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I don't know if it was laziness on the devs' part, or if they thought it would be "marketing". The truth is probably somewhere in between; let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they weren't intentionally adding garbage to the base game, yeah?
That's a bit ungenerous.
I think if you look at the actual code files involved, the obvious thing is that you can just slide in the extra two classes by pasting them straight into the base code - which means they show up in the base game.
(I haven't tried the hunter but according to a tooltip which flashed past quickly, the hunter _might_ have utility outside of the DLC - if you want it to occasionally (??) summon a big xsotan (???). I dunno.)
The alternative would be to do a full rewrite of the files in question to re-bake them to be extensible. There's an argument to be made that that would be valuable (to make things more moddable)
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Also I think you're grossly overestimating the benefit of upgrading a tier 0 captain to a tier 1 captain. Since you can just go and hire a tier 1 captain of the class you want, and the odds of finding a tier 0 captain with the exact good perks you want that would make that worthwhile are vanishingly remote.
It is possible to roll better perks on a t0 captain than a t1, but they have a 'less gooderer' way of rolling them.
Ergo, if you found a scientist captain with great perks, you shouldn't hunt around for a t0 captain with 'better' perks, because you're not going to find them.
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FWIW personally I ignore them, and I massively skewed the odds of them showing up as t3 captains. Especially as secondary classes.
According to the Encyclopedia entry for Xsotan Hunter, their ability only functions inside Rifts. The same is said about Scientists' abilities.
I'm not overestimating anything; I'm accurately discounting the captains whose class perks don't apply outside of Rifts... which are not accessible to someone who does not own the DLC.
If I want a Miner captain because they can "see" the asteroids that look like regular rocks, but have big chunks of metal inside, I perceive an unskilled captain to be a better choice than a Scientist or Xsotan hunter, all other things being equal. To my knowledge, the "unskilled" captain will gain the Miner class when s/he levels up from doing Mining missions, whereas the Scientist is "just a Scientist".
Similarly, a Scientist or Xsotan Hunter won't get the combat buffs of a Daredevil or Commodore, nor the Trading buffs of a Merchant, nor the salvaging buffs of a Scavenger... their buffs only apply in Rifts, which are only accessible in the DLC, so those captains are literally just useless garbage clogging up the systems in the base game; taking up slots that could have been captains with actual value to those who do not own the DLC.
TL;DR: Literally any other captain is objectively better than a Scientist or Xsotan Hunter unless and until you purchase the DLC.
Adding captains who are only appropriate for the DLC content to the base game was a slap in the face to those players who choose not to purchase (or install) the DLC. It's rude; I see it as either extremely short-sighted and lazy development, or strongarm marketing tactics, neither of which makes me want to purchase further products from this developer/publisher.
Please do understand: I got the game (and DLC) for Christmas, and I've spent nearly 250 hours in-game since then. As a time-specificity reference, I've owned the game for nearly 4 weeks at this point, which means I have averaged 60 hours a week of playtime. I'm not "just talking smack" about the game; the game itself is a phenomenal work with a lot of legs, potentially.
This particular decision was a bad one, and shows either a lack of respect for the players, a lack of forethought for the existing playerbase, or both. I'd like to see the DLC-specific captains and Rift-specific stations removed from the base game, because their existence implies either poor coding ethics, or poor business ethics.
Yes you do need a merchant captain to be able to do trade. Thanks for the extensive lecture on that general topic. However the scenario I was talking about was your scenario where you're singing the praises of the t0 captains. Except that _neither_ the t0 captain nor the scientist or hunter are going to be able to do trade missions.
So the t0 captain doesn't have any absolute advantage for most of its career over any other captain that has a non-relevant class to whatever we're sending them to do.
However the scientist _probably_ has an advantage over the t0 captain for map missions because they _probably_ have a better set of perks.
You could (in theory) have an amazing set of perks for a t0 captain, however IIRC in the code for those ones it makes it so that for every positive perk they have a negative perk. And the t1 and t2 captains have proportionately fewer negative perks (on average).
Which means that the t1 or t2 captain benefits _more_ from levelling up than the t0 captain does (!!!) - and being amazed that they gain a class at the end of it doesn't make sense because you weren't even using them for that stuff anyway.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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There's a _reason_ why there's no "t0 captain meta"
When you level up an unskilled captain with a map mission, they gain a class based on the type of mission they were on when they leveled up. In other words, other than Merchant, you can pick your captain's class (and thus perks) if they're "t0"... by the simple expedient of sending them on missions.
Scientists and Xsotan Hunters already have a class, and thus do not gain a new class when they level up.
Since the Scientist and Xsotan Hunter perks are not useful without the DLC, they effectively don't have perks in the base game... whereas an unskilled captain will eventually gain perks. This makes an unskilled captain an obviously and objectively better choice than a Scientist or Xsotan Hunter in this context, because (as you yourself pointed out):
I had thought that it would go without saying that a captain with a class would be better than one without, but apparently I need to spell that out. Of course a Miner captain is a better choice than an unspecialized captain to run your mining boat, but the fact remains that you can "skill up" an unskilled captain into a Miner captain by... well, mining.