Best and worst skills in A16

[GiantSpaceHamster]

Cooking, growing, medicine, and shooting are the skills I usually try to make sure have covered when starting a new game. For all of these I generally accept either a moderate starting score (8+) or a passion with pretty much any value. I prefer but do not require a burning passion. Of these, I consider cooking the least important since that skill will level quickly anyway from constant use. Growing is very important since it has gates at skill level 6 and 8 for important things like herbal medicine and devilstrand and I usually want to be able to start growing those as early as possible.

I consider construction important, but not when starting a colony. Even with no passion someone can work their way up easily enough. I don't consider a high mining skill important at all. When I mine I throw the whole colony at the job so it doesn't matter if a few are slow, with everyone working it goes pretty fast. This is also how I feel about early game construction, but later on it's more important to have a high skill to upgrade quality items.

Everything else is just nice to have in various ways in my mind, although generally speaking I try not to have any skills that all colonists refuse to do.

[Stormfox]

Firefighting disabled. Hauling disabled. Incapable of violence. Will never do cleaning. The vast majority of these are strictly psychological. And if they don't stem from physical health problems, they are not impossible. What about Social skill being used for counseling and psychiatric treatment ? Using Social skill, one colonist could talk another into unblocking a skill, or maybe make a colonist discover a hidden passion (more likely if colonist has few passions). To balance it out, traumatic events could give colonists mental scars, and they would lose a passion for something or stop doing some kind of work. So colonists with high Social would always be in demand and have something to do. Currently they're only useful early.

Excellent suggestion. Perhaps therapy could use a mix of medical and social stats or something.

[Tynan]

This is a really interesting thread, thanks for the thoughts everyone.

[b0rsuk]

You know what would be a really ballsy way of surviving with a trio of Construction disabled colonists ? Attack a pirate colony. Gun them down. Take over and use their buildings. Wait until some peons join you.

[Greed_GorAshaar]

Melee -  combat is not just striking, hits or cuts, the practice also teaches to avoid attacks, overthrowing opponent to the ground or knockout. Rework melee in my opinion is necessary. Melee combat should include a function in which during a fight, you can mark enemies to overthrow instead of just killing. Additionally, the increased chance to dodge grow along with fighting skills. Personally in my life, I trained martial arts, also participated in the reconstructions of medieval history and larp tournaments. Fight teaches much more.

Growing - another issue, which is unreal in their rights, I will use examples from life because each of us is able to observe them. My grandmother has a garden where planted vegetables and fruits, it also has fruit trees and various shrubs (maybe healing). Skill my grandmother is very high, but it has no effect upon the durability of plants to temperature, this property is individual plants regardless of the technique of planting, the thing that can change the time and size of fruit or vegetables, proper planting, prepare the soil, has a large influence on the course and effect. Conclusion greater skill = higher harvest in less time. The speed of collecting the same. I'm thinking of greenhouses but the game would become too easy.

Mining - mastery not only makes doing something more efficiently. Mining that digging, burrowing, chipped, there are many methods, depending on your needs. Also needed are different. If drilling mountains and we want to make the railway crossing it depends on us time to get it done as quickly as possible, so we choose the method to quickly dig. When ore interest us, we must change the method, time becomes less important issue. We want to extract as much as possible. Digging as process can make part of the required material be wasted. So again digging as the process is different for minerals, metals, salts, coal, rock. The physical properties are different so as not to destroy and extract have to do it differently. Unless that it was destruction is the goal. Conclusion If we dig iron that time of digging is the same but the amount of ore is higher. While digging in the rock to to break through is made faster.

Crafting - suggest simply split on his sub-discipline as suggested someone before me

Research - a skill that is based on the understanding of the operation of technological solutions in all fields. From easy to extremely complex. Arises from the fact that the person who is doing it improves their understanding of the operation of natural laws of logic, physics, and many others. What can you do with this knowledge? Here range of possibilities is very high. Researcher can become an innovator, a person who improves the already existing elements of the environment. This is just an example, but it should give food for thought. Currently, after the discovery of technology becomes useless.

as usual, sorry for rusty English

[makapse]

Melee needs rework as stated above.A difference in melee of the 2 combatants should result in more grazing and misses upon the experienced guy. Add some joy furniture like boxing bags and change them and horseshoes to training melee/shooting(per joy% increased) and chess to increase research while TVs increase random skill(like watching national geographic or cooking channels) and add a policy for joy activities like it is for drugs.

Research - The simplest way to add usage for this skill can be to tie global learning factor to the skill lvl with more scientific people analysing what they do while they do the other jobs or simply add a classroom workshop(blackboard) which works on a similar way to what the current TV does and bills to it that impart knowledge in skills depending upon the teachers research and the skill being taught and also the students research skill. This should also increase research for the student/teacher

Growing - the best way to deal with the growing problem is to change it to a similar fashion to the current wound treating with a %quality assigned at planting which will change the growing speed to +-20% and sometimes for the more 'advanced' plants failing planting altogether like surgery failures. Harvesting can also be assigned a %quality which will reduce/improve the yield and catastrophic failures can also result in destruction of nearby plants while the present harvest failures are just normal failures.

Mining - High skilled miners should increase the yield of deep mining.

Social - We can add a new task on the comms station to look for recruits and a higher skilled person can find a better person faster. We can be shown his bio and whether we should accept him or not and normal attempt to recruit should occur if we accept. To conserve memory space from needless chars, we will assume that that char died a year after contact.

Animals - A higher taming skill on a pawn should be required for the present random taming and we could add a DFesque animal knowledge system in the colony saves and a high skilled tamer can research already tamed animals/carcasses(e.g. what they eat) to improve the colonies knowledge on the animal type for future animals.

Shooting - There should be a setting for the 3 different shooting modes currently depicted by traits. The careful shooter/triggerhappy people can get different mode types for selection.
Eg- normal people can get fast,normal and slow shooting modes while a careful shooter can get the slow-normal,slow and slower modes with slow-normal being between slow and normal.

Medicine - Well we all know what is wrong with medicine in the current patch.Enough said.

Art - Again taking an idea from DF, artists can maybe create wall paintings to increase beauty.

Hauling - Not a skill as such, but still it needs to be improved upon from the 1 stack limit now that weight has been properly added. A cook should not have to make 10 trips into the freezer because there are 10 different items with only a single piece each. Likewise a bionic improved person be still limited to 75 units. The better way to do it is to 'load' the items hauling/crafting into a persons inventory till the weight limit and if there is space left and the job needs other materials, to go load those materials into the inventory as well. An while we are at it, maybe increase the weight limit for all those non hauling disabled people while the non hauling trait is changed to -carrying capacity.

The incapable traits should instead be changed to severe mood penalties for doing it over a reasonable time period. Presently, it just doesn't make sense that there can be a violent incapable person who will go on berserk rages and kill people while also refusing to lift a finger on invading pirates who are going to enslave him and it can be a matter of victory/defeat if he joins the fight or not.

[cultist]

This is highly dependent on map type, but I generally consider Cooking an essential skill for large, ambitious colonies. I always start by building my kitchen and food storage area, and I expand the base out around them. Pawns need to eat often, so they need easy access to tables and the food stockpile so they can eat and get on with their day.

As mentioned before, a good cook is essentially a constant +12 mood modifier (no awful meal debuff, +5 for fine meal) to every pawn, assuming you have access to both animal meat and vegetables. This is huge, both early on and in the late game, where you start losing your natural mood bonus.

Medicine is most poweful early on. A good doctor might pull you through those disastrous early diseases, but once you have a good supply of regular medicine, you don't need incredibly skilled doctors to do good work. Still very important for operations, so again, the more ambitious the colony, the greater the importance of Medicine.

Construction is only important for building certain things. Any usable furniture or objects that use up components should be left to experienced constructors, to avoid comfort penalties and lost components. It's very handy to have a bunch of people working on building walls, or you risk getting raided while your one constuctor is trying to wall in the entire compund, while also building furniture, joy items, workbenches etc. It's generally too much work for one pawn in the early-mid game.

[SpaceDorf]

For Medicine I noticed again that Doctors have to cheer up and feed the patients.

I think this should fall under the category of social jobs, the same way they do it with prisoners.

[makapse]

For Medicine I noticed again that Doctors have to cheer up and feed the patients.

I think this should fall under the category of social jobs, the same way they do it with prisoners.

Its a rather hard choice since in real life, that cheering up usually is the doctors telling the person that he is going to get better.

[sadpickle]

How useful is the shooting skill really? I'm thinking "not much". My best shooters are un-scarred colonists with the Careful Shooter trait. I have at least one with maybe 2-3 levels in shooting using a normal quality LMG, and she lands almost every shot. Another shooter with skill 10 (Expert I think is 10) and an Assault Rifle, NO Careful Shooter trait, misses about half the time.

I think that, on average, skill should matter more than inherent "ability". Careful Shooter should probably be nerfed, and skill level should play a bigger role.

[cultist]

How useful is the shooting skill really? I'm thinking "not much".

It matters for precision weapons like the sniper and survival rifle. You want to maximize the chance that these colonists hit because of the long cooldown. Because of the fast nature of combat, using these weapons are a gamble (you only get a few shots before the enemy can shoot back) and you want to stack the odds in your favour.
For spraying weapons like the LMG and minigun, shooting is mostly irrelevant. The shots are unlikely to ever connect directly, the damage comes from the sheer amount of dice rolled and the way that the game calculates missed shots. Just make sure other pawns stay well away from their line of fire.

[TheMeInTeam]

Construction:

Top tier.  Creating crucial defensive structures and shelter quickly can save colonies, but these scale into building for bulk goods (dining chairs) or exotic goods (armchairs) at high-end quality and the upper tiers even count as art.  Rapid conversion of resources into cash and necessary for most everything puts these guys way up.

Growing: 

Having this high helps food efficiency which is nice, and having access to devilstrand for armor is a plus.

Cooking: 

Another way to rapidly output cash if you have the resources and something you'll probably be spamming anyway.

Crafting: 

High quality clothing sells well, has a lot of possible input materials, and contributes to armor.  You can make weapons too if that tickles your fancy.

Research: 

Crucial early game as a tribe, but if you're not a tribe the game hands you most of what you need and the rest is available fast.

Medicine:

Junk stat for now, with few exceptions.  If you use glitterworld medicine, a skill 5 disinterested oaf can 100% operations in a regular bed.  If you don't, a luci boosted bionic 20 skill doctor can still fail sometimes.  They are often (due to 50% hit rate on average) the ones that get disease so can't help much there, and most other injuries are pretty trivially handled by anybody.

Shooting:

Helpful but careful shooter trait is better on snipers and the tuning still favors killboxes/traps.  Much less micro on a good one if doing door or cover/clear "waiting for targets" type micro.

Melee:

Underestimated.  Other than the sniper strats melee can safely do what shooters can.  The problem is that sieges and mechanoids make these guys disappear.  Well micro'd melee with personal shields is arguably less risky than shootouts (defeat in detail + mostly blunt damage).  Like shooting, however, the large #'s on high difficulty and better utility of just dumping raids w/o the micro muscles melee out as a relevant skill.  Swatting people down in 1 volley of swings with 3 plasteel longswords is great times though.

Art: 

It's decent.  You get $$$ and beauty/wealth added to rooms, and that makes mood management a cinch on all difficulties.  I got stuck with 3 of these recently and managed to get them all a table, lots of exotic goods caravans called in that run.

Animals:

Suffers similarly to melee but a few of them can trash those "land in your base" events and haulers are handy.

Social:

Trade prices are the most useful benefit, and it's non-trivial.

Mining:

Crucial to those under-mountain base builders.  Inconsequential in most cases if you're not going that route.

If starting with 3 people, I would prioritize construction, growing, crafting as one with at least "interested", and at least one guy that can shoot to make into a sniper.  I play tribes almost exclusively though, and usually have < 5 people at start, so I'm often taking what I can get.  I rate construction #1 by wide margin though.  It's so versatile and consistently necessary early game.

[Perq]

Good skills:
Cooking - An interest in this is great to have.  at 6, fine meals cost just as much resource as a simple meal, and provide a mood boost.  Higher skill is faster cooking, and this game is all about managing time.

Research - An interest in this is great to have.  Even if the colonist starts at zero, your one dedicated researcher will eventually be able to carry your technology by himself.

Less Important:

Crafting - Great for rocks, but partially offset by having a workshop with two tools cabinets.  You can make a fully functional army entirely comprised of drops from raids, though.  Tailoring is a non-issue.

Medicine - Good if you have it, but even a colony of zero-medicine pawns can keep you alive.  Glitterworld medicine makes up for a lot of shortcomings where bionics are involved.

Don't really care:
Melee - I'll equip all my shooters with clubs and swords if the need ever arises.  Not once have I said, "I wish I had someone with 15 in melee right now."

Social - Someone will come with a passable value in this skill eventually.  I can keep my desired pawn imprisoned and try indefinitely until then.

Animals - I really tried to like this, but taming is just too risky, and training will happen eventually.  I don't really need that dog to start hauling any time soon.
I tried to force-tame bears in a couple colonies, and even when I had a 16 animals guy on it.  He tamed two bears, then died to a third one after a failed taming attempt.  Simply a terrible risk:reward ratio.

Art - There are other ways to get beauty in your room.  There are other ways to get money.  Art is largely a non-issue for me.

Cooking - yup, the game is about managing time. And this is why having a good cook is vital. Food poisoning slows down your work flow immensely (50% if I remember correctly). So this is way more than just mood boost and little faster cooking.      
   
Crafting - depends on what you define as army. If you aim at bullet-proof vests and some basic weapons, then yes, drops will be enough.
If you wan power armors and charge rifles, crafting is essential. Not to mention that crafting enables you to get long-term components, which are crucial to get if you plan to get your 10+ colonists from the planet.        

Glitterworld medicine makes up for it, when you have it. When you don't, either shit hits the fan or you have one dude who can save your day.

Melee - And this is because melee is very powerful. :V Afaik melee skill increases the base damage of the weapon by a %. A good quality plasteel sword wielded by a skilled pawn can deal around 25-30 damage per swing, every 2 seconds. Needless to say, unarmored pawns lose limbs left and right to such pawns. :V

Social is a tricky one. One the one hand it is useful when trading (yes, that 7% bonus does change a lot), but on the other there are very little occasions to train it, other than keeping that 99% prisoner as a chat partner to our charisma pawn. TBH, it feels like an exploit.
I think some of these skills should be far higher at the moment you get such colonists (if it applies to them, of course), but grow way slower, say only when making a successful deal (the higher the amount of traded goods, the more exp, but still low). So that a colonists with trader history can actually trade, and don't have to talk to prisoners in order to learn it. :V
What I'm saying here is that some skills should be almost permanent - once you get a pawn that has a history of doing something well, he should be able to do it well but others who didn't start with it would not learn it easily.

[Euzio]

Hmmm. To narrow it down, I'd list down what I think are the 5 best skills and the 3 most lacklustre ones to have in this game.

Not in any particular order,
The 5 Best:
Cooking - I rank this very highly because besides reducing the risk of your pawns getting food poisoning and thereby reducing their productivity, it also affects their butchering capability. A good cook will be able to butcher animals efficiently, thereby increasing the amount of meat being harvested. I'm only aware it affects the amount of meat gotten but if it extends to the amount of leather/fur acquired as well then it becomes even more important.

Medicine - Although a good doctor isn't needed all too often (unless you get constantly raided and suffer injuries from events), it is nonetheless, extremely important to have one. A good doctor can mean the difference between keeping your best pawn at peak health or turning him into a cripple. Especially given the huge lottery that is played when doing major operations (unless you've modded it). Not exactly very fun when you intend to "upgrade" your favourite pawn with bionics only to have your doctor accidentally lop his head off or gouge his heart out....

Growing - For me personally, this one is here because you need a high growing skill (level 10) to access Devilstrand. Besides that, being able to grow healroot (for early game meds) and smokeleaf (for trading purposes) makes it super useful. Also, with capable farmers, you'd be able to keep your food supplies sustainable. It becomes even more important when you need to maintain your animal farm as they can burn through haygrass pretty quickly depending on your farm size.

Constructing - A good constructor would be able to build stuff quickly which is very nice to have. But most importantly, a good constructor would do two things, determine the quality of the item built, and reduce the chance of precious resources being wasted on a failed construction. These two factors makes construction an important skill to have.

Shooting - To me, this is important because of two factors. First one, it improves your hunting efficiency, and the second, its very important for defensive purposes. A good shooter can mean the difference between a manhunter animal reaching you before you shoot it to death or between a raider being taken out first or you.

The 3 most Lacklustre:
Artistic - This one is purely for aesthetics and not exactly key to me. Sure we get decent money from them and it does boost the beauty of a room. But money can be gotten through other means (smokeleaf, drug production, even selling meals). And beauty is not difficult to increase even without art sculptures.

Animals - This one I find is rather underwhelming. Simply because it doesn't seem to affect the amount of wool or milk you get from your farm animals. Sure training animals to randomly haul, rescue or protect your pawns is nice. But the effort invested can be pretty wasted if your pet husky gets incapacitated because in the midst of defending you, it gets mauled or shot to death. That and when they go forward to melee, the chance of them getting caught in a crossfire is pretty high. If the skill affect the amount of wool or milk you harvest then it would probably be worth. But for training itself, we'd have to be able to have some way to reduce the chance of our trained animals being taken out too easily (maybe craftable armour for them) for there to be a greater purpose.

Melee - Now this one is subjective. I do know that there are fans of this but to me, the trade-off doesn't seem to be worth compared to shooting. You'd need a good set of clothing, armour, and personal shields in order to make a melee toon worthwhile when taking on raiders. And even then, they have a significantly higher chance of getting critical injuries or even dying compared to shooters. Even in a fight with manhunter animals, a shooter can pretty much take out an animal before it reaches him, but a melee would likely suffer a few injuries in trying to take it down. I personally would like to see melee be given more weight but currently, its like the saying "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight..." being taken literally.

There are other skills which I do find important but those can afforded some leeway in their use. Stuff like  mining and crafting are key to me as well but they are trainable over time. Crafting is actually very important but its one of those skills which you can pretty much upgrade by spam crafting cheap stuff (wooden bows and such). Research is a little lacklustre as it falls off in the end game but not as much compared to the 3 I mentioned above.

[Catastrophy]

Research is kinda useless after the tree is finished. It could at least prevent skill degradation or something.