Sugestion - Pilot Abilities/Perks

[kaziglu]

Hey-o, Kaziglu from SA here, just wanted to drop a quick suggestion. The way I see it, pilots will either have 2 or 3 fields of expertise that interest them, based on which type of pod they are piloting. Most often a single weapon type pod like a melee-focused or artillery/missile-focused pod will have a pilot that only cares for +Melee/+Evasion or even pure +Evasion if all you are carrying is artillery and no hack decks. While skill points do come in rather slowly, and pilot rotation means you'll need to wait a bit in between skill gains, I feel that in a relatively short time skill point gains will be less valuable to pilots who run single-weapon pods.

For a more concrete example, if I was piloting a Purifying Rain, I'd most likely invest heavily in +Sensors and leave a few extra points for +Evasion. Something like a 75/25 split. If I was expecting to be able to stay away from major fire-fights and plink away from a distance, I might even risk something like a 90/10 split. Within just a few deployments, I might see my +Sensors maxed at 99 without major effort, and after that any points gained would likely go to +Evasion. Wouldn't a pure Artillery pod be an even more extreme example, given that it's pilot would likely only care for +Evasion from the get-go? In time, skill point gains for such pilots begin to feel like they aren't contributing as much (though admittedly, reaching the point where you can max two fields would take some time), I think.

Now, what I am suggesting is the addition of a few select perks of sorts, purchasable via skill points. Stuff like limited use % boosts to this and that. For example; "Speed Freak (Cost-"X"Skill Points): "Y"-number of times per deployment, can add +"Z"movement to piloted pod. Some pilots have learned how to squeeze a quick burst of speed from their machines.".

This is just something I though up on the fly, if you feel that skill point gains should only refer to the fields of expertise you've already devised and that everything is fine, feel free to ignore this idea. Just throwing it out there.

OH, and thanks for running the SA LP, great work!

[captainbravo]

Um, well for one thing if you never put any points into Hacking and run non-domed pods you are painting a big-ass target on yourself. Also, Gravedust can correct me if I'm wrong, but skills aren't capped at 100. That's just the amount of starting points you have, if you fight in enough battles to accrue godly amounts of skill points, you can just dump those right on in.

Also, if you survive a battle, (and, therefore, have spare xp to spend) you're locked in to your previous choices for the next round. Unless you want to continually run the exact same kind of pod every time you're up, you'll probably be spending some of those points to raise up other skills.

[Gravedust]

Hey hey. I'm in the middle of fiddling around with the map for the next mission so I don't have a whole ton of time, but I'll hit this as well as I can really quick...

Yeah, I've thought about how Arty units aren't really skill dependent, and how you can take an eva-heavy build and be really dodgy as per your example. Reeeealistically you probabaly don't want to go 100 into Eva, because that's an invitation for someone to hack your pants off, petty much. But something like 70eva/30hack or just sticking a really nice hack deck on would mitigate that, and you've still got more EVA than most units on the board will.

A -partial- counter to this is the fact that lots of arty usually makes for a very large/slow pod. The Size will help peeps land shots on your pod (though obviously not enough to counteract 70 or however much Evasion, that's still pretty egregious) and the lack of speed makes you vulnerable to melee, which Eva doesn't help you against. Same with missiles and enemy artillery, for that matter. Additionally if you get flanked that Eva won't count for anything anyway.

But yes I have considered high eva arty pods, and I'm not currently doing anything to prevent people from doing that if they really want to. I like to give the players the freedom to do whatever, at least untill it starts breaking the game too badly.

If it turns into a super common thing or it looks to be unbalanced then my planned counter is to have Sensors effect the accuracy of Artillery. Essentially you would have to make a D100+Sensors Vs. ((Difficulty)) roll (Based on range and damage? Something.)) In order to get your rounds to land on target, otherwise they go to a scatter table.

I'm resistant to doing this though because it means more rolls, and I'm trying to use as few as possible.

Also Artillery has it's share of drawbacks already (the 1-turn flight time, big launchers and expensive/large ammunition limiting the number of shots.) So I didn't want to penalize it more by making arty pilots sink points into it. The idea was to make it easier to make arty/something else pods.

But you are totally correct, there is a potentially exploitable loophole there. How useful that exploit actually is I haven't seen yet, but I have my eye on it, just like I'm watching a few other things.

As far as the pilot skill perks.. Those are another very good idea, and I've tried to do something similar with the faction bonuses. However on a pilot-to-pilot basis, I'm afraid it would be more things to keep track of and would slow the game down. Not by a lot, but I'm trying to be very very very consicius of the cumulative effect, I've run games where it took 4-5 hours to do a round, which gets extremely exhausting after a while, especially conisidering I have my own moves to make in addition to calcing out the players, (Battlepod takes ~2 hours, in case you're interested.) Since I update daily I really need to keep it as lean and as streamlined as I can to avoid going crazy (and have time to do things like repopulate the stock list, draw pods, eat dinner, etc.

But. Were circumstances different I would almost certainly implement a perk system like you suggest. As it is, the pods themselves are already customizable to the nth degree, so that's a good way to specialize if there's some specific niche you want to fill.

As far as XP gain, the amount most pilots get per mission is around 3-5, so far, which is pretty much what I intend.. (Don't tell anyone but I passed out some freebies on that last mission. Sssshhh.) So to rack up 20 or 30 or however many extra skill points is going to take quite a while, so I'm not really too worried about peeps maxing out their points.

Oh.. I just now saw CB's message.. To add to what he's said:

Skills -are- in fact capped at 100.

You are sort of stuck with the points you allocate, when you deploy, but you CAN respec your points later. (this costs you a few points, but you can reallocate the rest.)

Anyway.. I'm glad you're enjoying the LP, I'm having a lot of fun running it myself.

[kaziglu]

Cool cool, thanks for the reply and clarification, Gravedust, everything you said makes perfect sense to me. Keep up the good work! ;D