Allow for Hero skill retraining

This should definitely be an option. Not for free. like you said, but certainly available. This way if you're at peace you can have your heroes focus on planets and when you go to war you turn them into commanders. 

Thanks for the upvote!

Yeah, that's one of the primary reasons why I posted this idea. Another one, which wasn't mentioned here (but is the subject of my other Idea post) is because heroes based in fleets level up so slowly, it's often more worthwhile to just park them in a system and act as 'governors', leveling their fleet skills rather than system skills in the process. But at that point they're providing nearly nothing to the system, and are potentially a huge early-game Dust drain, hence this proposal.

Maybe they should split experience types? Governing and military based? This would need some tweaking, but in essence you could only have a good commander if he's been participating in battles. This feels a little more authentic. You could still have an option for retraining, but you couldn't use one experience type for skills in a different area.

azymin wrote:

Maybe they should split experience types? Governing and military based? This would need some tweaking, but in essence you could only have a good commander if he's been participating in battles. This feels a little more authentic. You could still have an option for retraining, but you couldn't use one experience type for skills in a different area.

You should take a look at my other proposal. It's more than just space battles that I suggest should grant experience: exploring (revealing new areas of the map, new constellations, meeting new major and minor factions), space events, including quests (as would sometimes happen in ES1), using probes (both to reveal areas or search curiosities), space combat, blockading enemy systems, commencing ground invasion.

Your idea is interesting, but wouldn't it restrict how you can spend your skills? So that a governor who has only governed would not be able to spend all their skills on fleet skills, if they were to retrain? It would definitely be more natural, though; participating in combat makes you better at combat, and not necessarily better at improving agricultural output or worker efficiency.

Thanks for the ideas!

TheTakenKing wrote:

azymin wrote:

Maybe they should split experience types? Governing and military based? This would need some tweaking, but in essence you could only have a good commander if he's been participating in battles. This feels a little more authentic. You could still have an option for retraining, but you couldn't use one experience type for skills in a different area.

You should take a look at my other proposal. It's more than just space battles that I suggest should grant experience: exploring (revealing new areas of the map, new constellations, meeting new major and minor factions), space events, including quests (as would sometimes happen in ES1), using probes (both to reveal areas or search curiosities), space combat, blockading enemy systems, commencing ground invasion.

Your idea is interesting, but wouldn't it restrict how you can spend your skills? So that a governor who has only governed would not be able to spend all their skills on fleet skills, if they were to retrain? It would definitely be more natural, though; participating in combat makes you better at combat, and not necessarily better at improving agricultural output or worker efficiency.

Thanks for the ideas!

I completely agree that all of the above mentioned things should grant experience. 

It would be restrictive, that's true, but I like the natural feel of that.

On a side note - what's the dial with espionage? Is there none? You should be able to make one of your heroes get hired by a different civ and serve as a spy. Also, be able to conduct espionage actions. Or just a hero who has a ship with stealth ability or something. That would be cool. Maybe the same hero would have an ambush ability or something? Just throwing stuff out there haha

azymin wrote:

It would be restrictive, that's true, but I like the natural feel of that.

On a side note - what's the dial with espionage? Is there none? You should be able to make one of your heroes get hired by a different civ and serve as a spy. Also, be able to conduct espionage actions. Or just a hero who has a ship with stealth ability or something. That would be cool. Maybe the same hero would have an ambush ability or something? Just throwing stuff out there haha

I'm pretty sure they're going to include espionage in an expansion or DLC, much like they did with Endless Legend. Still, you should create an Idea post about it to ensure that the Devs are paying attention and understand that players want that feature. I'd certainly vote for it!

Given that it's been a year, I wonder if this idea is worth revisiting. I just picked up the game a few days ago and have been feeling this pain. It really surprised me that placing a talent point for a hero couldn't be changed. I'm stuck with decisions I made on turn 10 even on turn 100, with not a lot of options to change direction on a hero once committed.

I support this idea, mainly because I feel like the current skill "tree" has issues.  It is very common for me to find that a hero that I want to be a governor has no good governor skills left in the available rings, or that a fleet hero has no good fleet skills left in the available rings.  If re-skilling leaves the unlocked rings open, then you could work around this later by re-assigning the skill points you dumped in skills you didn't really want.

Either that, or the current skill trees should be reworked to provide enough options for governors and fleet heroes at each level.  I shouldn't be wasting skill points.