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-> Bones of the God OR the Neutronium (both are super valuable)
-> Finding the Frozen Brass Pillar (if you fail the check, you don't find the pillar)
-> Getting Neutronium from the Cracks (new to Draconis)
-> Several of the Research Point ones are pass/fail. And as RP is rarer than Neutronium at times, losing any of it is a major loss.
These are one-off events. There is no repeating them. Most of them you can't even wait till later to do and are forced to attempt them at low skill level.
The only real solution right now is to either save-scum or just not explore planets at all. Though as you don't get xp very fast, its hard to get your crew skills high enough to actually be successful.
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2. I've gone over this enough in the other thread. The basic problem is we don't know where the breakdown of probabilities are. So with the "bar" in Betelgeuse:
40 or lower = fail
41 to 60 = partial fail
61 to 80 = pass
81 or higher = critical success
That would make the bar much clearer. But we don't have that.
Plus, skill increases are not a 1:1 increase to the rolls. I've tested with cheating, with 100 in a skill, and you'd assume that would be automatic successes, but I've still had failures with that high of skill. So clearly it is not a 1d100 + skill. I don't understand how I'm supposed to mitigate the risk of the rolls or to ensure success. It just feels purely random and you are dangling the crew skills in our face like bait to get us to try to specialize to mitigate risk but it actually doesn't do anything.
You have no idea how increasing crew skills improves your odds at anomaly success, and some anomalies appear coded to juke presentation and expectations on top of that (because life be like that sometimes).
The player being unable to make an informed choice on how to build their crew is generally considered bad.
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Next consideration is that a lot of what the anomaly RNG rolls boil down to is whether a player has to spend more or less time gathering materials to build the ship they want and buy the all the artifacts from the traders for precious Research Points. And then how much total RP they'll get from anomalies vs max potential RP.
RP already has a mild side discussion on how happy people are about not being able to research everything in a run. That limitation is valid in general, but giving it an unclear, randomized factor just aggravates a player's feeling of missing out or being forced into a weaker position with no recourse or real agency on the matter.
This can work in a rogue-like setting where your run only last 30 minutes to an hour and having a weaker character one time gives a unique experience that's offset by having a stronger character another time. That doesn't extend to a game like Starcom where you have a different crowd with different expectations and a huge difference in time investment per run.
So the anomaly RNG rolls boil down to giving your player the option to spend more time to gather up materials or save scum and save 30 minutes of their life for doing more enjoyable things.
The RP side is asking your player if their 1 or 2 (average) runs through the game gets to be randomly weaker or save scum to get the fastest, strongest experience the game has to offer.
So anomaly RNG asks the player if they want to miss out on insights, revelations, power and sunk game time or would it be better to get all that in one, faster go via copious amounts of load game dialogue.
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Then there's the presentation, which is a mix of being unclear on what information you're giving the player (skill check result vs loot table result vs mystery levels of success/failure) and then a lack of information on how everything works so you know why you're getting the results you're getting. Knowing why leads to player agency or at least a sense of player agency, alongside avoiding a player being stuck in a land of confusion which generally just turns them off on the whole experience depending. This loops back up to the informed choice problem.
How were you cheating? It's correct that delta skill is not linear to probability, but 100 skill should basically always give the best result. I think the player.log displays the result probability. Look for a line like "Choice was 1 out of 2 (index 0) with a probability of 0.999999999999986"
As I work on new content, would you prefer:
Can you send me your save? 100 should really always pass unless there's a bug.
THIS IS ALL IMO:
Basically, anything that's important/high reward shouldn't be stuck behind RNG. As one other commenter said, it's fine in a rogue-like where I spend half an hour or an hour on a game at a time, and this time RNG swung away from me but next time it'll go better etc. But Starcom is a game where I have one run and it last tens of hours, and when I miss out on something cool because of a (random, indecipherable, I don't even know what's going on) skill check, it just triggers the feels-bad vibe and that means I'm always going to save scum because otherwise I get serious FOMO and a fear that my game isn't going as well as it could be. If I get blown up, I get to restore from a save to make sure that doesn't happen again, there's no expectation that "Oh well, it happened, that's that, sucks to be you" so why should it be any different for other aspects of the game? It doesn't increase anyone's enjoyment to miss out on stuff they could have otherwise got but a random check said otherwise.
A lot of people on this forum keep going on about blocking save scumming. But that's the wrong attitude, IMO. There's no problem with Save Scumming, and if I want to play the game that way that's entirely my choice. But critically - I shouldn't need to for things like resource gathering.
So, long story short - option 1 is my pick. Skill checks should only be for small rewards that don't make the player feel bad for missing out on.
All my 2c, of course.
"
As I work on new content, would you prefer:
Skill checks are okay, but no significant rewards (e.g., discoveries or high value resources) behind skill checks
Significant rewards behind skill checks are sometimes okay, but only if there's some way to repeat the check: either the anomaly instance itself is repeatable, or it is a recurring anomaly type
Sometimes reward failure
Fewer/no skill checks in general
"
If I were developing it, I would:
-> Only do skill checks on repeatable anomalies that give a reward for success. ie The Uranium Mine.
-> I would only gate story progress on RNG if there was an alternative way to do it. So, for example, the Frozen Brass pillar, you could find the planet naturally and succeed at a skill check to find the anomaly with no prior knowledge. But if you knew where to look, by hacking the moonbase, you would keep searching until you found it.
With hacking the moonbase, you could find the access codes to it or try to brute force it. Brute forcing it would require a skill check, but if you were diligent, you might find it in say the Nimion base. From the transmissions, I'd say the moonbase was owned by the Krynan, as its monitoring Starcom, Nimion, and Emryr transmissions.
Or you might be able to purchase the access codes off the Goryr. They travel a lot, so they might have figured out the code.
-> I would reward and punish failure. In that, you get the neutronium always, but your crewmember may get hurt or avoid getting hurt. That way, the crewmember's skill is only being used to determine if they get hurt or not, and not if they earn the reward. Being hurt means that their skills for ship bonuses will be reduced until healed, and so people won't want to do unnecessary risks and likely won't do save scumming either.
-> Skill checks are fine, when they make sense. Like I wouldn't remove lockpicking from Skyrim, but, if you break your lockpick, you aren't prevented from trying again, unless you ran out of lockpicks. Or you got caught by a guard... whichever occurs first.
Usually in a game like Skyrim, you have three paths available to you; spells, stealth or combat. Spells require high mana and skill to reduce costs. Combat is all about brute forcing it. Stealth is using finesse.
Your game typically only has the Stealth OR the Combat option, and no other way to bypass a problem. If you included multiple ways to get around a problem, then having the skill checks would be one of several viable options, depending on how you play the game and the choices you have made. Right now, it is the only option and that means that if it fails, you are stuck. And most people would rather save-scum than be stuck.
No skill checks at all; at least not a roll check.
Options should be locked / unlocked based on skill, and this means that anomalies should always be allowed to be "leave for now" to allow players to come back with a higher level crew to make a better attempt. Which means story progression anomalies need to not have a check at all; to keep players from halting progress without realizing it.
Options should also be relatively transparent; there's no reason why a space faring crew that could scan for something in orbit couldn't figure out a general idea of what is under a rock when making a choice of whether they should risk digging it out, or grab some artifacts instead.
Giving players a general choice of " 1. Vein of copper ore. 2. Uranium canister wedged in a crevasse. 3. Study the alien markings on the wall, that would be destroyed by mining for resources" would be a way better way of giving players actual interaction with the game, rather than it being a blind slot machine. The exact values can more obscure, even possibly randomized in some way, but at least it wouldn't be a difference of "This blank option has a moderate difficulty, or you can choose this second blank option that has an difficult difficulty." and not knowing what either one rewards or leads to; as each of those options could be anything between 1-50 copper, 1-3 uranium, an almost dead crew member, or having to do the selection again for no reason.
It's been a while since I played Nexus, but I distinctly remember it being way more clear about your choices, offering players a clear choice between resources or research most of the time, "We could scavenge the platinum metal from this console , but we wouldn't be able to recover the data it has"
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There needs to be a separation of church and state made. Spending crew stats for research purposes is fine .. except you need them for anomalies too. This shouldn't exist at the same time; it's needlessly hindering story progression in order to make gameplay progression feel better. It's one or the other, not both.
I made a suggestion in another thread that each crew member should just be a specific specialist in a given category, and anomalies should make checks based on their crew level rather than skill level. The crew skills should then be a function of the research tree, allowing players to further customize how much they want to invest into particular aspects of the trees.
This means there needs to be more synergy / options for things like engineering being useful for engine research, and tactics for weapons, for example. The one segment in the research tree for battlestation, scanners, resources, etc. has a good start with minimal investment. This should be expanded greatly to include more options / interactions without having to devote research points to specifically unlock them; as spending crew points is already a cost.
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Crew in Unknown Space was meant to replace the generic crew hoard from Nexus that served only as a means of repairing the ship and having a very small sense of anomaly interaction when some of them died. Turning them into a gacha machine wasn't supposed to be that purpose. Nor was making them a hindering puzzle / bingo card you had to figure out way too late to correct.
The system needs way more player agency and informative choices, it really needs to do away with the randomness of it, and subsequent minigame animation.
I think making the crew skill points more clear would be a big help. I've tried spending every point on the crews main skill and didn't see a real difference in skill checks vs spending a point on an alt so all the crew had 1 point in Eng, Bio, Observation (to get the research bonuses).
Combing your first two points: Single chance skill checks are OK, but give the player the odds and a way to "return to the ship for now" and come back once they skill up. Not major rewards on these types.
For major rewards, ie Bones of the God, either make it repeatable --like having the dust storm clear after awhile so you can land try again-- or have multiple paths to the same reward (also detailed in Bonegrinder's post above).
^-This. I don't mind a RNG mini-game but not a blind one.
This is akin to my crew talent tree suggestion, so we're kind of going in the same direction, except that I want crew skills/abilities to be removed from the research tree as they're cluttering it up and doing weird things to RP value. Generally, crew advancement is unlocking crew potential and expertise - you shouldn't need to research something to unlock it.
Additionally, an ability like Battlestations probably shouldn't be something you can research/gain right off, as nice as it is for early game encounters.
So I also want more crew-based abilities derived from leveling up your crew - to be a completely parallel power development path based on planet exploration - but I want it split out into separate crew member talent trees and completely removed from the research tree.
The neat trick I just figured out is that each talent would give different points toward different crew skills, so we'd still be getting different amounts of different skills, but the choice is a lot more interesting now. Do you want talent A that boosts plasma turrets and gives 2 tactical skill points, or do you want talent B that boosts armor deflect values and gives 1 point of engineering and 1 point of astrophysics? Can also make talents have multiple levels so you don't need to make an absolute ton of different ones, which greatly reduces the amount of work this system would need.
Anomaly skill checks become a flat pass/fail based on team total rather than individual total. This makes more sense in some/most cases and gives the team total stat value clearer relevance where right now it's a red herring because nothing fully utilizes team total value.
Additionally, I'd like to see:
- Anomalies with a partial pass for a partial reward, that you can later come back to for the full reward when your team skill level is high enough. A slight variant on this is anomalies marked as partially explored where further insight/revelation can be acquired but is otherwise lacking in material/RP rewards.
- Anomalies with multiple paths to victory where one is easy (low skill pass) but gives a lesser reward but a second path is harder (higher skill pass) that you'd have to come back to later for a greater reward. Generally different skills here.
- Randomized material payout based on team total skill checks are okay. Slightly less okay for super rare materials early on, but people can cope.
- Artifacts are always obtainable one way or another. Research Points either always obtainable or differing payout based on hard/easy path for later/now choices.
A lot of the 'feels bad' RNG anomalies are the ones where it's "now or never" and you have no choice to come back later, so it's either roll the dice with bad odds now or don't get any chance if you choose to leave it.
That's all just my opinion, but I think in general the system should be such that players don't feel the need to 'savescum,' and that should be one of the primary goals in mind when reworking it.
I think that the ultimate problem is that you have a more detailed system, but don't have the support infrastructure behind it to make it 'feel' right. We have one survey bay, with no upgrades. You need a mark 2/3 survey ship. You need a bigger survey bay. You need more support modules for surveying. The point would be to require a player to have a survey ship and a normal ship.
Heck, you could even go fancier and have the second captain flying around in the survey ship while the 'main' captain has your warship. When you want to do a science mission, you get on the science ship. It has lab modules and such making those checks easier.
But as it sits, the skill check mechanic makes you feel more like you lost stuff. I again suggest using the trader that appears in the core system as a fail over point. If they fail to get the widget, then it appears in his inventory for a price. That solves lots of little problems if you want to keep up the RNG. Later say that he's been following you and catching all the stuff you miss if you need to.
Hmm, I would like to see more use of the Aletheia than roaming around the Celano station system. This could be a good way to make it feel organic, have Yu give permission to report fiends that the Aleteia will follow up on. You can make the priority and then give some time for the ship to go check it out. For systems with enemy ships you'd want to patrol it while the Aletheia does her work.