Sceriv
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Posted - 2003.07.03 09:26:00 -
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MoonDragon, you are missing a couple rather vital points: first off, mining: the only skills that only give you a benefit when mining are "mining" and "minig drone operation" Astrogeology is not available on the market, and most miners (myself included) did not pick it up in character creation. Refining is not mining. In fact, unless you're a solo miner, you can mine for days, and not once refine. In fact, to get a decent mining 3, mining drone 3, it take less than 2 days. To get half the usefull levels on refining is more than a week. That's a *start* to a useful specialization. But the cruiser, and drone skills? you can use those for any number of things. Those are the kinda things which you wolud train anyway. Compare this to the skill trees for any of the other combat sub-disciplines, and it's pathetic. ALthough, except for heavy guns and ship skill trees, most skill trees are rather flat, and have few skills in them-- this does not make for interesting characters.Anyway, to refute your point about how mining is a specialization, nothing is pikced up on day 2, but a high-level fighter can add the mining skills, and be a good miner in less than 2 days. *That* is not a specialization.
And on to teh ore distribution: just because you got screwed doesn't make it a bad thing. You can still buy rare ores, simply at a higher price, as the cost of getting them has increased. No biggie.
And the society of conscious thought stations lose all magic as soon as you realize there's NOTHING there.
not even some trade goods that you could garner a higher than average profit trading back to empire space.
The real reason that there doesn't seem to be there is that everyone can do anything within a day, and it only takes a week to get decently good at it. True, it takes months to get that upper echelon of excellence, but that only gives you an extra 10% anyway.
Even worse for the specializations, except for EW, you start with the skills to do everything.
This is very nice for those who want to try stuff out, but it also means that characters are even more homogenous. Maybe mining should be easy to get into, but the industry and research fields should be a good bit harder, and the large training time for mining drones now, is not very worthwhile compared to the return you get. Even the best mining drones require 2 to equal a miner 1.
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