Merchant Capt. skills vs Ship Status skills question

[John Robinson]

Question: In Test 2.  Why does the Captain display Negotiate 2(12) instead of 2(17) ?

Test 1: Dismissed All crew.

Template added +10 Negotiate, +5 Command.

Basic difficulty, manually assign, job=E,

Merchant Skills = Negotiate, Command, Tactics.

Displayed:

Captain		Ship
Negotiate	2(12)	Negotiate	2[+10]
Command	1(6)	Command	1[+5]
Tactics	1	Tactics	1[+0]

Test 2:
Identical setup.

Kept one crew with a 0[5] Negotiate, promoted to Officer.

Displayed:

Captain		Ship
Negotiate	2(12)	Negotiate	2[+15]
Command	1(6)	Command	1[+5]
Tactics	1	Tactics	1

[bobc]

The Captain's status page will only show his skills, whereas the ship status is showing all effective skills.
Your Captain has 2pt job skill and 10pt bonus, so his personnal total is 12
The effective ship pool is 2pt job skill and 15pt bonus (10 from Captain & 5 from officer) for a pool total of 17.
If you give your new officer the Merchant job his character status will read something like 2[7] while the ship pool will be 4[+15]

[John Robinson]

bobc

Thanks. So let's run with this a little further.

I have a level(20) Captain with 17(23) Negotiate. The ship is 24[+6] Negotiate.

On missions I'll be asked to pass a test, for example
"do you want to use your Captain's Negotiation + Charisma."

I'm wondering about;
a.) Will the test be rolled against the Captain's or Ship's negotiation skill + Charisma?  By the way my Captain's Charisma = 28 not 23, so I'm not sure what is really being displayed here.

b.) Is Negotiation Strong dice, and Charisma standard dice used for the test.

c.) If the test is made against the Captain's Negotiation + Charisma.  Under what conditions does ship Negotiation come into play, why does it matter?

What are your thoughts?  It always helps to kick around a problem with you.

[bobc]

Hi John Robinson this game is a bit of a monster to get your head around isn't it!  I've been taking a BF break so that I can come back with fresh eyes, and stomping some xeno can be good to ease frustrations.

Starting off looking at your Captain's stats, he has 17 job pts and 6 bonus giving the 17[23] display. His Charisma should show as 28 in the attribute section above. The ship pool is 24[6], which is your Captain's 17/6 and 7pts from whomever else has a job that provides negotiate.

My understanding of mission tests (from experience and various threads) is that,

a) The test is rolled against the ship pool for skill.  The debug line should be showing 30 negotiate skill here.  The test is rolled against half of the captain's attribute, so the debug line should be showing 14 charisma here.

b) The skill is strong dice and the attribute is standard dice.

c) The skill test is against the ship pool.

The characters individual skill pools are often used with talents, like where your negotiate skill can be used to increase payment when accepting missions.

[John Robinson]

bobc

Dead on with the first comment. I have a Diplomat officer with 7 negotiate. Stay with me, I want to examine another example, to make sure it's nailed down.

My Captain is a Merchant / Doctor / Diplomat.  He has a Doctor / Diplomat Officer.  What do you make of this?

Ship Doctor Skill	17	(+12)
Captain Doctor Skill	6	(8)
Officer Doctor	11	(16)

The ship's 17 makes sense but the (+12) does not.

[grävling]

May 21, 2017 11:35:45 GMT -5 John Robinson said:

bobc

Thanks. So let's run with this a little further.

I have a level(20) Captain with 17(23) Negotiate. The ship is 24[+6] Negotiate.

On missions I'll be asked to pass a test, for example
"do you want to use your Captain's Negotiation + Charisma."

I'm wondering about;
a.) Will the test be rolled against the Captain's or Ship's negotiation skill + Charisma?  By the way my Captain's Charisma = 28 not 23, so I'm not sure what is really being displayed here.

b.) Is Negotiation Strong dice, and Charisma standard dice used for the test.

c.) If the test is made against the Captain's Negotiation + Charisma.  Under what conditions does ship Negotiation come into play, why does it matter?

What are your thoughts?  It always helps to kick around a problem with you.

You have a level 20 Captain. 17(23) is Negotiate. Negotiate is not Charisma, so it is perfectly fine that your captain has Negotiate and Charisma scores that are different. This tells me that you gave your captain 6 points in Negotiate when you created him, because 23 -17 is 6. You have since stuffed 17 points of Negotiate into him via levelling jobs.

"do you want to use your Captain's Negotiation + Charisma."
You are going to use Your Ship Pool Negotiate as strong dice.

Your Ship Pool is 24[+6] = 30. You have 24 points that you have put into your captain, officer, and crew as part of training them. They went up in levels in a job that gives out Negotiation points to the tune of 24 points, counting the start number for jobs such as Diplomat which start with some. You have 6 points which come from your captain and officers only. If you look at them you will find that they have stats like: 0 [2] Negotiate. This is an officer whose jobs don't provide Negotiate, but who happened to be born with the gift of the gab. As an officer, he contributes 2 extra points to your pool. You might have another one with stats 9 [15] Negotiate. (I have one such.) This is my senior Diplomat Officer. He's a Level 9 Diplomat, and he has 9 points of Negotiate from his job training. But he has 6 more points because he was special. So he is contributing 24 points of Negotiate to my ship pool. If you look at all your officers, and sum the points they get out of being special and not out of job training, your sum should be 6.

You are going to use your Captain's Charisma/2 as weak dice. So 14 for you.

The rule that I am using is -- you never, ever use a captain's Skill in a test, where you get to pick which skill and which attribute. When the game asks about a Skill it wants the pool. And it wants them to make strong dice. When the game asks about an Attribute, it only wants the captain's, it never wants the pool. Furthermore, it will immediately divide your captain's attribute by 2 and use that as the number of weak dice you get.

The game rounds down, so don't give your captain an odd number of points in any attribute. It's better to give him one attribute valued at 14 and another at 16 rather than 2 attributes at 15. 2 at 15 is the same as 2 at 14.

.........

I think things would be better worded as:

Do you want to use your Ship's Negotiation + Your Captain's Charisma or Your Combined Negotiation or something other than 'Your Captain's' Negotation. Because this is what is confusing you.

The other confusing bit is that when you are looking at the ship, and you get a figure like 24[+6] Negotiate, you need to add the two together to find out what the pool is. But when you look at a crew member who has a figure 9[15], 9 is the pool if the crew is not an officer, and 15 is the pool if the crew is.

If it were me to decide, I would scrap the entire idea of displaying how many points are in officer specials in the ship display. I would just show the pool total. It's not a piece of information I find useful, and it would be nice to not have to add the two to find out how large the pool is.

And the main thing it would do is not have the ships pool and the crew both using the notation X[Y] but where X means the same, but Y means utterly different things. For ship pool X = 'job training' and Y = 'specials' while for crew X = 'job training' and Y = 'job training + specials'

Though if people other than me do find the information in the ship display useful, then I would change the notation to be X:Y so it is very clear that this is not to be interpreted the way that crew Skills are.

[grävling]

John Robinson -- I spent enough time on that last posting that you and bobc managed an exchange before I posted it. So when you read my note, remember that I hadn't read those 2 yet ...

[grävling]


Ship Doctor Skill 17 (+12)
Captain Doctor Skill 6 (8)
Officer Doctor        11 (16)

The ship's 17 makes sense but the (+12) does not.


You have 29 points in Doctor in your ship pool -- 17 + 12

Your Captain has 6 points in Doctor because you trained him that way. He has 8-6 = 2 points built in special because you built him that way in the template.

Your officer doctor has 11 points in doctor because you trained him that way. But he had 16-11 = 5 points of Doctor built in special when you first met him.

Since your ship has 17 points of doctoring from job training, and 6 + 11 is 17, I can conclude that you have no doctors or combat medics as regular crew on your ship, and none of your other officers have had any doctor training. Otherwise the Ship first number would be more than 17. Nobody else's job training is helping you with your Doctor total. It's all in these 2 people.

But your Captain and your Doctor together have 2 + 5 == 7 Specials in Doctor. But your Special count is 12. Go look at all your officers. You will find that there are 5 unaccounted doctor points in there. One of your officers might have a Doctor 0(5) or you might have 2 of them with 0(2) and 0(3) but you have 5 points to account for.

[bobc]

grävling thanks for stepping in, you helped me spot the deliberate error in my earlier post.  The ship pool is the sum of both numbers, so the debug line would show 30 negotiate and 14 charisma (now fixed/edited).

John Robinson concur with gravling re your follow on question; looks like you have an officer or two harbouring bonus doctor skill points.  Good explanation here too, thanks gravling.

[John Robinson]

grävling Excellent posts! Thanks for jumping in. For me this is allot to absorb. I tried for hours last night trying different tests to explain it to myself.
Thought about it all day. I'm still a bit fuzzy, so get ready for some silly follow up questions.

I'm going to spend some more time reading what you and bobc wrote, giving a good study. I'm going out to run some errands, but want to return
to this topic a little later.

Thanks

[grävling]

I added one line to my remedy, as well, you could keep the information if it really is doing some good for some people. I go eat dinner now, back later.

[John Robinson]

grävling & bobc

Added your very valuable help as an entry in ST2 Unofficial player's guide

Gotta run 

[grävling]

Also -- maybe you have a Medical Bay, that piece of equipment will also give you 5 points of 'Medical Rating' -- I think that is Doctor. Fallen says no, they are different things, so its back to look at your officers.

[fallen]

May 21, 2017 13:00:57 GMT -5 grävling said:

When the game asks about a Skill it wants the pool. And it wants them to make strong dice. When the game asks about an Attribute, it only wants the captain's, it never wants the pool. Furthermore, it will immediately divide your captain's attribute by 2 and use that as the number of weak dice you get.

To clarify, if the game asks for an Attribute or Skill in a Trait or Talent, it is always referring to the owner of that Talent.

Outside of that case, see grävling's well put answer.