Moving skills around

Is there any way to add another part to leadplanet holiday. So, instead you could enter “leadplanet holiday Christmas”. Then the broadcast would say “Blah blah blah the people are Celebrating Christmas, this is thanks to Paco for being such a cool dude!

It would add a little bit of flavor to the leadplanet stuff.

Leadplanet in general is in need of some major overhauling anyway. I am of the understanding that it was some half-completed code that was thrown in by a previous owner. I like the idea of some kind of micromanagement of planets, but leadplanet in itself just seems really dull and two dimensional. Not to mention the resource management is pure crap. Let’s go down the commands themselves:

Gov_Name: Flavor text for GNI broadcasts relating to crime sprees and such.
Military: No purpose except for random GNI broadcasts about armed forces out in the streets.
Police: No purpose.
Tax: Semi-useful with regards to shops and cargo running, but is not a decent revenue stream for governments of any kind no matter how many planets they own. I do not feel that governments should be reliant on cargo running for steady revenue, but that’s for another argument.
Recruit: Sets up a recruitment room for the “enlist” command. Never used. Serves no purpose.
Blockade: I’m not even sure. If this is anything like the blockade empowerment, it’s kind of a redundancy.
Embargo: Needs reworking. It was used to great effect in Era 2, but no one in their right minds will actually ever use this outside of the Empire unless they are die hard isolationists. With the new trafficking command, this really needs a serious looking at again.
Holiday: I honestly don’t know what this does outside of GNI broadcasts. I haven’t seen any noticeable effect on support or revenue.
Yield: You’ll almost never see anyone use this. It’s far easier to bring down support and capture than it is to take a planetary leader hostage and work in some RP that would make sense for them to yield the planet without breaking SpyApp.
Broadcast: In my opinion, the only useful command out of the whole set. A planetary leader with networkhack will achieve the same effect as leadplanet broadcast (No private signal tag), but not every planet leader has access to that and broadcast itself costs way too much.
Assist: What the hell does this even do?
Jailroom: Pointless. No one ever uses the jail command anymore. Far easier and safer to drag someone to a jail cell than have it automatically done.
Cargopass: Also used to great effect in Era 2, but the only other time you’ll ever see someone having an embargo permit is to study it for data science.
Resource: Extremely unpredictable even when using help resources. Also needs to be more tightly regulated as there have been issues in Era 1 and in this Era with people mishandling resource price setting. Really needs an overhaul.
Citizenshiproom: Defunct code with no purpose. There was supposed to be something going with this, but nothing was ever done.

The lack of help files detailing each command of leadplanet is a major detriment. I remember the first time I used it, I was fumbling blindly with it and praying I didn’t break anything. Years and years later, I STILL don’t know what half of it does, if it does anything.

I also support some changes and enhancement to leadplanet and diplomats in general. I might additionally suggest diplomats that aren’t a planetary leader get access to a very expensive and limited version. Something like inspirecrime that lowers (raises?) police or military by one (in response to rising crime) at a cost of 500,000 or something. Perhaps their detriment to support lingers longer than other support hits. The concept of diplomacy that has a smaller effect over a longer period of time than violent actions should also have a longer time to repair. Perhaps give them tools to affect the support rate itself. Swing public support rates to the negative and force a clan dip to fix it (outside of inspirecrime). Perks to increase or bypass rebel rating. Broadcast is actually a higher level than the free slicer version. If they’re paying for it anyway, I’d like to see it more accessible as a skill, or have the skill % be tied to level like sciences, then make the cost % based. Cheap or free at 100.

For the knowing: Military and Police both address crime and pirate rates negatively (at different rates) while also having a detriment to support and income. I think income may have been reworked a TL or so ago and may no longer be tied to them? Holidays did have a very positive effect on support last time I used it. Every planet had (haven’t confirmed since some changes, but appears to still be true) different ranges of acceptable crime, military, and police, before intolerance sets in. The native positive support rate would start reducing beyond that point until it eventually swings and increases to the negative. Leadplanet is a little understood skill and has resulted in most everyone using a cookie cutter setting that doesn’t break anything and mostly works.

I’ve yielded a planet before. A Sith took the Grand Moff (me) of the Remnant hostage and demanded yield or death. By sabotaging the leadplanet settings like military and police I ensured there would be a revolt <24 hours later, recaptured it and fixed the settings. That did result in lightsaber diced Moff eventually, but was loads of fun. That also may be why they don’t try to force that anymore 😛

As I understand it though, planets and support are one of those mucky code places where changes can easily break the mud. I’d love to see some diplo love, but I’d rather have a LOTJ.

Jailroom is not pointless, @Kirash. If you control the planet and have your jailroom set, it’s very useful for trimming the edges off a ganksquad.

Even with clans and the clandroid empowerment, I still think one should be able to have more than one droid. What if you do not have the empowerment? I agree with limiting it to one active droid and then the effect is the same as a one droid limit.

I also agree with the makedroid/upgradedroid level change idea suggested by Kirash and Paco’s suggestion that scan be made a level 1 combat skill. Both make complete sense to me.

kick should be level 1…. one word: drones

While we are on the “* should be level 1” stint, I’d like to make ‘call message drone’ a level 1 skill. It isn’t a usable mob, just a courier service. Maybe make it a standalone ability, and keep call where it is. Thinking not everyone can call UPS/Fedex/DHL and say ‘HEY! I’d like to schedule a pick up and delivery’ is a bit foolish.

Never understood why research was a diplomacy skill. If anything, it should be a science skill or just a general command that doesn’t require percentages.

We were discussing this on OOC and I talked myself into an idea about datapads since people love to complain about the availability of master set datapads so much.

What if only slicers could use master set datapads and nobody else because of the complication involved in using them? Spec master datapads could still be used by other people but regular cheapo master set would only work if you are in the slicer class. Everyone else would have to use the specialized ones because otherwise they’re too complicated.

In regards to sneak:

I hate silent sneak. It irks me. I find it irksome. You’re burning up a feat to lose a forced actiondesc that doesn’t really make sense. With the raise of sneak to 125(?), you would think that someone with that kind of knowledge in stealth and such wouldn’t be making it that obvious they were sneaking. Two ideas for this:

1) Keep sneak at its current level and just get rid of the actiondesc and feat.

Or

2) Lower sneak to something between 30-70, keep the actiondesc, but if someone gets up to say the current level where sneak is, they would automatically lose the actiondesc. Get rid of the feat.

Also, in both cases, or neither if it just stays as it is, I feel that sneaking should come with some kind of movement drain…especially in the latter case where sneak would return to the accessibility it used to have. This would not only force people to decide when to use sneak (as opposed to always having it on like now), but it would also act as a check to those BH and Combat mains who rely on MV for fighting.

Methods of stunning outside of having your HP dropped to 0 should force the victim to drop drawn weapons. This is to help those who aren’t really combat-oriented still be able to drag people around if they stun them by other means.

This would include setblaster stun, blackjack, and inject.

Agreed. Anytime you ate stunned, by any method, you should drop an held objects. Just makes sense.

I had this weird idea, probably stupid, but still, here it is:

We discard espionage class, and give smuggling the piloting and slicing bonus, and give slicers smuggling + science bonus. Perhaps combat penalty of espi class to one of them, probably smuggling.

Some skills like tail, blackjack, etc, go to smuggling, while camera stuff, makebinder, etc, goes to slicing. espi datapads could still be used to work now on camera stuff.

one thing that bugs me about (a lot) of the slicer mains is they cannot monitor cameras..

BEHOLD! For I am a master with a datapad…. I can tap comms on a planetary scale and I can disrupt it.. I can hack into systems…but I cannot pickup a camera feed.

@rakun, if you were to do that you would need to provide combatants with a slicer and smuggling bonus because one of the main complementing classes to combat mains currently is espionage. The blowback there would be that it would make combats silly overpowered compared to bounty hunters, moreso than they are already.