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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Wow. That''s an amazing system you''ve got there.

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Thx!

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Maybe you could tie this into the intellect stat, or to some other character trait, so that some characters will have extremely good retention while others will only be able to maintain skills with constant practice and training.

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Granted, this really works for suspension of disbelief, but if I make it variable, I''m worried about management overhead considering all the other things you have to worry about (loyalty, morale, ship function, missions, etc.). You''d have to worry about the different decay rates of 15 characters + your own if you swapped out skills on all 16.

It may be a moot issue, though. Maybe they don''t need to manage it because it isn''t a central feature of "skilling" up. It''s more of a tacked on bonus. Most RPGs don''t let you even swap out skills; once you get them, they''re hard coded and never go down.

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In addition, I''d like to see skills raise faster when they''re being relearned. If Sgt. Sykes was a 300-level navigator before he was transferred to your craft, and he''s been out of the loop for a while, he should pick it up again faster than some green cadet who''s taking the helm for the first time. I see that the experience level will have an impact on this, since he''s likely to succeed more frequently, but I''m not sure that will be enough to emulate his reaquisition of the skill.

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Good point. What sucks is that skill decay REALLY is bupkiss and only exists as a game mechanic, not IRL. IRL it seems that most things are like riding a bike: You never really forget any skill. Of course, if I do this, not only will all 16 characters possibly end up with a bazillion skills, the Intellect limit will be meaningless.

What''s an elegant solution to this? Should there even BE a skill limit? Maybe what I should do to reflect Intellect is not limit the number of skills, but maybe cap skills based on Intellect... That way, there''d be no skill decay to worry about AND a genius would still be differentiated from a mule.

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Next, I have a question about the skill slot system. If a character has 20 Intellect, and thus 4 skills, can he have only four skills total, or can he only have four skills active at any time?

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This was supposed to be 4 total, with Intellect representing potential. I''m starting to feel that it should be limited in other ways, though.

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Also, when a skill is deactivated, can that crew member not perform that task, or is it just in a steady state of decay?

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I simply hadn''t thought of this. I think originally I had planned that they couldn''t use the skill at all, which makes absolutely no sense as I write this! (Ugh! Don''t you just love LOGIC ERRORS in your design! )

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After all, if two Elite gunmen draw and fire, it''s almost certain that both will get the requisite 1 successful test, and so each would inevitably kill the other.

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Yes. The Counterstrike-style lethality here is intentional so as to put more emphasis on arms, armor and any other combat stats (accuracy, rate of fire, target acquisition time, etc).

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In all honesty, I''m not sure I fully understand the "experience level" system you''ve described here. I like it, because it allows for some characters to become reliably dominant, which will be a major concern in strategy, but it does seem that a clash of titans will end in a bloodbath.

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Two equally equipped opponents WILL massacre each other, which gets rid of some of the "I''m high level, therefore I''m GOD" mentality. Just as in Counterstrike, this shifts the burden from endurance to tactics and strategy.

Two things give the player control here: 1) Various mechanics and equipment allow them to obtain pre-conflict intelligence, so they can see some of what they''re up against. 2) The game world is open ended and has a bowl shaped difficultly level, so that the further you go from your home system, the tougher things get; since it''s also open ended, you can choose what fights you get into.

Combined, I think these two will put a great deal of emphasis on pre-conflict planning.

(Theoretically, anyway.)

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SiCrane''s suggestion of taking that into account is a good one, and I''d like to see an algorithm for comparing experience levels in tests that pit two characters against one another.

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I''ll post a statistical workup as soon as I get the chance.

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I''m not sure I like the skill test system. I''m trying to see what it is supposed to be emulating, and I can''t quite figure it out. It seems that the multiple trials would be bizarre in some instances, and the percentage of winning would be bizarre in others.

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The multiple trials are supposed to represent the complexity of doing a task (say, diffusing a bomb). Think of each trial being (roughly) a step or group of steps in the process (identify the timer, cut the red wire, etc). The more complex the task, the more steps there are.

Now, in truth, not all steps are of equal difficulty. But it''s a game, after all.

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Taking your example of the wormhole, where Jones has to navigate the complex gravities of the phenomenon, why would he have to win the majority of ten tests? Wouldn''t it just be him and his helm console versus the gravity?

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Sure, but the complexity rating is saying that there''d be multiple phenomena to worry while doing the task , such as customizations to the ship to make to compensate for distortions in time-space or whatever.

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If that''s the case, then it would only be a matter of time before he got a good trajectory calculated.

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Yes, the scenario was that Jones just drove right into the wormhole. There is a preplanning thing you can do (Projects) where you can idle a crewmember and have him precompute the route. You can do this on the way to the wormhole, or sit outside the wormhole while it''s being done.

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If the number of trials was a function of time, it would seem more intuitive. You can still get multiple trials, but only if you''re going to have the same guy hammering at the same problem more than once.

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I think we''re thinking the same thing. Trials show up as a function of time in real-time actions, like diffusing a bomb, repairing a conduit, or performing combat. NPCs have to make a trial every n seconds, or the player plays a mini-game involving moving bars that takes about the same time.

What I neglected to say is that a wormhole jump is an instant action, sort of a "town portal" warp from place to place. It takes only as much time to accomplish as it takes to load the new map.

Instant actions like this (landing, normal docking and combat docking, deploying equipment) still have a complexity rating, but it''s just done all at once. Time is skipped, and the task either succeeds or fails.

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On the other hand, if a boarder armed with a plasma rifle and a defender armed with a laser projector are facing off, they''ll never see more than one trial in their combat.

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In combat is another instant action involving multiple trials. There would be (behind the scenes) about 4 trials on average per shot . You as a player would never see this, you would only see the shot. You''d see the Green guy miss more often than an Elite. Then it''d all be about degree of success, armor, HP and equipment.

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Characteristically superlative work, Wavinator.

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Thanks for taking the time, especially with something so dry.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

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Original post by yspotua
I like your skill deterioration scheme. So many games let players build 'super' characters which is completely unrealistic, IMHO. I guess its fun for some players in single player games.

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Yeah, I don't like the naturally godly characters. I'm not opposed to letting them become that way for some reason in the game, like extreme genetic modification or coming across alot of powerful artifacts, but I don't want it to be an average result.

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However I would adjust the deterioration so that it doesn't become a reason why players dislike your game. The skill decline should continue until the skill is half of its original value before the decline began. Once the character returns to using the skill, it advances faster than it would under normal circumstances until it reaches the original value.

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Here's my concern: There are 30 base skills, with maybe 10 having as many versions as there are alien cultures (14, 8 humanoid variants and 6 truly alien ones). That makes about 20 + (14*10) = 160 potential skills. Each has subspecializations on the order of about 6 or 7 per. Now sprinkle in a few more for the Language skill, then spread these across 16 characters (yourself and 15 principles). Now toss in hirelings that you don't manage directly but are under the 15 principles.

Skills could get out of control very quickly (heh, if they're not already). So I've got to find some way of not having the player wind up with over 2,500 skills in various states of decay or whatnot over 16 characters.

I may have to ditch skill decay and skill swapping simply because it opens up a potential management nightmare. It's my philosophy that a game should never give you enough rope to hang yourself, and more and more this is what that looks like.

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Just waiting for the mothership...


[edited by - wavinator on April 6, 2004 1:57:49 AM]

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I thought about 1% per day, but that seemed a bit unfair and unrealistic. Although, I have to remeber it''s just a game, and I''m not simulating memory.

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Well if we want to go realism, I think losing at a proportion of the original knowledge is reasonable. I hardly remember any biochemistry any more, and the knowledge I lost went away pretty darn quickly after I stopped being exposed to it. And the details I lost first would be the ones most likely to mean that high skill level.

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(Admittedly, it might have been an excess mechanical detail not relevant to a design discussion.)

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Exactly my point. Keeping down details like this helps the "eyes glazing over" factor in your text.

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If I do that, Elites will still hit more often than Greens, but everyone will have a 5% chance of critical be they Elite or Green. Elites will just see them more often, statistically, because they''ll hit more often.

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But the elites will also see negligible success more often as well. Which I suppose you could interpret as success being seized out of the jaws of defeat, however, it might fit player expectations better if you modified higher experience levels so they get less negligibles. And maybe less criticals as well. There''s something to be said about beginner''s luck.

As a real life justification for that kind of mechanic, consider the case of soldier equipped with a submachine gun. The novice will shoot directly at the target, which means if he hits, he could potentially nail any part of the body. (Which means a good chance for a critical, if he hits.) However, an experienced soldier will deliberately shoot low so he can see the burst pattern in the ground and walk the fire to the target. (Low chances for a critical, as the most likely point of impact is the legs, but much better chance of hitting overall.)

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There would be (behind the scenes) about 4 trials on average per shot.

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Four trials per shot doesn''t sound like it would work well. It should probably be at least six. The reason being, with only four trials per shot, and the current experience level chart, then there''s no advantage to being a veteran in combat over being regular. With four trials a regular soldier needs to win two of them to succeed, and a veteran needs to win 1.3333, and since you can''t actually win a third of a trial with your system, then the veteran would actually need two also. If you round the other way, then there''s no advantage of being elite in combat.

Also, if you want to remove explicit setting of decayed skills, you might move experience level to a per-skill basis (right now it sounds like its on a per-character basis). Then cap the number of skills you can have with experience rank. That should provide a level of play balance without needing to bother with tracking deterioration.

Alternately, you can deteriorate *all* skills. This way people would have to constantly work on their skills in order to keep their edge, unless you stick them in suspended animation when they''re not needed or something.

Or if you don''t like that, and the goal is just to ease management restrictions on the player, decay skills that haven''t been used recently. For each character, keep a list of all the skills. When they use a skill move it to the front of the list. Then when skill decay gets calculated, decay the skills at the back of the list, the number of skills being not decayed based on the character''s intellect.

Maybe you can combine the skill decay and the relearn bonus into a single penalty. Go ahead with intellect-based caps and whatnot, but take a look at this:

When a skill is not in use, it will gradually degrade, approaching, say, 75% of the character''s earned level. However, it will never go below that, on the "like riding a bike" principle.

When you reactivate that skill, either by adjusting your character profile or just performing the task again, it will rebound at perhaps twice or three times the normal learning speed.

So, if you''ve got a 100-level deck swabber, and he hasn''t swabbed a deck for ten years, he''ll still have a skill of 75 on it, and when he gets back into swabbing, he''ll be able to re-attain his 100 within a few shifts. There''s some decay, and an incentive to keep up with training, but you can''t ever just lose a whole skill by sleeping for a week, or transferring to a different position for a few missions.

Also, you might want to base the decay on a proportional scale, so that the reall, really high-level skills (like a 970 or something) will degrade more rapidly if you don''t really keep up with it. I know from my pistolcraft training that once you get really sharp, you have to stick with it or else your more finely honed skills will bomb. You can still go out there and impress your friends, but you''re nowhere near where you were.

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I still don''t quite get how the trial system reconciles with real-time, instantaneous actions. Maybe when I understand the Project system it''ll make more sense.

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Original post by SiCrane
Well if we want to go realism, I think losing at a proportion of the original knowledge is reasonable. I hardly remember any biochemistry any more, and the knowledge I lost went away pretty darn quickly after I stopped being exposed to it. And the details I lost first would be the ones most likely to mean that high skill level.

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How long did it take you to forget? I can''t remember some of the details of the stats test I just took a week ago. However, I remember salient points of a show about the CIA and Vietnam that I saw over 5 years ago.

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Keeping down details like this helps the "eyes glazing over" factor in your text.

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Gotcha!

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But the elites will also see negligible success more often as well. Which I suppose you could interpret as success being seized out of the jaws of defeat, however, it might fit player expectations better if you modified higher experience levels so they get less negligibles. And maybe less criticals as well.

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I see what you''re saying. This looks like one of those decisions you can only make when you see how it plays. I''m not opposed to automatically changing the table once rank goes up, so this may be just fine.

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Four trials per shot doesn''t sound like it would work well. It should probably be at least six.

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Right, good point.

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Also, if you want to remove explicit setting of decayed skills, you might move experience level to a per-skill basis (right now it sounds like its on a per-character basis). Then cap the number of skills you can have with experience rank. That should provide a level of play balance without needing to bother with tracking deterioration.

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So would you have less available slots for skills the better any one skill is? This seems about right, since as you come to master any one discipline you have less opportunity to master otehrs.

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Alternately, you can deteriorate *all* skills. This way people would have to constantly work on their skills in order to keep their edge, unless you stick them in suspended animation when they''re not needed or something.

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*shudder* I think players would hang me for this one. It''s already expensive / tough to raise skills as it is.

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Or if you don''t like that, and the goal is just to ease management restrictions on the player, decay skills that haven''t been used recently. For each character, keep a list of all the skills. When they use a skill move it to the front of the list. Then when skill decay gets calculated, decay the skills at the back of the list, the number of skills being not decayed based on the character''s intellect.

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This is workable, but I still see the player having to juggle management. The player is a captain, so there''s a certain level of self-development of crew that she/he should not have to worry about, theoretically.

There''s another, totally oblique approach to this that may be better: I could make NPCs much more responsible for the skills they know and don''t and link their improvement to their personality and individual drive. You could still assign them to learn, but whther or not an NPC ends up with a bunch of skills, or skills that decay is up to the NPC more than the player. If you hire someone who''s lazy, maybe they''re less inclined to improve themselves; or if you hire a motivated NPC interested in combat, his combat skills are more likely to improve over time.

This potentially removes a bit of the management headache of being RESPONSIBLE for the state of NPC stats (you now just worry about your own). Your job is just to get the right personalities and the right facilities, then make sure the NPCs have enough free shift time to naturally improve themselves. And since you could still provide "on the job training" by sacrificing time on duty to training sessions, you''d still have some control over how they improved.



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Just waiting for the mothership...

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Maybe you can combine the skill decay and the relearn bonus into a single penalty. Go ahead with intellect-based caps and whatnot, but take a look at this:

When a skill is not in use, it will gradually degrade, approaching, say, 75% of the character''s earned level. However, it will never go below that, on the "like riding a bike" principle.

When you reactivate that skill, either by adjusting your character profile or just performing the task again, it will rebound at perhaps twice or three times the normal learning speed.

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Yes, I see, but what''s to stop you from taking every skill in the game for every character and letting them all degrade? Since you know that they''ll jump immediately, the only problem for you would be an intellect cap on how high they''d eventually rise. Wouldn''t every character potentially end up as a "jack of all trades?"

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There''s some decay, and an incentive to keep up with training, but you can''t ever just lose a whole skill by sleeping for a week, or transferring to a different position for a few missions.

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Let me say that I do like this side effect. It seems I''m a bit stuck between wanting skill decay for strategic and suspension of disbelief purposes, and not wanting it for the troubles it causes. I DON''T want players having a crew that can perform every task because that kills some of the RTS gameplay I have in mind. When everyone can do everything, it''s like having only a single unit type.

Granted, this situation only occurs when the player spends TONS of money to train their crew. However, this just means that the game will become less strategically interesting the richer / more successful you become.

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Also, you might want to base the decay on a proportional scale, so that the reall, really high-level skills (like a 970 or something) will degrade more rapidly if you don''t really keep up with it.

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This could be good way to balance things as well, especially if you have alot of money.

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I still don''t quite get how the trial system reconciles with real-time, instantaneous actions. Maybe when I understand the Project system it''ll make more sense.

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I''ll post more about this as soon as I can. In brief, Projects simply allow you to plan an action ahead of time and add bonuses to that action when it comes time to implement it.



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Just waiting for the mothership...

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Original post by Wavinator

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Original post by TechnoGoth
Well, It seems like a solid system, not very intersting to read but then math isn''t suppose to be.

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Yes, I''ve learned my lesson, never again will I post something so dry. (It''s funny, though, because math is the nuts and bolts of game balance and game systems-- no wonder so many of them are screwed up! They''re the least interesting thing to work on! )

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One thought under skill improvement, what about mentoring? You assign a more experinced crew member to mentor a less experinced, one. So they work together and the students recives a percentage of the mentors skill.

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Okay, kind of like on the job training. What do you think the cost / tradeoff of this should be? This is like training, but you wouldn''t lose staff, so it wouldn''t be a labor tradeoff. Simply requiring an extra workstation doesn''t seem to be a steep enough tradeoff either.

Maybe the requirement should be that the two individuals can''t be more than 50 or 100 points apart in skill level? Or that they have to be compatible personalities? Hmmm... I like it, but I''m not sure what the cost of having someone tag along as you do your work would be in gameplay terms.

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Just waiting for the mothership...

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Well for mentoring I would say there should be some kind of cap, maybe 25% of the mentors skills after which point the student can no longer improve through mentoring. It wouldn''t require any additional equipment the only trade off would be the decreased man power since you have two npcs doing the job of one. It would serve more a purpose of improving raw recurits then for training skilled npcs. Perhaps the mentor''s teaching skill could increase as well if such a skill exists.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project: Ambitions Slave

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Original post by Wavinator
Yes, I see, but what''s to stop you from taking every skill in the game for every character and letting them all degrade? [...] Wouldn''t every character potentially end up as a "jack of all trades?"

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A valid concern, but I don''t really see how you could get every skill high enough for this to be important. With the pace at which skill increase and the limited time you have for training (with morale activities etc.), it seems that it would be as difficult to master everything in-game as it would be to do it in real life. Unless you save up a bajillion dollars and build a cyber-super-sailor, your crew will always have considerable room for improvement in their area of specialization. A micro-engineer will only get to that 1000-level after years of training and experience. It is unlikely that he''ll jack that skill, switch over to something else, and so on until he''s unstoppable.

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I''m a bit stuck between wanting skill decay for strategic and suspension of disbelief purposes, and not wanting it for the troubles it causes. I DON''T want players having a crew that can perform every task because that kills some of the RTS gameplay I have in mind.

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Maybe this would be a good way for you to re-introduce the active/passive skill system. Active skills hold fast at 75% (or whatever) and recharge more rapidly, while passive skills degrade more rapidly, and drop lower. A "professional" skill will never go below 75% and you''ll get a 3x bonus when rebuilding it. A "hobbyist" skill will drop to 25% and you get a 1.5x bonus when rebuilding it.


And on a tangent...

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Original Post by SiCrane
an experienced soldier will deliberately shoot low so he can see the burst pattern in the ground and walk the fire to the target.

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What? Who taught you to use an SMG? As with any small arms at close distances, you put the sights on center-of-mass and control your fire. An elite gunner would use his muscle memory and an aiming device to know where his fire was going to go before he pulls the trigger. "Walk the fire to the target," indeed.

Here''s an idea to prevent jack of all trads, why not impose a total skill point cap? Say based on the primary stat for each skill point so if a npc has 75 intellagence that could amount to 75* 200 = 15000 max skill points for intellagence based skills. In this mannor the player can still choose to take alot of diffrent skills however the cost is an overall low level to those skills or take a view skills and have them at higher levels.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project: Ambitions Slave

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How long did it take you to forget? I can''t remember some of the details of the stats test I just took a week ago. However, I remember salient points of a show about the CIA and Vietnam that I saw over 5 years ago.

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Over the course of about a year, I had forgetten probably the equivalent of three or four 200 and 300 level biochem courses. At which point, I had to help out a friend doing a grant proposal, which is when I realized that I''d heard of NF-kB, but I couldn''t remember what the heck it did, and I couldn''t remember the names of any of the amino acids except asparagine, but only because it sounds like asparagus, etc.

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This potentially removes a bit of the management headache of being RESPONSIBLE for the state of NPC stats (you now just worry about your own). Your job is just to get the right personalities and the right facilities, then make sure the NPCs have enough free shift time to naturally improve themselves. And since you could still provide "on the job training" by sacrificing time on duty to training sessions, you''d still have some control over how they improved.

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This kind of thing has really cheezed me off in games before. If you do this, try to make it aparent up front what kind of predilictions an NPC has, and give a wide variety of NPC selection. There''s nothing quite as annoying as choosing someone for a role and then realizing after you''ve sunk in a lot of play time in developing the character that they''re completely unsuited for the job. (Which admittedly imitates real life, but its one of the little realism details I can live without when I''m looking for entertainment.)

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage

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Original Post by SiCrane
an experienced soldier will deliberately shoot low so he can see the burst pattern in the ground and walk the fire to the target.

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What? Who taught you to use an SMG? As with any small arms at close distances, you put the sights on center-of-mass and control your fire. An elite gunner would use his muscle memory and an aiming device to know where his fire was going to go before he pulls the trigger. "Walk the fire to the target," indeed.

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A former navy seal described the process to me. I will admit that I forgot to mention that this was for moderate, not close ranges. It was for a piece of short fiction that I asked him to review for realism. (An error in judgement, as he gave me even more trouble about what I had written than you did, and the darn thing never even got published.) I may be mistaken on the terminology, but he was *very* firm on the increased likelyhood of leg woods inflicted by an experienced soldier using a submachine gun at a range.