Secondary Skills?

[V-Bro - The Titan's Driver]

In short, I never trained secondary skills; I never saw a need to do so.

When I train employees, I only ever focus on maxing their primary skill then work on that exclusively. It's always been enough; I can consistently produce games well above 90% with this approach.
I do know that you can train employees outside their primary skills. While they'll never be masters in secondary tasks, they can reach a competent enough level of 50. There is also an 'all-rounder' perk that increases it to 60.

But most tasks are specialized in the first place. You want good graphics? Hire artists and put them in the graphics department. For research, you hire dedicated research teams that never do anything else. So on and so forth.
The only exception is the developer room, but even then, I only need to fill those rooms with game designers and programmers, while the specialists support them by working in their respective offices.

There are two possibilities I can conceive where secondary skills might be useful:
1.) You have a very small team that needs to work multiple skills (but that's only true if you just started or made a bad business decision.)
2.) Playing at a higher difficulty is more demanding, therefore employees would benefit from developing secondary skills to create better games.

How about you? Perhaps you've found it worthwhile to work on secondary skills? I don't mind being told I missed something.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Even in Legendary, secondary skills are not worth bothering with. Specially if it involves sinking money into a thing that won't bring in enough returns to justify it - unlocking training room, then wasting money on training a skill your employees will barely, if ever, use.

The only skill that matters in every room is the "main" skill, the one tied to the profession, the one the room needs. Even in the Development room, only the Game Design and Programming skills do anything worth noting - they affect development speed (at the same rate, from what I've tested.) Graphics and sound in that room are a waste - by the time you really need those stats, you either have unlocked the Graphics/Sound studios, or are going down a "death spiral."

So to me, the "All-Rounder" perk is basically one of the worst flaws your employees can have. It inflates their salary (which matters in early game, but enough people working at a game with enough useless overpaid perks can make your game non-profitable too,) for a meager increment in the limit of skills they'll never need. I'd rather hire a dendrophile than an all-rounder.

[V-Bro - The Titan's Driver]

*Looked up dendrophile:
"Someone who loves trees, a little too much in some cases." (Oh dear)

So no meaningful bonuses come from secondary training at all, huh? Weird, I figured if there was a positive effect anywhere, it would've been in the game development room. Maybe the perk was supposed to have a benefit once, but the idea got left behind as MGT2 was being developed.

Anyway, it looks like I'll just continue specializing, then.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Yes, the only point to the "Loves plants" 'trait' is to have people who'll be humping constantly taking care of obviously plastic plants. It offers no real bonuses, requires one extra piece of furniture to be placed in rooms for the person afflicted by it to not have constantly taking motivation, and inflates their salary a bit. Just like All-Rounder, to me that 'trait' is a flaw in disguise (same as "inuit" and other 'traits' that need everyone in a room to have it before you can use it's 'bonus.')

The main problem with "secondary" skills: By the time having 50/60 points of any skill would matter, you've already built the rooms where the stats output given by those skills are magnitudes better, and you want to put someone who can go all the way to 100 in them (and has a head start, too, to save up on wasting space in training rooms.) Either that, or you're bankrupt, if playing Hard difficulty or above.

Only exception would be Programming, but since I staff my rooms with all programmers - and my CEO as the one designer - then I can tank through the relatively small time frame that happens between "controls/tech stat starts mattering 9001% more" and "MoCap is available."

All in all? Employees could have been given one single skill, tied to their profession, and the game would not be that different. My starter room of nine programmers and one designer can get the needed graphics/sound stats for games up to 1978, and by then I'll - at worst- be starting research on graphics/sound rooms so I can stop fiddling with percentile sliders for good.