Crew Combat Avoidance Talents

[MintDragon]

After reading Vzite's comments on discord:lobby (non-Alpha player) late tonight, I started thinking about his desire/dislike of crew combat being too much of the ST:F game (ie. too much like Darkest Dungeon).

His specific comments were "also, not trying to sell ST short or anything. i can comepletely understand if that whole combat system / crew system is a small part of the game. honestly, i hope it kinda is because i am such a big fan of ST1 that if you put too much focus on something like that it would take away from what makes it such an awesome and unique game."

So my thoughts went to the sandbox component of ST:F.  There are talents to avoid ship/ship combat (skip off the void, quick escape), mutiny crew/crew combat (Quell Mutiny), but as far as crew/crew combat (ex. exploring card game), there isn't anything to the equivalent to 'run away' or 'escape' (outside of the tiny ESCAPE button once combat starts).  10+ revisions ago, I tried to incorporate 'escape' into avoiding combat in early game, but only got 'unable to escape' each time. And my fighting group just got massacred each turn, so I eventually just started fighting as my default.  No clue as to the effectiveness of using the ESCAPE button to get out of a scrap (and no equivalent of sharp steering or skip the void to help)

And realized tonight that if I WANTED to play the chicken merchant or diplomatic explorer captain, there really weren't a set of talents where I could surrender or more importantly, escape from crew/crew battle.  Or some other way to influence/increase the chance of the 'escape' button succeeding during combat. There is a button to attempt escape, but no way to influence it's success or make a decision based on the chance of doing so (as far as I know).

Imagine being able to use a spy talent, doctor talent, diplomat talent, charisma test, TELEPATH JOB, ?? that could escape, call a truce, or have some other means of using/stacking such talents to be able to get out of crew/crew battle situations and/or (% RNG chance of course) of influencing the possibility of NOT fighting their way out; by sneaking, buying, charming, running, crying, surrendering, bribing, ?? the aggressors either in the pre-amble or during crew/crew combat.  Requisite hit on rep, health, morale, credits, death chance, or ?? could be repercussions too.

I can certainly think of situations where I'm exploring for a mission, and would prefer to have the option to influence a scavenger crew/crew battle by using talents (or throwing certain crew with such talents into battle) to 'bribe' the scavengers to look elsewhere vs. fighting my crew to the death; let me get back to the card game to try and finish my mission.

I CAN create a set of ship/crew talents that allows me to prevent ship/ship and mutiny crew/crew encounters, but nothing yet as far as crew/pirate, crew/scavenger, crew/?? battles brought on my card game results. (Personally, I'd leave crew/Xeno unavoidable/un-negotiable encounters).

REALLY late night food for thought and 2 cents.  and I'm babbling.


So I thought I'd open the thread.

[contributor]

Good thing to discuss. Balance wise I don't feel like there is overmuch crew combat in STF. Especially if you don't want it. It can happen when exploring, trying to enter a black market or in ship-to-ship combat, but then it has to be sought out. I suppose I can see someone saying I want to be a boarding captain, but I like the auto-resolve of ST RPG because it kept a fast tempo to everything. I don't know how many people that will really be though. The point is that crew combat is fairly avoidable if one wants already and those that want to do a lot of crew combat won't want to run away anyways.

I do heartily agree that there ought to be some talents though for escaping crew combat just like there are for the other "saves" you can get in the game. They might be good things for fighting crew members, because right now they don't have many ways to contribute outside of combat and you really don't need 6 combat talents for each fighter.

[fallen]

Escape Talents seem like a reasonable thing. As contributor said, crew combat is far more avoidable up front. Also, you generally have the option to toss your lower level crew into a massacre if you don't want to risk your upper level folks. Escape is counted as a defeat.

We just had a reviewer play the game for hours and write a multi-page review of it, but they never encountered crew combat once. So, I am not worried that the game is overly focused on crew combat. There are lots of exciting possibilities. We are going to open up boarding a bit with some new exciting Talents from jobs, which might help. Right now, I think lots of first time players will simply never see it.

[Cory Trese]

This is really by design. Everything discussed in the OP is well reasoned, and intentional on our part.

Think about when/how/why you encounter crew combat vs. other mini games. What other players actions could you have taken?

What other outcome potentials existed? Did you have pre-planning avoidance actions?

I disagree that Escape Talents should be a thing. The player in question saw approx. 8 minutes of Crew combat heavy Twitch Stream content and was concerned.

We, as designers, have to be careful not to upset a carefully balanced set of design elements regarding crew combat potential and avoidance action options.

We're trying to improve, but also keep within the design

[Cory Trese]

Oct 4, 2017 4:41:16 GMT -5 contributor said:

I do heartily agree that there ought to be some talents though for escaping crew combat just like there are for the other "saves" you can get in the game. They might be good things for fighting crew members, because right now they don't have many ways to contribute outside of combat and you really don't need 6 combat talents for each fighter.

I agree with this -- we just want to make sure that we put the Talents in the right place.

I think attaching some of them to fighting and semi-fighting crew is a good suggestion.

For example "Take Watch" could be a fighter job talent that eliminates a combat type card from Explorer mini-game.

You could have Talents that blocked boarding combat by buffing the ship's defenses against crew combat.

There are lots of options

[MintDragon]

Oct 4, 2017 13:12:25 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Oct 4, 2017 4:41:16 GMT -5 contributor said:

I do heartily agree that there ought to be some talents though for escaping crew combat just like there are for the other "saves" you can get in the game. They might be good things for fighting crew members, because right now they don't have many ways to contribute outside of combat and you really don't need 6 combat talents for each fighter.

I agree with this -- we just want to make sure that we put the Talents in the right place.

I think attaching some of them to fighting and semi-fighting crew is a good suggestion.

For example "Take Watch" could be a fighter job talent that eliminates a combat type card from Explorer mini-game.

You could have Talents that blocked boarding combat by buffing the ship's defenses against crew combat.

There are lots of options

Great discussion.  And yes, I don't want to upset the applecart on balance.

It's goodness that TB's would consider some options/talent adds.  I have to do homework on the 'Escape' button, honestly never checked the log on what a dice roll does there. After a night's sleep and day of work, I'm kind of zero-ing in on the possibility of influencing the dice roll of the 'Escape' button; and as Cory stated in the previous previous post, the possibility of a talent to affect the card deck (preventing certain negative cards from appearing).  I know during certain games, I have talents, EXO suits and heavily armored ships; not worried at all about the crew damage/ship damage cards at all.

Hoping that a few talents in the right places could help with crew/crew encounters.  And thankful for contributor 's always helpful insight :-)

[Cory Trese]

It sounds like we're going to need to headed a bit in the opposite direction, for the game to be a success.

We might need to make Crew combat a more common thing, because it seems popular. However, if that is the case we will need more Talents related to the trade offs of combat and combat avoidance actions.

This has been an interesting, and useful, discussion. So for that, thank you.

You bring up some good points -- definitely something we're discussing a lot here.

[MintDragon]

Oct 4, 2017 18:40:31 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

It sounds like we're going to need to headed a bit in the opposite direction, for the game to be a success.

We might need to make Crew combat a more common thing, because it seems popular. However, if that is the case we will need more Talents related to the trade offs of combat and combat avoidance actions.

This has been an interesting, and useful, discussion. So for that, thank you.

You bring up some good points -- definitely something we're discussing a lot here.

We might me talking about different things, but.

After my initial 'toe in the water' test of avoiding crew/crew combat, and deciding that it wasn't effective, I was thinking that combat avoidance was the one area that wasn't an option from a talent/skill perspective that wasn't addressed.  Still going to spend time to figure out the dice roll outcomes.  Hope to have some better/more pertinent feedback after trying a couple things out.

Really like the idea of throwing low level crew into combat to intentionally lose (per contributor) to overcome those situations too.

Thanks again for considering everything Cory Trese