Skill farming

[greetingsfromoslo]

You can leave your ship idle and on autofire against an enemy ship with weapons that won't threat you (their weapons < your shields) to farm skills for your crew. Some other conditions must be met as well:

- Your weapons combined damage must not exceed the enemys shield capacity. If you do not plan to destroy them, eventually.
- Fast shooting weapons are preferable for quicker gains on Weapons skill. A fast shooting enemy will also yield quicker ratings for Piloting, Engines and Shields.
- There must of course have not been any warnings that your enemy tries to dodge away with their FTL.
- The enemy have already tried to board you.
- All of the enemies missiles have been used up.

In general the AI is remarkably predictable and generic in its strategies. It will throw everything at you at the start until it completely drains itself of finite resources and then proceeds to sit idle and auto attack with what little weaponry is left to attack it. No more teleport. No FTL, unless you've been warned.

I find this strategy totally legal within the idea of a rouge game, as you try to overcome the impossible odds and edge out any advantage with some clever abuse of the mechanics. Afterall it's the same mechanics that try their best to make you lose in the most humiliating and unimaginable of ways.

[Kenshkrix]

I usually don't spend a great deal of time farming skill, but one thing I do is lower my shields after a fight, and raise them again when I reach an enemy until I get max shield skill.
This gets my shield skill up to max pretty early on in the game and has low risk versus most enemies (Exception being droneships).

[Mataza]

The only downside is, that mastering skills is incredibly trivial.
Manning the weapons gets you 10% recharge. Fully mastering it gives you 19%.
Likewise, the shield nets you 10% and goes to 30%. The shield recharges so fast by defaut, that I actually find it useless. The AI doesn't sync its weapons, so I don't feel any difference between ~0.5sec per shield layer and ~0.38sec.
For piloting and engines the difference between manning and mastering a station is 5% each. Do you know what also gives 5% evade? Upgrading the engine for 15 scrap.
Also the best way to level up evade is to first get like 3-5 engine levels, so your basic evade is already at +30% with your untrained men.

[greetingsfromoslo]

The only downside is, that mastering skills is incredibly trivial.

Well, as long as you leave the ship to itself you receive some freebies with no cost of time to you. Early on in the run such small gains add up. I wish gains would be more substantial, up to the point were a skilled crewman could compensate for something like a lack of shielding. Perhaps they chose to set the bonuses to a trivial level to counter the OP-ness of skill farming?

On a sidenote it's more valuable to use your crew to board ships rather then have them man the battle stations. If gains would be more substantial in the long run of having manned functions, I'd perhaps reconsider my crew priorities.

[Prophesy]

The only downside is, that mastering skills is incredibly trivial.

I strongly disagree with this sentiment, especially when it comes to increasing evasion. Every point of evasion is incredibly valuable, especially when cranked up fairly early in the game. It increases your odds of survival and cuts your repair costs, putting you ahead of the curve.

As for shields, I've had plenty of occasions where I've been saved from damage just barely by my shields recharging. This is especially true when facing attack drones-- their very frequent attacks paired with an aggressive enemy make it easy for them to sneak hits in around your shields, and a faster recharge can easily help negate 5 or so points of damage in a particularly hectic battle of this sort.

For piloting and engines the difference between manning and mastering a station is 5% each. Do you know what also gives 5% evade? Upgrading the engine for 15 scrap.

Why not both?


If there were some cost to leveling your crew's skills, there might be more of a debate to be had here. But, when you can spend less than 5 minutes in a no-risk scenario increasing your survivability by something like 15-20% (roughly), the cost is worth the payoff. You can even, as Mister Sammy would say, go make a sandwich while you wait

My counter-argument to the whole xp-grinding thing is that is sort of feels like cheating, so I usually try not to do it too much

[mattlistener]

While it's within the bounds of a roguelike, the emergence of strategies like this is often considered a game design flaw as it rewards boring behavior. For example the designers of Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl put a lot of effort into designing a training-based skill system that rewarded really playing the game rather than bashing a door with your sword for an hour or the equivalent.

I try to avoid using those strategies because when I go to play a game, it's not the experience I'm looking for. But once I'm in the "maximize my chance of winning" trance, I'll still end up doing them if a situation presents itself.

One way to limit this would be to have all enemies FTL away (with warning) after X turns of causing the player no hull damage or crew deaths. That would certainly be a positive change in terms of theme -- when you realize that you're the mouse rather than the cat, you run!

[greetingsfromoslo]

You can even, as Mister Sammy would say, go make a sandwich while you wait

I usually take a power nap or play with the cat.

One way to limit this would be to have all enemies FTL away (with warning) after X turns of causing the player no hull damage or crew deaths. That would certainly be a positive change in terms of theme -- when you realize that you're the mouse rather than the cat, you run!

That's a great, simple solution to the temptations of skill farming. Very often enemy crew set priority to pilot their ship, but they never use the opportunity to FTL away when the situation become critical. Then it would also make sense to get a FTL jammer, an upgrade I hardly ever have unless someone throws it in with the loot.

[BKT]

While the actual benefits in combat is debatable. However, If think of the benefits you get by doing this in term of values in scraps; assume that this is done at the beginning of the game:—

2 Engine = 45 (for most ships)
2 Power (for engine) = 40-50
21% Faster shield regen = 45 (price of Shied charge booster augment)
10% Faster rate of fire = 27 (66% of the price of Auto-Reloader augment)

= 157-167 total value in scraps

That's anything but trivial...

[HYP3R10N]

A way I found to get pilot and shields up is to idle around an asteroid field, since there is no danger of an asteroid hitting your hold, its a safe way to skill farm.

[Metzelmax]

A way I found to get pilot and shields up is to idle around an asteroid field, since there is no danger of an asteroid hitting your hold, its a safe way to skill farm.

That's right, but you barely will find an enemy that's weak enough to stay with you in an asteroid field. And without an enemy in the system, your guys dont get xp.