Skill checks on Hard and above?

[wanderer]

Is it expected that the ship checks you're rolling against a hundred+ dice in Hard and above before you're finished with Estelle's storyline?

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2287403301

In the screenshot, out of curiosity I hovered over the 3 electronics checks to check what difficulty I was rolling against, and in order:

• 63 strong + 51 standard
  
• 63 strong + 46 standard
  
• 63 strong + 46 standard

If I'm understanding the world difficulty modifier for hard, even if it were 100% instead of 115% this is still in the 90-100 dice range, which is going to be fairly hard for small crewed ships to be able to handle without resorting to getting enough auto-saves lined up. For reference, my crew is rolling 48+11, with 7 E-Techs in the crew.

[drspendlove]

There are a lot of factors that dictate world dice. Some of them are quadrant difficulty, engine safety, game turn, rumors, ship size, and crew member count. But yes, there is also difficulty level.

[fallen]

Looks like a Danger 15 Quadrant with a Pirate Fleet Rumor.

18 years into the game.

Those look like reasonable numbers to me, yes.

[wanderer]

I was still noticing 50+40 rolls in Danger 5 Quadrants later.

What I'm sort of worried is that in general unless you're rolling 200% stats on an otherwise maxed out 6000 mass ship, for the purpose of the deep space travel you're forced to essentially just roll enough auto-saves to ignore the dice rolls, because it will get to the point where crew attrition and the general scaling modifiers make it unreasonable to expect 100+ dice pools all the time. Especially if one failure causes 17 x 38 morale hits across the crew, where basically one failure wipes out a quarter of your crew on the next stop because of desertion.

Which, to get the point, I would question whether forcing players into builds that eliminate scaling issues altogether is healthy for the difficulty system, if only as a matter of early game being the only point of the game where difficulty matters when you don't have enough auto-saves to guarantee safe travel for 10-15 AU inside a system.

[fallen]

I don't think so at all. May players role out to the very late years in small ships. Small ships require more focused builds. Medium ships allow flexibility. Big ships even more so.

Maybe post your ship status so we can advise. You are 18 years into the game, what upgrades have you made to your ship?

200% is a relative value. Are you 200% of 10 or 30?

[wanderer]

Ship build linked below. I believe the only meaningful upgrades I could make at this point are swapping out one of the quarters for Navigation or Pilot bonuses, but with my existing dice pool, I still wouldn't be close to the 100 total dice threshold with regards to piloting and navigation checks.

Note that I did proceed another 9 years anyways since the last screenshot, but basically at this point piloting and navigation are largely dependent on the auto-saves to pass the hundred dice checks. I still run into hundred dice ship ops checks, but at least it's more a 40-50% chance of passing, which is fair at this point considering it is Hard.

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2289383496

I suppose I should be wondering also: what is the scale at which we are considering to be mid-game or late-game? Because in this playthrough, the Second Founding happened a few years ago in game, so it brings into question if the Second Founding is considered late-game.

[koles]

Nov 14, 2020 17:17:56 GMT -5 wanderer said:

For reference, my crew is rolling 48+11, with 7 E-Techs in the crew.

hmm i dont get it (or didnt pay enought attention - fallen please correct me if i'm wrong)
skill checks while flying for electronics, pilot, navigation and ship ops are [skill level] * strong + [skill level] * standard, so you should have in rolls equal numbers x+x like 48+48, not 48+11
different rolls you have in other skill checks (command, doctor etc), or while ship operations (patrolling, exploring etc) when you test half of your capts attributes value.
in ship's operations card games a major role plays also difficult number showed on card, so you can easy bite them with 50 on your sill or loose with 100, depend of card.
beside that some rumors (like radiation storms) drastically increase rolls that we are checked againts.


in the end, you need to upgrade your ship to max to be ahead for max possible time, and even then after some time, difficulty lvl will be higher than your possibility - thats why its a challenge and thats when your save skills comes to play again, but remember that skill saves have only 3 weeks cooldown - so staying for healing, repairing, spicing always give them time to get ready, and if not, then try some ship operations (they take 3-6 days) to give them more time to recool.


and last thing - difficulty levels higher than normal gives theoreticly more than 100% of your possible skill check rolls - so you need to think how to override that

my hint:
1) upgrade
2) save skill
3) upgrade
4) save skill
5) upgrade
6) save skill
7) save skill
8) save skill
9) save skill, save skill, save skill, save skill

[fallen]

wanderer - I'd consider Second Founding mid-game.

A roll of 50+40 means 50 Strong and 40 Standard, which your Electronics is rolling 74 Strong and 50 Standard.

Good question from koles as to what difficulty you are on.

[wanderer]

It is mentioned inside the ship screenshot what difficulty it is: hard.

As an aside, I don't think the tooltips are reflecting what is being mentioned for the skill checks.

imgur.com/a/nD3OEmD

In particular, I just did a quick fly by to trigger some 'easy' checks, and it is mentioning 33 + 14, which is my total of 47 piloting.