Disclaimer: I have only just started pulling together a full workup, I only posted because I have enough of the general idea, I believe, to share and hopefully get some constructive feedback / suggestions to help me as I move forward.



As many have noted the current heroes system has some serious flaws, mainly in the fact that in the early game the only game changing hero is an admin hero, and because even a small change early on can have huge impacts this means having an admin hero becomes close to a win or lose situation.



Some have proposed nerfing admin heroes to put them more in line with other heroes others have suggested or even written modules to buff corporate heroes so that both of these heroes are good from the beginning.



I have come up with another approach, but first let me explain how I see the current situation.



The Situation



Currently the obvious problem is that comparatively admin heroes give a huge advantage compared to corporate heroes, but there are a few not so obvious problems.

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Adventures are useless, this generally is known but not looked at because you can't have a adventurer / adventurer hero so you will always have a hero class that is not completely useless.

Both Pilots and Commanders are extraordinarily powerful at high level to the point of being overpowered if your opponent has no access to a fleet hero.

The melee stat really doesn't mean much and has almost zero integration into the Hero Class System.

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This however does not mean the hero system is bad it definitely has some good points.



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The Hero System succeeds at changing the game, having access to an admin hero and moving about or fleet heroes will definitely change how you can play the game. This makes for a much more interesting game.

The experience and skill tree is a great idea, however because of the limit of useful classes and overlap mostly there really isn't a need to choose between skills because you can get everything that you want.

Attributes!!! Such a wonderful idea, but because the are a percentage stat they have to little effect early on and too much later.

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This should give you a basic idea of how I view the current Hero Class System, now lets look at a possible solution.



New Classes!!!



So the problem to me seems to be that there are 5 classes but really only 3 are game changing (admin/commander/pilot) one is some what useful (corporate) and one completely useless (adventurer) on top of that you have the fact that there are identity issues between classes and attributes (commander and pilot are similar, and where are all the melee skills?).



To fix these problems I present an overview of the new class system.

Class	Attribute*	Attribute FIDS Bonus	Attribute Offense Bonus	Attribute Defense Bonus	Special Class Ability
Administrator	Administration	+3 Industry	+5% Missile	+5% Shield	Salvager: nearest system gains 10 industry per cp destroyed.
Bureaucrat	Bureaucracy	+3 Dust	+5% Energy	+3% Regeneration (all)	Marketeer: gains 10 dust per CP destroyed.
Pioneer	Sufficiency	+3 Food	+1 Movement	+5% Flak	Hyper-driven: -3 turns to move from current assignment.
Innovator	Innovation	+3 Science	+5% Kinetic	+3% Armor	Insightful: gains 10 science per cp destroyed.
Commander	Leadership	+5 Approval	+.25 CP	+5% Deflection	Resourceful: current system gains +1 deposit size on resources.

*Every point of an attribute gives the column for; FIDS bonus, offense bonus and defense bonus.





In the table above you may notice that first there is no melee stat or equivalent, this takes care of the issue in the current system where this stat is nigh completely useless.



Also you may note that all FIDS are separated, this means that as every class has a type of FIDS (+Approval) that they focus on, no single class will out shine another when it comes to system management.



Another noteworthy thing is that each class and attribute benefits both systems and fleets. This means two ramifications, first no hero will be be super focused on a single task and is more useful for other tasks should you need them. Second, and most important, you will never again have 3 heroes at the start where not one of them benefits your play style.



Finally you may notice the Special Class Ability, I added these to try to give a small but significant bonus from the beginning that would add flavor to each class and also help to differentiate them.



Skill Tree



Here is a link to a graphic showing how the skills would branch out, it is not complete but does give an idea. The size of the pdf is too big to view properly in Google docs so you have to download it to view it.



You may notice a new thing called Heroic Buildings, these are minor FIDS increasing building that can only be built by a hero with that skill who is in that system. These buildings do however persist after the hero leaves. This again is a way to impact your empire by what heroes you choose.





[HR][/HR]When I have completed the skill trees I will post a finished pdf with the proposal and a fuller explanation.



Also I may when modding becomes easier make a mod to incorporate the completed idea if Amplitude does not use the idea.



Please post any constructive thoughts, thank you.

This is a good idea. I am not "sure" how much is implementable via xml changes; in particular I am not sure if the list of classes can be changed. It would be a lot of work to change all the existing heroes to the new system. Is it possible to consider smaller changes? For example, can we make pilot and commander "more obviously different"? And can we come up with skills which would be useful for adventurer?



BTW, melee is one of my favorite skills. Melee 10 is easily achievable with the ground pounder line, and it doubles the invasion strength of the fleet. Why do you consider this useless?

3. The melee stat really doesn't mean much and has almost zero integration into the Hero Class System.

I'm not saying that the attribute does nothing what I'm saying is all the other attributes are worked into the skill trees extensively, to the point that every other attribute has effectively a hero class dedicated too it, in that vein adventurer should be a class all about invasion / defense but its not dedicated to that.



Is melee as a stat useful? Yes.



Is it well integrated into the Hero Class Skill Tree? No, in that case melee as a stat is nigh useless to the class system.

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As for smaller changes, I 'll leave that up to others as I'm sure they will come up with ideas as you and others have.



I feel that without reworking the whole system there's no way to insure that you will have useful heroes with random classes. As it is either we make every hero class useful for every type of game play (I think this at least is a good start to that) or you have to make it so every game starts with a single admin hero.

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Edit:



Where are the skills that are skill tree lines (director, negotiator...) specific to melee compared to every other attribute?



Answer, they are buried after veteran, where the other attributes skills come first, also the skills that branch off of ground pounder have nothing to do with invasion / defense.



Edit 2: Had trouble explaining what I meant, hope its a bit clearer now.

Adventurer has one nice trick--Saboteur is the only skill that affects the entire empire, and it can potentially generate some nice income.

That whole and stealing is brutal. I can't recall if the effects are cumulative but even if they are not: 50% / stolen in a system is rather much. 80% is just incredible. Position yourself nicely and you get yourself a system's worth of trade income without having to worry about expansion disapproval or setting up trade routes.



I do acknowledge the merit of your ideas but for the most part the system is fine as it is. All the classes have a clearly defined role in which they excel. They seem imbalanced because other aspects of the game are - namely starting distribution of heroes and the battle system.

Those two things make Administrators seem overpowered early on because you depend on them and Melee useless because battles don't last long enough for Melee to come into play.

If those issues were to be properly addressed the need for a rework of the class system would be less pressing if needed at all.

vyolin wrote:
Melee useless because battles don't last long enough for Melee to come into play.

Please note the "melee" hero skill is used for ground invasions. It has nothing to do with the "melee" close range phase of ship battles.



Before you go too far into a design which includes new classes, I would recommend a prototype to see if this can be modded using xml. Otherwise, it may be just a thought experiment. I know we can re-arrange the skill tree and change abilities on the existing classes, since my corp hero mod does this.

I agree with the thread starter, that there is to much randomness within the heroe classes. Players with luck on heroes classes can easily outperform other players. I like the approach that each class is able to give some benefits to your FIDS.



At the moment it is randomness of which heroe-class is accessable + randomness of their stats.

davea wrote:
Please note the "melee" hero skill is used for ground invasions. It has nothing to do with the "melee" close range phase of ship battles.



Before you go too far into a design which includes new classes, I would recommend a prototype to see if this can be modded using xml. Otherwise, it may be just a thought experiment. I know we can re-arrange the skill tree and change abilities on the existing classes, since my corp hero mod does this.

I'm not going to try to mod this in until modding is more supported as I expect that with that we will get a few more options and as is I doubt I could do this currently, plus I have some work to do on the outlay of skills anyways.

One thing I'm a little confused about. It seems that every class still gets access to each stat, so is the class difference just on the special ability?

Adventurers aren't useless. They are best invasion hero. They steal 80% dust and science output from any system they stationed in. Triple fleet invasion mp power. Also they got +30% crit to lasers battle card, many people don't know it.

I think two parts of the current hero classes should be modified:



The required experience points to reach a level should be increased by 100 %



The attributes should be replaced by the traits and only the traits should change the stats as in Fallen Enchantress:

Kinetics Expert: commander class, + 10 % damage, can be purchased three times

Energy Expert: commander class, + 10 % damage, can be purchased three times

Missle Expert: commander class, + 10 % damage, can be purchased three times

"Small ship" Expert: pilot class, + 10 % defense against kinetic, energy and missle weapons, can be purchased three times

"Medium ship" Expert: pilot class, + 10 % defense against kinetic, energy and missle weapons, can be purchased three times

"Large ship" Expert: pilot class, + 10 % defense against kinetic, energy and missle weapons, can be purchased three times

...

Stalker0 wrote:
One thing I'm a little confused about. It seems that every class still gets access to each stat, so is the class difference just on the special ability?

Yes the difference is how the stats effect the game, and if you want to see an early version of the skill tree download the pdf