Tinter wrote:Electronics & Lockpicking: The pricing vs utility of these skills is totally wrong. AFAIK, the vast majority of players take these to trained and then thats it; for experienced players, the number of multitools & lockpicks available mean theres no reason to do otherwise, and there is no reason why 6000 for master could possibly be worth it. I see two possible ways of addressing this:
1- rebalance the effectiveness of the skills downwards at each level, as I think some other mods have done. Even just taking 5% from trained would be significant, advanced is probably about right, Master could go up to 90-100% perhaps.
2-Change the costs downwards, heavily. The standard way of doing this would just to make the whole line cheaper, but I think theres a good case for deviating from the pattern of making later upgrades cost more. Weapons upgrades should cost more as you get to higher levels as they give you more in terms of benefits, but here we clearly see reduced returns.
Personally, my preference would be to combine 1 with reducing the costs of advanced and master very heavily- probably to less than 2000 for each. They just give very little benefit.
I don't want to deviate too far from established cost patterns, but I will look at maybe adjusting the numbers, at least.
Computers- runs into the same patterns as above. In particular, Master provides no gameplay benefit beyond making email easier to read for the impatient and a handful of credits. I would probably leave the first two, but upgrading from advanced to master should reasonably cost even less than advanced. Failing that, Master computer badly needs something adding to it to make it a realistic option, maybe +10% EMP resistance ["As an elite hacker, the agent may reroute his internal circuits to resist electrical discharges"?]?
The 10% EMP resistance thing seems really contrived and weird.
However, I see the problem, in that there's basically nothing you can do with Master skill that you can't do with Advanced. That said, I did incorporate Shifter's vending machine bypass thing at Master skill, and increased the hacking timeout for Advanced and Master, especially Master.
It's worth noting that apparently
user accounts in computers have their own sort of "skill level" that override's the players if the player's is lower, but I think the only existent effect of this is allowing user accounts access to things like turret controls, which you'd need Advanced skill for if hacking.
Medicine- its too expensive, especially given Regeneration exists. The higher levels provide explicitly less benefit at greater cost. It would be neat if the toxin resistance could be modelled by some low level of environmental resistance? Or just increase the boost it gives medkits at higher levels? But mostly, make it cheaper.
Medicine could also possibly scale the gains from bioelectric cells in addition to medical kits, but I'm not sure.
I've also been considering the idea of limiting repair/medical bot use on higher difficulties, which would make medicine more useful sometimes.
Athletics- Has the opposite problem, its a passive skill of use 100% of the time, even at the increased price its still perhaps a little cheap. However, with your nerfs to starting JC, I think increasing the cost of the first level would be unfair, but a slight cost increase for later levels isn't unreasonable.
Maybe. I'll think about it.
Essentially, I think the balance in costs for all the non-combat skills is totally wrong, and I think abandoning the traditional experience cost chains is the easiest way to fix it. I don't expect it to be a widely agreed with opinion, though.
You might be right about this, but it's beyond the scope of this mod, in my opinion, to make such a drastic change.