suggestions:

1. Would it possible to change the names and portraits of officers you recruit (even the future planned staff ones)

2. Or for a higher credit cost (whatever needed to recruit basic officers) you can create 'Custom' Officers, with the same rules as the normal ones but you get to pick their initial skill, psychology (the mentioned timid etc ), in addition to their portraits and names.

The reason for the above suggestions is to add abit of flavour for the player to use if they wish, to the game. I sometimes play in a strange way, so in games where you can customise whatever you play for example X-Com or the more recent Pillars of eternity, you can add your RL friends names to them.
It does being abit of tension and laughs (for example when your sniper named after a friend 1 shots a Muton on full health, only to be taken out by a sectoid who got a crit hit).

I think they won't take much extra coding (I hope) but adding the option to customise these officers would be a appreciated touch.

Thanks

[CrashToDesktop]

I don't think there's going to be any officer customization in the game - as a person, I don't think I'd like my Captain to be changing my name or my appearance, let alone both together. Just won't fit in, at least in my mind.

Although I'm sure there'd going to be mods that allow you to do that, so look onto that.

[Megas]

If officers demand too much payment, I will fight as before, either alone or with nameless disposable heroes, and leave officers alone to rot.

I like that an Avoid order will be added.

[Tartiflette]

I like the idea of shared combat reward with your officers. I can definitively see something like 5% of the loot's money and goods getting claimed by each officers. Same for the bounties. Having 10 officers would mean getting only 50% of the money and force the player to balance their number, unless he really want to go after high level bounties. On the other hand, maybe a captained ship could cost less to deploy, as the officers should participate in the expenses too.

Maybe we can imagine two types of contracts: the monthly salary, or the loot share... And rookies officers would generally ask for a salary (cheaper in the long run but you have to level them up), while experienced ones would favor various shares of loot. Given how powerful skills are, plus with the benefit of the personality, I'm sure they will massively boost their ship and be worth it even if the price is high.

[Alex]

I do use the tags, quite often as it's a good way to find related topics without resorting to google search. When I read a new article I like to read similar ones that may have been written earlier. Articles are rad.

I.e. in this article I used them to try to find an older article you wrote about captain personalities: http://fractalsoftworks.com/2011/08/03/captain-personalities-fleet-control-update/

Unfortunately it didn't work, as like you said consistency stuff. But in theory it would work!

Ah, yeah, that's pretty neat - forgot about that one! Going to give tagging more thought in the future.

So are there any real downsides to officers yet? Or should I immediately place one in every one of my ship as fast as possible?

It would be neat to see a MAJOR downside to officers, such as splitting all "loot" with your officers (exp, credits, after battle scrap, ect). That way there is a little bit of "is it worth it?" before spamming every ship with officers. I'd rather there not just be a simple "pay me X credits every week", because those become meaningless so quickly in games.

No downsides for the moment - well, aside from any potential personality/loadout mismatches. I get what you're saying, though, and it makes sense. As far as credits, though, I think the current state of affairs might be misleading; I don't think they *have* to become meaningless. (M&B is a good example where you're never really swimming in gold, no matter how well you're doing.)

Although with industry, you'd probably reach a point where if you're building capital ships, paying officers would hardly be on your radar. Then again, the importance of drops would go down at that point, too - credits might be more important/easier to make really expensive, since no-one said the amount that high-level officers charge for their services had to be "reasonable". It's a seller's market!

Oh, another idea!
I assume any hull mod bonuses associated with a skill would not apply to officers (like FMR/ECCM for Missile Specialization). How about enabling officers to apply specific hull mods to the ship they command, as a form of skill bonus? Could even be worth it as part of the normal upgrade path, unrelated to behavior compensation. A timid officers might have a chance to enable the Reinforced Bulkheads or Extended Shields hullmod.
Would be a great way to put hullmods that are far from the player character's skill path on single, specialized ships. Or, for new players, try the effect of a hullmod with an officer before dedicating the character to a upgrade path direction.

Hmm - that could get messy when combined with reassigning the officer to another ship. It'd also make some officer benefits (i.e. those hullmods) obsolete as you level up and get them for yourself. All in all, I'm thinking about handling hullmods in a different way altogether, but that's a ways off

Spoiler

Hi Alex, long time lurker here, firstly thanks for the update, I guess you are starting to 'flesh' things out for Starfarer now since as you said, most of the basic mechanics are getting done.

I would like to add 2 suggestions:

1. Would it possible to change the names and portraits of officers you recruit (even the future planned staff ones)

2. Or for a higher credit cost (whatever needed to recruit basic officers) you can create 'Custom' Officers, with the same rules as the normal ones but you get to pick their initial skill, psychology (the mentioned timid etc ), in addition to their portraits and names.

The reason for the above suggestions is to add abit of flavour for the player to use if they wish, to the game. I sometimes play in a strange way, so in games where you can customise whatever you play for example X-Com or the more recent Pillars of eternity, you can add your RL friends names to them.
It does being abit of tension and laughs (for example when your sniper named after a friend 1 shots a Muton on full health, only to be taken out by a sectoid who got a crit hit).

I think they won't take much extra coding (I hope) but adding the option to customise these officers would be a appreciated touch.

Thanks

[close]

Hi! In all honesty, I don't really see doing that. It goes against the grain of officers being "actual people"; if anything, I'd prefer to go the other way and enhance that rather than make them something the player has minute control over creating.

If officers demand too much payment, I will fight as before, either alone or with nameless disposable heroes, and leave officers alone to rot.

That's kind of the definition of "too much", isn't it? The key would be balancing the payment amount so that it's worth it or not depending on your specific usage.

I like the idea of shared combat reward with your officers. I can definitively see something like 5% of the loot's money and goods getting claimed by each officers. Same for the bounties. Having 10 officers would mean getting only 50% of the money and force the player to balance their number, unless he really want to go after high level bounties. On the other hand, maybe a captained ship could cost less to deploy, as the officers should participate in the expenses too.

Maybe we can imagine two types of contracts: the monthly salary, or the loot share... And rookies officers would generally ask for a salary (cheaper in the long run but you have to level them up), while experienced ones would favor various shares of loot. Given how powerful skills are, plus with the benefit of the personality, I'm sure they will massively boost their ship and be worth it even if the price is high.

It's an interesting idea, but I think that might be getting a bit too involved I can certainly see making it deeper, but I think for this kind of thing, it's important for it to combine well with other features. For example, if there are monthly expenses, then a monthly salary for officers fits right in, and does the job of making officers expensive without a lot of dev or design overhead. A loot sharing mechanic, on the other hand, sounds like it'd be specific to officers, and thus considerably more work on all fronts - mechanics, UI design, explaining it to the player.

This is a large part of the reason I'm filling campaign mechanics in with a fairly broad stroke at this point. Once more of them are in place, it'll become more clear how to best fill them out. (I mean, look at officers - that came together so quickly because all the surrounding pieces pretty much dictated the shape officers needed to take.)

[SafariJohn]

Although I don't think it fits Starsector, the booty-splitting system in Sid Meier's Pirates springs to mind from this discussion.

[Cycerin]

Awesome surprise. It was what I hoped the secret was.

All I'll say is that I would like to see a small risk of Officers not ejecting from an exploding ship. Ideally you get attached to these people like your squad in X-COM and the risk of losing them and the stories that result from it should also be there, simply because it makes you care to actually retreat ships and try to back them up instead of just treating them like pawns.

The combination of personality reflected in AI and combat skill bonuses is a good way to get you to give a crap bout your officers - I also suggest a list of randomly generated quirks inherent to each officer, not big ones but little cool things that are inherent to each officer and can help at any combat role. Maybe they could scale too, youd occasionally be asked if you wanted to "invest" in the quirk as it'd be listed there with the skills. Just very quick brainstorming:

Hard-assed - Less crew loss and overload time for affected ship
Itano Fan - More trigger happy with missiles, missiles do a little more damage
Right Hand Man - Bonus to damage done and aim accuracy when close to the flagship
Applied Cowardice - Almost always ejects succesfully, engines repair twice as fast
We Put our Faith in Blast Hardcheese - Ship is better at boarding action
Death Wish - More likely to drop shields and slug it out instead of backing off, bonus to damage done

etc. Maybe they'd by design have to be too lightweight to actually matter, maybe there arent enough hooks to affect the AI behavior with, so theyd end up as a list of player skill-type bonuses, but man I love the idea.

[Uomoz]

The combination of personality reflected in AI and combat skill bonuses is a good way to get you to give a crap bout your officers - I also suggest a list of randomly generated quirks inherent to each officer, not big ones but little cool things that are inherent to each officer and can help at any combat role. Maybe they could scale too, youd occasionally be asked if you wanted to "invest" in the quirk as it'd be listed there with the skills.

This, so much this. I love the implementation of random traits that's in Darkest Dungeon for example, half of them are positive, half negative (still fun) and you get to fix/change some of them spending resources. Ideally I'd want an officer to make me think *oh John is overkilling lashers as usual, well at least he's a beast with those missile stats* instead of *nice, John's lasher is 13% more combat effective*.

[HELMUT]

Eh, that's funny i also thought about Darkest Dungeon when i read Cycerin's idea. Not sure if the Lasher-phobia thing in particular is possible to code but yeah, personality quirks could be fun. At least something more than just a standard (and a bit bland) stats buff.

[bills6693]

I also think that more varied personalities would help here, they don't even have to be advantageous.

How about a paranoid officer who likes to shoot empty space, a choleric one who doesn't stop shooting at disabled ships, or a prideful one who doesn't back away from superior forces? They could get big related skill bonuses to keep them attractive (and more interesting) choices. You could implement that as independent (rare?) personality traits or as sub-traits to the main ones (aggressive-prideful, aggressive-paranoid etc.). 

I do like the idea of giving tradeoffs for bad behaviors, though that also has some potential downsides - if the player "gets" it, it could be great. If not, it could be "jeez look at this broken AI".

On the topic of the player 'getting it', I think there's a really easy UI answer for that. Basically an officers traits are displayed like pictures with tooltips (just like all the other thumbnails) when looking at them. When seeing the summary written it might just say 'proud' but when you read the tooltip for what proud means, it says:

This officer is too proud (alrhough his crew sometimes say stupid) to give in to any foe.
His ship will not back off or retreat, even in the face of overwhelming forces.
Once in combat, can't be ordered to move away or withdraw.
Gains 20% shield, armour and hull strength.
Gains 50% peak performance time, and CR reduces at 50% speed.

So on the surface it just says 'proud', no buffs shown. On the tooltip it tells you, and this links it all together.


Furthurmore, I really like the idea of the officers having these 'personalities' more than the current ones. The current ones are rather generic - basically 'aggressive, balanced, defensive, non-combatant' under some new names. These should be 'standing orders' toucan give to any ship, with or without an officer. The officer spices it up by having these quite different traits that are much more unique, have more personality, and interact with the player a lot more (through the giving/taking of orders maybe). Some extra ideas:

Singleminded: will follow through with an order with no care for anything else, until it has been completed. Can't be given a new order until the last one is done.
Opportunistic: orders are more a 'recommendation' for this officer. Will change their mind if something better pops up.
Devoted: will refuse to go further than 1000m {balance} from the player. If they find themselves further away, will immediately return. Can only deploy at the same time as player ship, and will always deploy with it
Bezerk: once they spot an enemy ship, they'll engage and become deaf to any orders (unlike proud, who will still receive target preference etc)
Frightful: will keep away from bigger ships, even if that means disobeying orders. Will engage at range, if out of their range.

These are just to give a taste : the key thing is that it's always s bit unique, a bit of a handicap but you get appropriate buffs too, making them quite specialised. It's future content of course but I think it would do much better at giving officers personality, and something unique. Of course you'd probably have these as extremes (maybe 25% of the time?)

Just my personal humble opinion, I understand the current limits.

[Zaphide]

The combination of personality reflected in AI and combat skill bonuses is a good way to get you to give a crap bout your officers - I also suggest a list of randomly generated quirks inherent to each officer, not big ones but little cool things that are inherent to each officer and can help at any combat role. Maybe they could scale too, youd occasionally be asked if you wanted to "invest" in the quirk as it'd be listed there with the skills.

This, so much this. I love the implementation of random traits that's in Darkest Dungeon for example, half of them are positive, half negative (still fun) and you get to fix/change some of them spending resources. Ideally I'd want an officer to make me think *oh John is overkilling lashers as usual, well at least he's a beast with those missile stats* instead of *nice, John's lasher is 13% more combat effective*.

Came to post pretty much exactly this

Perhaps if an officers ship is disabled, they gain temporary/permanent quirks (i.e. if they are in a frigate that is disabled/destroyed, they decide they want to pilot something bigger and refuse to pilot anything smaller than a cruiser).

Perhaps quirks can be removed/altered with a certain amount of shore leave

[Pushover]

I feel like negative quirks like Darkest Dungeon don't fit Starsector. We don't have things like Crew Morale, your crew doesn't seem to care if you are running them through a meat grinder, suffering 10% casualties every engagement, with a roughly weekly engagement. Life expectancy is probably under 3 months under those conditions, I have to wonder why the crew is so willing to join you at that point. From there, why should their commanders be so fearful when they don't die, and the people under them go into a meat grinder, yet still perform their jobs.

[Alex]

In lieu of detailed replies to everyone saying similar things, I'll just say instead that I totally get the appeal of adding something unique to each officer

It's less clear exactly what shape that will need to take, though, so I think it makes sense to leave it be for the moment, implement a bunch of other features that are more impactful for the time spent, and perhaps get back around to it either when it's a good opportunity to work it in, or when it is the most impactful thing to work on.

[nomadic_leader]

Looking forward to trying these new features, it sounds fun.

On the face of it I agree with people saying that fighters should get officers too (per wing basis); fighters are a bit dull because you cannot customize/personalize them in the way you can other SS fleet assets.

I also think officers should die if their ship dies. Why:

If they don't die, this happens: A player gets the officers they want, levels them to perfection, and keeps them forever.

If they can die, this happens: They occasionally lose beloved officers, and have to replace them with new ones. This keeps things fresh, and it adds an element of jeapordy for high level players, who by that time are so powerful and wealthy that they can easily replace other losses. Engagement/combat becomes boring when you have nothing significant to lose.

It also adds an element of 'humanity' which is appealing to a lot of players. Losing a dear old officer would most likely generate an emotional response. Bungie made an RTS before halo called myth, which had units with personalized names that leveled up with each kill. Losing a skilled veteran really meant something in that game. I'm sure there are other examples.