Colony Ship update #32 - The Skills & Learn By Using

[Infinitron]

Surely the primary incentive against hybridization is not the learn-by-use system, but the fact that the game is party-based. You can cover all the bases by specializing each party member, instead of having to try to cram it all onto one guy.

 

[Trashos]

Infinitron, yes, I added such a thought to my previous post with an edit.

So my PC will be able to hybridize to his heart's content if alone, but he will be able to hybridize less and less as the party grows. Interesting. Gotta think about it, but maybe this could work after all.

 

[Black Angel]

Theoretically, the way they're designing it might actually work, especially with this in mind:

• We’re well aware of the possible exploits and want to reassure you that skill use will be a somewhat limited resource (no respawning enemies, silly things like greeting every NPC to increase your speech skills, spamming activities to max skills in 30 min, using faster weapons to level up skills faster, etc). Instead of counting how many times you did something, we’ll assign a certain value (let’s call it learning points) to each activity (attacking, killing, fixing, sneaking, convincing, lying, etc). So killing a tough enemy or repairing a reactor will net you more points than killing a weakling or fixing a toaster. Basically, it will work the same way as XP but go directly toward raising a skill that did all the work.

So, if they implemented it that way, the problem with learn-to-use system that existed in other games like Skyrim, where you can simply craft a simple iron dagger over and over again to increase your smithing skill won't be there, and even grinding small fry to increase combat skills won't be a thing, too.

 

[Strange Fellow]

One of the most common complaints about AoD was meta-gaming, yet the problem wasn’t on the design end but on the player’s end. Basically, it was driven by the player’s desire to get more content in the course of one game. As that content required stats and skills, it forced some players to metagame, either to spread skill points in the most optimum manner or to hoard points and use them like currency to buy extra content. The ‘increase by use’ system eliminates this meta-gaming aspect as now there are no skill points to hoard or distribute. The content you get will be determined by your actions and choices (including which skills to use as your primary and secondary groups).

Wouldn't this just lead to a different kind of meta-gaming, though? One where if you want to maintain a balance between two different skillsets (say, diplomacy and combat), you'll have to exercise both equally, thus leading to situations where the player wants to solve a situation by diplomatic means/the diplomacy path fits his character better, roleplaying-wise/the diplomacy path is the easier solution for his character build, but he'll feel pressured to solve the situation through combat to avoid the combat skills falling behind, possibly so far that it's no longer viable to use them in the future? The way I see it, this could lead to the player strictly alternating between combat and diplomacy options not because it's his preferred way of going through the individual situations, but because it's mandated by the skill system.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Feats are great, but then I will naturally compare the character design complexity (complexity=good) with games where I had to think both about feats AND SP allocation. Fallout, Underrail, Wasteland 2. At this point, it sounds (to me) like the character design aspect won't be as rich in Colony Ship.

You still have to think about how to develop a character but in a slightly different way: instead of thinking how to distribute points you'd have to think how to handle quests and how to fight (which essentially comes to which skills to develop).

What's my motivation to go with a hybrid character in Colony Ship though? In AoD, the motivation was to be able to do more stuff in a single playthrough. So I took advantage of metagaming knowledge to optimize my hybrid characters and push things to the limit. That is great fun for people like me.

In Colony Ship? Maybe it will be the same, but it does not sound like it will be. I strongly expect that the Learn by Use system will make it much harder to hybridize in comparison to AoD, as I can't use my acquired skills in order to improve in something different.

Same principle: you either fight all the time, or talk all the time, or do both. Plus stealth and science, of course.

 

[Tigranes]

The fundamental issue remains, though, which is - LBU is supposed to be "get good at what you use", but it becomes "use what to get good at". I'm not sure you can even get rid of that while having an LBU, so maybe it's a weakness that any LBU game just has to roll with.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

The fundamental issue remains, though, which is - LBU is supposed to be "get good at what you use", but it becomes "use what to get good at". I'm not sure you can even get rid of that while having an LBU, so maybe it's a weakness that any LBU game just has to roll with.

This is a “problem” of any cRPG. If the system allows you to beat obstacle Y by doing X or Z, the player can plan ahead and invest in a path that lead to X or Z. Learn by use has nothing to do with it. In fact, it is to be expected from a proper cRPG that it allows this kind of tinkering and metagaming with builds.

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying - that maybe it's just something you have to roll with.

 

[saeci]

Looks good, but if combat is as dull and boring as age of decadence then i'll have to pass on this.

 

[Sacred82]

The fundamental issue remains, though, which is - LBU is supposed to be "get good at what you use", but it becomes "use what to get good at". I'm not sure you can even get rid of that while having an LBU, so maybe it's a weakness that any LBU game just has to roll with.

This is a “problem” of any cRPG. If the system allows you to beat obstacle Y by doing X or Z, the player can plan ahead and invest in a path that lead to X or Z. Learn by use has nothing to do with it. In fact, it is to be expected from a proper cRPG that it allows this kind of tinkering and metagaming with builds.

it gets interesting if you have a party of recruited characters and you have to switch weapons for ammo/ wear&tear though. Especially if you don't read up on requirements for recruiting characters.

I'd also give them that it's way more elegant to not allow people to become super rhetorically gifted within a few level ups when you just blasted everything to pieces before. You do cut down on the metagaming that way.

 

[cruelio]

With finite amount of combats and CS being random what happens if you just don't get the die you need to train CS skill even if you're using CS build? If every enemy has a pool of defense points to dish out then why aren't I going to spend every fight letting all the enemies hit me until I max out their pools? How are you going to address doing things like stealthing / talking through an area and then turning around to kill all the enemies to train both skills so the player ends up looking like a Bethesda character with every skill at 100 by the end of the game?

You should take a look at the roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. They also had a train by use system that they tried all kinds of gimmicks to prevent players exploiting while still being fun to actually use. These goals were impossible and they gave up and switched to a player-directed skill system like most games. If those guys who put a ton of thought into it couldn't do it, let alone all the shitty games that don't put a lot of thought into it like Bethesda games, what makes you think you can make a train by use system that isn't going to fail like every other?

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I'd also give them that it's way more elegant to not allow people to become super rhetorically gifted within a few level ups when you just blasted everything to pieces before. You do cut down on the metagaming that way.

Yes. The other thing I want to know is how Vault Dweller will deal with using the skills of different speakers in dialogue, if that is possible, etc. SoZ allowed you to do something like that, but it sounds contrived and gamey. I think he already mentioned this topic in a previous update, but I forgot.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

God dammit, when is this coming out?

 

[Vault Dweller]

One of the most common complaints about AoD was meta-gaming, yet the problem wasn’t on the design end but on the player’s end. Basically, it was driven by the player’s desire to get more content in the course of one game. As that content required stats and skills, it forced some players to metagame, either to spread skill points in the most optimum manner or to hoard points and use them like currency to buy extra content. The ‘increase by use’ system eliminates this meta-gaming aspect as now there are no skill points to hoard or distribute. The content you get will be determined by your actions and choices (including which skills to use as your primary and secondary groups).

Wouldn't this just lead to a different kind of meta-gaming, though? One where if you want to maintain a balance between two different skillsets (say, diplomacy and combat), you'll have to exercise both equally, thus leading to situations where the player wants to solve a situation by diplomatic means/the diplomacy path fits his character better, roleplaying-wise/the diplomacy path is the easier solution for his character build, but he'll feel pressured to solve the situation through combat to avoid the combat skills falling behind, possibly so far that it's no longer viable to use them in the future? The way I see it, this could lead to the player strictly alternating between combat and diplomacy options not because it's his preferred way of going through the individual situations, but because it's mandated by the skill system.

It's a possibility, of course, but the way I see it, acting in the manner fitting your character you want to play is the lesser evil here.

With finite amount of combats and CS being random what happens if you just don't get the die you need to train CS skill even if you're using CS build? If every enemy has a pool of defense points to dish out then why aren't I going to spend every fight letting all the enemies hit me until I max out their pools? How are you going to address doing things like stealthing / talking through an area and then turning around to kill all the enemies to train both skills so the player ends up looking like a Bethesda character with every skill at 100 by the end of the game?

Imagine fighting Antidas in his palace and letting the enemies hit you until max out their pool. Or playing the same game with Miltiades' thugs. Or beating them after 5 attempts and then reloading anyway because you didn't score as many criticals as you would have liked.

Stealing/talking's been addressed too. Mastering all skills Bethesda style will simply not be an option.

You should take a look at the roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. They also had a train by use system that they tried all kinds of gimmicks to prevent players exploiting while still being fun to actually use. These goals were impossible and they gave up and switched to a player-directed skill system like most games. If those guys who put a ton of thought into it couldn't do it, let alone all the shitty games that don't put a lot of thought into it like Bethesda games, what makes you think you can make a train by use system that isn't going to fail like every other?

Surely the update answers your question?

I'd also give them that it's way more elegant to not allow people to become super rhetorically gifted within a few level ups when you just blasted everything to pieces before. You do cut down on the metagaming that way.

Yes. The other thing I want to know is how Vault Dweller will deal with using the skills of different speakers in dialogue, if that is possible, etc. SoZ allowed you to do something like that, but it sounds contrived and gamey. I think he already mentioned this topic in a previous update, but I forgot.

As mentioned in the past, you will not use other people's skills in dialogues. Instead you'll have an option to ask them to handle it for you. Think letting Virgil handle the assassin in Arcanum's intro.

 

[Efe]

whats wrong with taking speech xp before killing people?
why is stopping this is priority for you?

so people shouldn't greet everyone to get xp. -> people shouldnt kill everyone to get xp either right?
what follows that path? > people shouldn't do anything you let them do?
Annnd now its a visual novel?

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

whats wrong with taking speech xp before killing people?
why is stopping this is priority for you?

Husband: “Hey, sweetheart, good news! I just went to the bank and persuaded them not to foreclose on our house.”
Wife: “oh, I love you so much! So we don’t have to move?”
Husband: “weeeeell... you see... after I convinced the bank manager, I blew his brains out for some additional xp and the possibility of some phat loot. But they still have the deed and they’re pissed. So technically the bank’s still going to foreclose.”
Wife: QUEST FAILED

 

[Efe]

thats a bad outcome since so you missed quest xp + lost the house.
at least shoot up the whole bank till you get the deed

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

thats a bad outcome since so you missed quest xp + lost the house.
at least shoot up the whole bank till you get the deed

That’s the thing, you can solve the quest by violence or by persuasion, right? But if you kill the person you’re supposed to persuade right after the quest is done, the persuasion doesn’t do anything—dead men tell no tales. Convincing him was an irrelevant detour designed to maximize your learning points. Your actual solution to the quest is an orgy of violence.

Rather than looking at this as two discrete things—a persuasion check followed by unrelated combat—maybe it makes more sense to see it as one thing with two mutually exclusive solutions.

No idea if this is how VD’s doing it, but perhaps view it like this: there’s a limited pot of XP/LP for solving the quest/subquest/interaction. You can get the pot in the form of persuasion LPs from convincing the NPC or in combat LPs from killing him, but either way you empty the whole pot. So if you persuade, there’s nothing left to earn by killing the guy.

 

[Black Angel]

The fundamental issue remains, though, which is - LBU is supposed to be "get good at what you use", but it becomes "use what to get good at". I'm not sure you can even get rid of that while having an LBU, so maybe it's a weakness that any LBU game just has to roll with.

With "use what to get good at", did you mean those problems where, like, in Skyrim, you can abuse smithing an iron dagger to increase smithing skill all the way to 100, etc etc? If so, didn't this update pretty much aimed to avoid that problem completely? Because, once again:

• We’re well aware of the possible exploits and want to reassure you that skill use will be a somewhat limited resource (no respawning enemies, silly things like greeting every NPC to increase your speech skills, spamming activities to max skills in 30 min, using faster weapons to level up skills faster, etc). Instead of counting how many times you did something, we’ll assign a certain value (let’s call it learning points) to each activity (attacking, killing, fixing, sneaking, convincing, lying, etc). So killing a tough enemy or repairing a reactor will net you more points than killing a weakling or fixing a toaster. Basically, it will work the same way as XP but go directly toward raising a skill that did all the work.

I, too, initially worried that the fundamental problems with LBU will be carried over to CS, but with this update, I think "get good at what you use" will at least be intact because players can't go around abusing trivial activities to max their skills. Fingers crossed they accomplish their goal with this design.

 

[Efe]

I don't get what you mean by dead man tell no tales. Persuasion isn't notoriety. he doesn't need to let others know of your persuasiveness for something to happen.
lets go by an example since you seem to like those:
you make him hand over key to safe and then put a bullet in his head.
or have him radio/call a certain group, have him give you access privileges, etc.

why should this resullt in less xp? he can add repercussions in another way. make the character get a bounty. get him excluded from factions, services and/or quests rather than an arbitraty you already got this much xp from this guy so you cant get more.

 

[Tigranes]

The fundamental issue remains, though, which is - LBU is supposed to be "get good at what you use", but it becomes "use what to get good at". I'm not sure you can even get rid of that while having an LBU, so maybe it's a weakness that any LBU game just has to roll with.

With "use what to get good at", did you mean those problems where, like, in Skyrim, you can abuse smithing an iron dagger to increase smithing skill all the way to 100, etc etc? If so, didn't this update pretty much aimed to avoid that problem completely? Because, once again:

• We’re well aware of the possible exploits and want to reassure you that skill use will be a somewhat limited resource (no respawning enemies, silly things like greeting every NPC to increase your speech skills, spamming activities to max skills in 30 min, using faster weapons to level up skills faster, etc). Instead of counting how many times you did something, we’ll assign a certain value (let’s call it learning points) to each activity (attacking, killing, fixing, sneaking, convincing, lying, etc). So killing a tough enemy or repairing a reactor will net you more points than killing a weakling or fixing a toaster. Basically, it will work the same way as XP but go directly toward raising a skill that did all the work.

I, too, initially worried that the fundamental problems with LBU will be carried over to CS, but with this update, I think "get good at what you use" will at least be intact because players can't go around abusing trivial activities to max their skills. Fingers crossed they accomplish their goal with this design.

No, not quite - I mean something even more basic. When you walk into a conversation in a game like AOD/CS, what you really want is to be gripped by the severity of the situation. You want to think, given my limited set of skills and resources, how can I make it through this situation? Can I even make it through this situation?

In AOD, the problem wasn't just that skills gating required you to hoard SPs and stuff. The problem was that the experience of saying, "eh I'll go up and talk to this guy, see what the checks are, then reload and spend some SPs" - or the experience of saying "OK let's see what the game brings, oh god, I'm dead! I guess I reload and, spend some SPs on Streetwise" - was really detrimental to what was otherwise AOD's unparalleled achievement: to put a real sense of danger, consequences and impossibilities into dialogue-driven situations.

With CS, design changes including a switch to party means, as we know, we are much less likely to encounter such harsh thresholds. In other words, we're more likely to have a couple of options that our party is actually capable of using to solve the situation, and it's not going to be such a stark "got Persuasion? no? reload". So that's good. But what I don't want is to go up to a set piece in CS and have the experience of, "well, I could shoot my way in or sneak in, but do I want my character to be good at shooting or sneaking?" That again really dilutes what is Iron Tower's signature strength.

As I say, I don't think this is some fundamental problem. To a degree, this just comes hand in hand with playing a video game, and I'm happy as a player to say to myself "with this game, I'll just make my choices and see what my character ends up as, instead of planning what he/she is at the beginning." I think that will be a cool experience. I simply predict that many players who will otherwise enjoy CS get into a thoroughly unenjoyable meta-calculation. (Again, I'm not even sure if VD can address that, or whether it's VD's task to address.)

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

No, not quite - I mean something even more basic. When you walk into a conversation in a game like AOD/CS, what you really want is to be gripped by the severity of the situation. You want to think, given my limited set of skills and resources, how can I make it through this situation? Can I even make it through this situation?

In AOD, the problem wasn't just that skills gating required you to hoard SPs and stuff. The problem was that the experience of saying, "eh I'll go up and talk to this guy, see what the checks are, then reload and spend some SPs" - or the experience of saying "OK let's see what the game brings, oh god, I'm dead! I guess I reload and, spend some SPs on Streetwise" - was really detrimental to what was otherwise AOD's unparalleled achievement: to put a real sense of danger, consequences and impossibilities into dialogue-driven situations.

That's the wrong way to play the game. The best thing is to go blind and take risks. You can beat many playthroughs this way.

 

[Tigranes]

I agree. And usually, my consistent stance is, the player should exercise their freedom to play in a more interesting way, and not blame the game for their OCDness. So I'm certainly not saying this is AOD/CS' fault and that they must produce an ironclad way to control player behaviour - I'm raising it more as a general question about learn-by-doing systems, I guess.

I definitely look forward to playing CS in the emergent spirit - not by thinking up a build (in numbers or in concept) and then merely fulfilling it, but by taking each situation as it comes and see what kind of person your protagonist/party ends up becoming through the trials they face.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

In AOD, the problem wasn't just that skills gating required you to hoard SPs and stuff. The problem was that the experience of saying, "eh I'll go up and talk to this guy, see what the checks are, then reload and spend some SPs" - or the experience of saying "OK let's see what the game brings, oh god, I'm dead! I guess I reload and, spend some SPs on Streetwise" - was really detrimental to what was otherwise AOD's unparalleled achievement: to put a real sense of danger, consequences and impossibilities into dialogue-driven situations.

I'm gonna meta-game the shit outta CS and bitch and moan about LBU until the third game is confirmed back to skillpoints goddamnit.

 

[Vault Dweller]

No, not quite - I mean something even more basic. When you walk into a conversation in a game like AOD/CS, what you really want is to be gripped by the severity of the situation. You want to think, given my limited set of skills and resources, how can I make it through this situation? Can I even make it through this situation?

That's always been our goal when designing quests and situations.

With CS, design changes including a switch to party means, as we know, we are much less likely to encounter such harsh thresholds. In other words, we're more likely to have a couple of options that our party is actually capable of using to solve the situation, and it's not going to be such a stark "got Persuasion? no? reload". So that's good. But what I don't want is to go up to a set piece in CS and have the experience of, "well, I could shoot my way in or sneak in, but do I want my character to be good at shooting or sneaking?" That again really dilutes what is Iron Tower's signature strength.

It will be a bit more complicated than that. Take sneaking, for example. Only a specialist would be able to stay hidden for a long time and thus hit multiple objectives while sneaking. Similarly, only a specialist would be able to beat every fight. So a hybrid would have to compromise by default: do I go in and hope I manage to get out before they get me or do I go in guns blazing and hope I'm the last man standing? Or do I go in and shoot my way out when they come looking for me? It will never be a lazy, "which skill do I want to raise now" choice, but which way gives me a fighting chance.

I'm happy as a player to say to myself "with this game, I'll just make my choices and see what my character ends up as, instead of planning what he/she is at the beginning."

Exactly.