[Work in Progress] Improving Engineer skills

[lubatomy]

Right now I am working on improving the engineer script to accomplish a few goals without doing a significant rewrite of the script.

1 - make engineering skill affect more of the process
2 - add in the process to level up the engineer.
3 - add in hull repairs.
4 - add in reporting to the player so that player knows script is running.

Currently I have accomplished all that I have set out to do but need to balance it a little more and I would need to figure out what all the changes I have made in order to get a decent patch file instead of replacing the entire script.

right now I have it set as the following:

1 - Max repairs on components = 75% + 5% per star level of the engineer (5 star engineer will repair components to 100%)

2 - max repairs on hull = 70% + 5% per star level of the engineer (5 star engineer will fix hull to 95%) ** This only affects player owned ships but when i think i have the right balance, it will be set to affect ships not owned by the player as well. This value will not be set above this by me. **

3 - The chance to restore a wrecked item is 10% + 1% per star level of the engineer.

4 - Wrecked items will be checked for restoration even if the ship has no construction drones. No construction drones do prevent repairs, but not restoration. This makes it possible to capture something and atleast be able to move and jump the ship.

5 - Limits for starting repair have changed. If an item is below the max level the engineer will repair, then it is considered damaged and the engineer will repair it to the best of his abilities. Also the engineer will start repairs if one of the following conditions is met:

• A - More than 4 items are in a wrecked state
  
  B - More than 15% - 1% per star level items are wrecked (ie - 10 to 15% wrecked).
  
  C - More than 30 - 2% per star level items are damaged (ie - 20 to 30% damaged).

6 - Engineer gains experience as follows: ** Note - currently only affects player engineers **

• A - 1% per item repaired to the best of his ability.
  
  B - 3% per item restored from wrecked to damaged state.
  
  C - 5% per hull repair %. Hull gets repaired only if there are no components considered damaged (thus must have drones) and only repairs 1% per 25 to 35 second check.
  
  D - 10% for completing all component repairs to the ship.
  
  E - Engineer levels up in the same manner as the boarding officer. That is, it requires 100% times the next level in order to reach that level. If engineer is 0 star then he/she must reach 100% to become 1 star. If the engineer is 2 star, he/she must reach 300% to become 3 star.

7. I have added in some reporting to the player (for only player owned ships) to show when a ship does one of the following:

• A - Repairs 1% of hull, notification shows ship doing the repair, the engineer on the ship, and the new hull percentage.
  
  B - Engineer restores a wrecked item. Shows ship, Engineer and Item restored.
  
  C - Completes repairs to any one item. Shows the ship, engineer, item repaired, % value repaired to, and remaining items to still be repaired.
  
  D - Completes all damaged component repairs on the ship. Just shows ship and engineer.
  
  E - Engineer gains a level. Shows ship, engineer, and new engineering skill level.

Known issues/limitations -

1 - Currently there is no way to see experience progress on the Engineer. I use pretty much the same system as the Boarding officer at the moment and since the engineer does not have the boarding skill, the experience progress does not get shown. I could add it into the message about repairs for the ship being completed.

2 - Engineer is only checked for level up after completing all component repairs to the ship. On level up the engineer will end up starting a new round of repairs as he/she can now repair all components to a higher % so they will all be considered damaged next time the engineer checks for damaged components. Marine officers are checked in the same way. All experience over what is needed for next level is saved as progress towards that next level.

Anyone have thoughts on appropriate balancing that does not include full repairs to the hull of the ship? Again I am trying to keep the script as close to the vanilla script as possible while making the skill level of the engineer be more meaningful while also enabling engineers to increase in their ability level.

[Kierk]

Balance is something I've been thinking about quite a bit lately. Been waiting for 1.8 info before making more serious changes, now that 1.8 beta is out I'm gonna do more work on hull engineer.

Firstly for the no drones case make sure that simply restoring the elements to 1% hp is enough to get them working. I seem to remember that when my Taranis was under repairs, it only started moving when the engines were up to 25% hp.

Secondly consider the rest of the crews skills as well. In my mod I used leadership and morale of the ship to affect the engineers skill level and repair rate.

Thirdly think about if you want hull repair active during combat or not. Personally I chose to make hull repair secondary to component repair since i didn't want ships 'healing' during combat.

Fourthly the repair rate: Ships can have a huge number of drones on board, and even with repair rates set low you can end with massively speedy repairs happening. Now that I've changed it so ships with 100 drones can act as mobile repair platforms I'm seriously considering changing the benefit of additional drones to work on diminishing returns basis.

[lubatomy]

yeah right now the way i have it, it only repairs the hull if there are no components that need repair (those always get repaired first).

As for the repair rates, i have sort of left those at default at the moment with a minor fix. The command that returns the engineers skill currently will spit out 0, 20, 40, 60, 80 or 100 depending on 0 to 5 stars. when deviding it by 25 it causes both zero and 1 star to actually provide no repair bonus as it is only dealing with integers. 3 stars provides a bonus of 1, 4 stars a bonus of 3, and 5 stars a bonus of 4 even though the comments say you should be getting numbers between 1 and 5 from the command.

As for the remote hull repairs, I may look at adding in a similar thing but make it only available on construction ships if i can. otherwise i probably will not add it.

As for the skills from the other members, I have thought of adding in the captains skills in some form but not affect repair rate but maybe time between repair checks or something like that. This evening I went and put that on hold as I am playing vanilla at the moment with the current public beta patch, and so far so good for me. Trades work just fine, drones dont get stuck on trades, engineers work as originally programed, by a few long standing bugs are still there too like returned ships disappearing after you capture the taranis, and defense officers still being assigned the defend station script even though they are on a ship.

[Jey123456]

for your integer problem. add the letter f next to it
example <set_value name="$variable" exact="$twenty/$twentyfive"/>

would set $variable at 0, but

<set_value name="$variable" exact="($twenty)f/($twentyfive)f"/>

will set it to 0.8