Talent Progression - improved?

[ChocoCrowbar]

Feb 25, 2017 22:47:52 GMT -5 athios said:

I am curious what you are all replacing starting officers with? To gain what? If just talents, isn't it easier to re-roll your starting crew?

I take into account their extra skill points when choosing who to give specialized jobs.

For example, I like it if my doctor has a boost in Doctor or Commander.

My bounty hunter needs to be a soldier, but it's a big plus if he has some extra tactics or evasion.

I love it when my spy has extra Stealth, since it's very hard to come by. Plus being a Tech lets him take advantage of the electronics that the Spy and Exo-Scout give him. So I focus on finding a Tech with extra Stealth to promote.

And sometimes, other crew members are better than my officers, or they have what I need.

[athios]

Yeah, I understand wanting Evasion and Stealth for fighters.

What I don't understand is why bother going the route of having ship op "specialists". A pair of Stealthy Spy + Doctery Doctor, is exactly the same as a Doctery Spy + Stealthy Doctor, because all the officer skills are pooled anyway. Is there actually any benefit to focusing skills on a single character? It feels risky to me, since losing that one person means that entire branch of skill tree is wiped out.

Hmm... On further thought, I guess there are Talents that have further bonuses based on skill levels...

[grävling]

I've been giving this some more thought. In the days when ship ops and fighters couldn't support each other very much at all, it made sense to split your initial officer cadre between both sorts, with more ship op officers. The captain could get more use out of a skill pool shared with other ship op sorts, then with other fighters, unless the captain was an extremely combat-focused creature indeed.

Now that this isolation is no more, I believe that combat sorts are every bit as helpful in ship pool sharing as ship op sorts. This may imply that the starting officers the game gives you should have 1 more combat sort in the mix and 1 fewer ship op sort.

[MintDragon]

After a weekend of trying to level my Explorer captain, it was nice leveling to Job #5 and getting new talents. With my 28 person crew, I seem to have a lot of 'Level 1' overlap, but I'm trying to concentrate them on passing 'xyz' tests. The variety in reaching higher levels is great, and with further travels, battle, explorations with the missions, the experience seems to be accelerating a bit. I'm sure we'll need some balancing at some point, but the talent progression is very nice. Good job guys.

[fallen]

Thank you!