I’ve been doing a bunch of work adjusting skills in the last couple of days. Since it’s so fresh in my mind, and since there were a lot of changes, it seemed like it might be interesting to talk about the reasoning behind each change – nothing huge, just a sentence or two describing the thought process. This is an extremely unplanned/impromptu post, and it (probably?) won’t be a very long one. [Editor’s note: this turned out to be overly optimistic.] I’ll try to organize things roughly in the order that I made the changes, so you get a little more of a real view into how this type of work goes sometimes.

Overview
First, a bit of a step back. While there are 4 different skill categories, or “aptitudes” (combat, leadership, tech, industry), there are two broad types of skills – ones that boost the ship you’re piloting, and ones that boost… everything else. From other ships in your fleet (usually including your flagship, though not boosting it as much as personal skills), to things like colonies , campaign travel and so on.

Coming at it fresh, it might seem “obvious” that skills that boost your fleet are way better than skills that boost your flagship. Boosting more things is clearly better than boosting fewer things! This is perfectly reasonable, but like many obvious things, it turns out to be wrong – or at least, more complicated than that. Read the rest of this entry »