Feature Request Shared XP Discussion

[Tingyun]

Feedback on ideas:

Levis idea:

I do not like two aspects: first, if you are worried about min/max players micromanaging, they will do so here. Because there are times when the officer's contributing skill is likely to be checked, and times when it is less likely. Quatermasters will always be set by min/max players to "all skills" at sea for example, and then set back at land. Doctors all skills before battle, then set back, etc.

Second, shared XP should NOT be linked to an all-around more xp bonus, which you have here in the contributing skill state. This is a 2 point perk that everyone will ALWAYS get then, meaning if shared XP generally means more XP in contributing skills, you might as well just balance the XP charts to accelerate growth and speed up leveling anyway, and do away with the perk. So it should not lead to faster general percentage advancement in contriting skills, that needs to stay the same whether or not you have the perk. Its benefits need to be more narrow and specialized, as befits a perk offered as a choice against other perks.

Pieter idea:

I like this idea. Basically, in the off-time of an officer when they aren't working on their job, you can have them train up an additional skill. It makes sense, and is a rather interesting mechanic. And it suits certain playstyles, so a player may get the perk sooner or later depending on preferences, it feels balanced and interesting. Also realistic, as opposed to the current magical mechanic of shared xp. And it offers the player interesting strategic choices about which secondary skill would most benefit a given officer. A really fun idea!

Pieter idea suggested refinements: I would say you should not be able to select a currently contributing skill (see my above point regarding why shared xp should not mess with the current speed balance of class skills), so only skills currently not associated with your class at all. And the speed rate gained by such side training should only be as fast as a half-skill rate (so an actual carpenter will always level repair twice as fast as a boatswain learning carpentry on the side). Fencing should also be exempted from being selected--you need to actually step outside the risk and see actual battle, or at least personally witness the player fighting, in order to share in fencing xp (so keep the shore party shares fencing xp mechanic, regardless of shared xp perk).

One does wonder whether this will provide a good mechanic to train up future captains in all the skills they will need. I'd suggest it could be implemented together with giving first mates half-skill contribution settings in everything but fencing, luck, and commerce--a couple of additional half skills won't unbalance the game, half-skills almost never help out anyway, and it will make the first mate essentially a captain in training.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Pieter idea suggested refinements: I would say you should not be able to select a currently contributing skill (see my above point regarding why shared xp should not mess with the current speed balance of class skills), so only skills currently not associated with your class at all.

My simplest thought was to allow it, but for it to do absolutely nothing if you did.
Better to prevent it though.

And the speed rate gained by such side training should only be as fast as a half-skill rate (so an actual carpenter will always level repair twice as fast as a boatswain learning carpentry on the side).

Makes sense. The secondary one isn't the main focus, after all.

Fencing should also be exempted from being selected--you need to actually step outside the risk and see actual battle, or at least personally witness the player fighting, in order to share in fencing xp (so keep the shore party shares fencing xp mechanic).

Agreed. There is already a mechanic in place for sharing Fencing XP; it doesn't need another one.

One does wonder whether this will provide a good mechanic to train up future captains in all the skills they will need. I'd suggest it could be implemented together with giving first mates half-skill contribution settings in everything but fencing, luck, and commerce--a couple of additional half skills won't unbalance the game, half-skills almost never help out anyway, and it will make the first mate essentially a captain in training.

Interesting idea. Though for player companions, you can assign three officers to each ship, so the captain doesn't actually need to do everything by himself.
As long as the captain-to-be gets Sailing and Leadership, the other skills shouldn't need to be shared, right?

 

[Tingyun]

Yes, that's right. Though the player captain does get to gain in everything (essentially at a half skill rate?), and Presumably first mates are getting involved with most everything as well. I'd say it makes the most sense if we make salary recalculate when you change professions--if we did that, then we could make the first mate have a 2.0 or 3.0 salary modifier or something, and it becomes an interesting choice to pay for more general xp advancement if a player really wants to train up the person. (Couldn't do thst currently, as it mostly wouldn't affect existing other role officers changed to first mates much).

I'm not sure the first mate does have much of a role or use currently, this could stress the captain in training potential. Also, curious, do officers on companion ships contribute perks, or just skills? Just curious about that.

Mainly, I suggested this as a way of offerring a path to players wanting to train a generalist future captains, since the new shared xp mechanic (which I really like, and is far more interesting than the old) would no longer provide that.

 

[Levis]

Indeed you can set up to 3 officers for a ship so that should make sure the ship has all skills you need.

The contribution of these officers is exactly the same as it is for you. so they contribute theire skills and perks to the captain. If you look at the captains perklist in the character interface you will see checkmarks for all perks which are contributed

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Though the player captain does get to gain in everything (essentially at a half skill rate?)

True, though that's mainly because of the controversy if we'd basically force the player to ONLY get Fencing, Sailing and Leadership!
That won't go down well....

If a First Mate learns everything, then there is less need for officers on companion ships.

Also, curious, do officers on companion ships contribute perks, or just skills?

As @Levis confirmed, they contribute it all, as long as it's appropriate for their officer type.

 

[Levis]

I do like where this idea is going. @Grey Roger do you think you could work with this too?

 

[Tingyun]

Pieter, that makes sense (and even I want the captain to learn everything as well ). I understand wanting to keep the incentive for additional officers on companion ships. Also provides a good reason to keep your longstanding friends around even if you find a better gunner--send the old friend to a companion ship.

So, basically, we are departing from the goal of shared xp creating generalist all around heroes (even a limited number), and doing so to achieve the end of preserving officer diversity in skills and preserving need for officers on companion ships. Instead it will create an interesting way of training side-roles, and players will make strategic choices about which to train.

Question: what is the first mate's role currently? Just to train up for future captainhood? Seems a shame he doesn't have much useful to do on ship...would it be possible to maybe add a check where the first mate's leadership independently has a small influence on morale, similar to doctor, so that it always is useful to have one? Seems realistic, you need a captain for overall leadership, and a firstmate to administer some things, one man can't do every role.

EDIT: Or maybe an increasing morale penalty as crew becomes larger if you don't have a firstmate to enforce dicipline, so you don't need one on small ships but they are essential to help you run larger ships.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Question: what is the first mate's role currently? Just to train up for future captainhood? Seems a shame he doesn't have much useful to do on ship...

What does the First Mate currently contribute? I can't remember now....

would it be possible to maybe add a check where the first mate's leadership independently has a small influence on morale, similar to doctor, so that it always is useful to have one? Seems realistic, you need a captain for overall leadership, and a firstmate to administer some things, one man can't do every role.

Everything is possible. Whether it is simple and straightforward though is a different story.
Perhaps we should try to not change everything at the same time ourselves....?

On a related note, I did once have an idea of somehow requiring more officers for bigger ships. But I'm not at all sure how that would be supposed to work.
It wouldn't be that insane though if you'd need more than one Gunner for a Tier 1 ship. Right....?

 

[Tingyun]

EDIT: erased the truly irrelevant chatty parts to shorten the thread. will leave first mate parts in case much much later might be useful for a new thread.

The firstmate does have several contributing perks, but the problem is you'll probably get individual officers to cover those roles rather than him. But he does save the player investment into ironwill and shared xp. Still, there is kind of an abundance of perk points in general, with most roles maxing out early, so contributing perks doesn't do thst much for that long.

I thought about increasing perk costs for all non-combat perks for my personal modifications, but I think that would hurt the AI too much, since they need to purchase all the perks on a single captain. So basically I'd get them anyway eventually, but the AI would not because AI captains don't get officers. But seems a shame that a low level cannoner can already max out on cannon perks, and there is no further advancement.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Maybe we can take improvements on this in smaller steps.
It is becoming quite difficult to keep this all clear in my head, with all the different things being proposed.

For starters, can we see about determining the best course of action for the XP Sharing itself?
A better purpose for the First Mate could perhaps be discussed in another thread.

 

[Tingyun]

Pieter,

I'm just in a conversational mood, ignore my last post, no proposals on that right now, I only initially mentioned it when it still had something to do with the topic at hand (generalist officer training), we can forget about it for now.

To get back to the point: I love your training dialogue idea. It enables creating secondary roles, but does so in a way that exposes strategic choices and tradeoffs to the player, and lets him make choices about how thematically and strategically he wants to develop a particular officer. In comparison, the old shared xp everywhere was a blunt instrument, involved no strategic choices, eliminated the diversity of officers, and was magical and unrealistic in a nature that breaks immersion and hurts roleplaying.

So my opinion is: The new idea is fun, flavorful, realistic, intelligent, it is the essence of good game design, and I really hope we do it.

 

[Levis]

So to expand on @Pieter Boelen idea. We could easily add a variable in internal settings which determines how many skills you can let progress if shared XP is enabled. This would be 1 on default but could be set to 10 so you can just select all skills to be shared.... maybe we could even make it for example when it says -1 it will automaticly do all of them.

 

[Eskhol]

Sorry for the late response, I don't have much time now.

I really like where this is going and I think what Pieter mentioned about the "main and secondary" skills is great. But please lock it! If you can undo or change the skills you've chosen then there's no point in doing it because you can always have supermen. I really like the idea of having memorable and unique officers, not the same guys with different faces and a 10/10 in everything. I wouldn't even know who my first mate is if it wasn't for the text.

About Tingyun's suggestion: I also think the secondary skill should also grow slower than a guy who is actually specialized in it and maybe he would never be able to be a 10 at that skill or the other one ( the one who has that skill as main) should get a benefit when reaching 10 because that is his main skill.

There's also another thing that makes characters unique and that is making them dumber at certain tasks or even unable to do them. Let's say you find the best navigator in the Caribbean but he is also the cursed guy so he would have 0 luck and would not be able to gain any luck ever. That would make it very difficult to min/max things and characters would be more interesting I think (you wouldn't recruit the first officer you find in a tavern) . Maybe not making them unable to learn but very slow.
It would be normal if in a ship everyone knows how to fight (level 5) besides one or two guys but there's also those 3 or 4 guys who are master swordsman but maybe they are completely awful at everything else or even the guy who wouldn't hurt a fly and has 0 in swordfighting. So I think blocking skills or making them learn very slow would make it interesting because otherwise you will end up having near 10/10 guys again, not from shared XP but from finding people with very high level that already have a couple of 10 in some skills. If you find those guys and make their main and secondary skills different you can still have almost 10/10 guys. And I can tell you it's very easy to find people with 4 or 5 skills already at level 10.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I really like where this is going and I think what Pieter mentioned about the "main and secondary" skills is great. But please lock it! If you can undo or change the skills you've chosen then there's no point in doing it because you can always have supermen. I really like the idea of having memorable and unique officers, not the same guys with different faces and a 10/10 in everything. I wouldn't even know who my first mate is if it wasn't for the text.

If it is only 1 skill at a time, then having that instead of 10 slows things down very substantially.
I think once an officer got up to maximum in that skill, you should be allowed to let him gain experience on something else again.
Or earlier, if you so choose. "1 at the time" would already be a substantial limitation by itself.

There's also another thing that makes characters unique and that is making them dumber at certain tasks or even unable to do them. Let's say you find the best navigator in the Caribbean but he is also the cursed guy so he would have 0 luck and would not be able to gain any luck ever. That would make it very difficult to min/max things and characters would be more interesting I think (you wouldn't recruit the first officer you find in a tavern) . Maybe not making them unable to learn but very slow.

There are some quest characters with 0 as their base skill that they subsequently cannot increase.
But there aren't many of those.

 

[Eskhol]

If it is only 1 skill at a time, then having that instead of 10 slows things down very substantially.
I think once an officer got up to maximum in that skill, you should be allowed to let him gain experience on something else again.
Or earlier, if you so choose. "1 at the time" would already be a substantial limitation by itself.

But then you would end up with the same 10/10 guys ,right? You would just have to chose what they level first.

There are some quest characters with 0 as their base skill that they subsequently cannot increase.
But there aren't many of those.

But can those be officers you find in taverns (rarely) or maybe special encounters?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

But then you would end up with the same 10/10 guys ,right? You would just have to chose what they level first.

Eventually. But that should effectively take forever.

Actually, @Grey Roger tried to get his officers' skills maxed out and couldn't manage it even with the current system.
So I wouldn't worry too much about that.

But can those be officers you find in taverns (rarely) or maybe special encounters?

At the moment only specific side quest characters.
Rys Bloom used to be one, for example. Can't remember if he still is.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I think there might be space here for a checkbox behind each skill:
View attachment 28043
That would allow sharing to be toggled per skill.

With @Levis' suggested InternalSettings.h toggle on the number you can select at any given time (defaults to 1), @Grey Roger can toggle them all on if he so chooses.
Does require some clicking the first time. But at least that only needs to be done once per character.

1 or multiple skills selected should not affect the increase of speed, to prevent inconveniencing @Grey Roger.
Multiple would be a bit of a cheat, but effectively pointless since your officers can't really use all their skills at the same time anyway.
So if he wants to do it, why enforce preventing it?

@Levis: How much work would you envision that to be?

If @Grey Roger would be willing to try out using less than the full 10 to see if that is acceptable too, then we might have an actual way forward.
If not, then we might as well stick to the old plan of "toggle on whether Shared XP affects only the shore party or ALL officers".
Either way, there'd be a toggle, so then the choice should probably go with "path of least resistance", e.g. whatever is easier.

 

[Eskhol]

Actually, @Grey Roger tried to get his officers' skills maxed out and couldn't manage it even with the current system.
So I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Really? I have 4 almost maxed out (only one skill remaining and already have enough skill points to max it out) and 1 completely maxed out. There's a point in the game when I feel like they start getting a crazy amount of experience very fast and end up leveling a lot.

This one is in my shore party


This one isn't

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Really?

That's what he said above. He couldn't max out his characters within the duration of the Standard storyline, despite actively trying to make it happen.

I have 4 almost maxed out (only one skill remaining and already have enough skill points to max it out) and 1 completely maxed out. There's a point in the game when I feel like they start getting a crazy amount of experience very fast and end up leveling a lot.

What storyline are you playing, what difficulty and how long did you manage to keep it going by now?

 

[Tingyun]

@Eskhol

Glad to hear you love this idea as well.

On the issue of 10 ability scores, are you currently playing on swashbuckler difficulty? I recently turned up my difficulty to swashbuckler, and while it didn't get too hard, the level of NPC officers you can recruit instantly went down substantially. Helps to hold down their starting skills. The exception is the tavern owner dialogue option "I'm looking for a specific type of officer", which in testing spit out the same high levels as before, but I figure that is basically a cheatcode option anyway, so if you rely on the ones you find at tavern tables and walking around, swashbuckler will give you officers with much more reasonable stats who are farther from the max. Also, compared to seadog, swashbuckler xp gain rate will by default go from .66 to .5, so in general it might suit your tastes well.

Also remember the one skill at a time will be going at the half-skill rate, so I think it will stay reasonable. And ultimately shared XP does need to open up some kind of new options and possibilities.

One final consideration against locking it is that you can switch officer roles anyway--basically, play infinite time, you have 10s all the way no matter what. Since all roles have at least 1 full skill (2) and one half skill (1) already, adding an additional half-skill of XP gain only increases the rate at which you are filling out skills by 33%.

(although you as the player certainly have the ability to never change selection if you like).

EDIT: I see skill numbers there in your screenshots, does that mean you are playing with manual skill gain/assignment upon gaining experience levels, not the automatic leveling system? If so I think that is a different balance question, and actually I'm not sure how it fits into shared xp.