Are attribute spreads of conscripted crew intended?

[kaeroku]

Conscripting has known intended drawbacks: a morale penalty when initially conscripted and bad traits. These can be exempted with a couple of different Talents.

However, the attribute spread of conscripts is always low. This seems to ignore era, "home planet" stat influences, etc., and leaves conscripts in the unfortunate position of *never* being better than an equally leveled spice hall recruit. 

I have tested this enough to *strongly suspect* it's not simply a function of bad rolls on conscripts, but don't have the thousands of data points I'd need to demonstrate this certainly. Hence the title: is it intended? And hopefully someone with access to the full source code can fact check that it is in fact working as intended. 

Expected: conscripted crew without a talent will be higher level than you can get at a spice hall, but have lower morale at the start and inherent negative traits. With a talent, downsides should be negated and they should be roughly equivalent to a leveled spice hall recruit

Actual: conscripted crew without a talent are higher level than you can get at a spice hall, and have lower morale at the start and inherent negative traits. With a talent, *those specific* downsides are negated, but their attribute spread are pretty universally inferior to what you would get with a starting recruit in a spice hall. This appears to be an unintended downside based on the in-game description.

Suggested: either

a) fix conscripting mechanics to check their home planet, apply appropriate era & planet modifiers to attributes
-or-
b) update in game description to reflect an inherent permanent attribute penalty which ignores talents

[Cory Trese]

Thanks for the feedback. Keep in mind you cannot recruit Officers!

In general, there is nothing here to fix. This is all part of a battle tested design, honed over years and confirmed with millions of data points.

Perhaps in the next game we might do something different. I suspect we might!

For anyone else who's looking at the numbers, the following facts are true:

- The game uses a home planet system for conscripted crew generation
- This is part of the design of the game and is carefully balanced in the math

[kaeroku]

Hi Cory. Thanks for the response! It's good to know it is working as intended. I posted here rather than suggestions because the numbers didn't appear to add up.

Can you please confirm specifically that conscripts & spice recruits from the same world have their attributes generated in the same way & should therefore have, on average, roughly equal attribute spreads? (assuming a conscription talent is used to mitigate the downsides for the recruit?)

I'm asking because your fact statements don't eliminate the possibility that conscripts are using a system that considers home planets which is still different from the system used to generate other recruits, and, since no attributes are listed in the downsides of conscripts it's weird that the numbers for attributes which typically don't change much over the lifetime of a crew member (outside of traits, really,) don't match up. Specifics are really helpful. Thank you again!

[Cory Trese]

Sept 18, 2021 22:28:20 GMT -5 kaeroku said:

Can you please confirm specifically that conscripts & spice recruits from the same world have their attributes generated in the same way & should therefore have, on average, roughly equal attribute spreads? (assuming a conscription talent is used to mitigate the downsides for the recruit?)

Attributes are certainly one of the downsides of conscripted crew. (Note: You can't conscript Officers.)

Conscripts & spice recruits from the same world will NOT have the same average attributes.

Conscripted Crew will (on average) be lower. Exceptions, of course, exist.

[kaeroku]

Ok, thank you! That clears it up. I'll add to wiki so at least that info exists somewhere; this answer absolutely explains the discrepancy I was seeing!