So after trying and failing to find my old file (sorry!), I thought that I hadn't actually played Gearhead for a good long while, before the change to the new skillset at very least.
So I gave it a fresh start, and will take the opportunity to raise a few of the things that hit me:
1: The fewer skills thing is mostly pretty neat.
Not having to learn to repair with two different skills: Makes sense and is much better.
Learning Martial Arts "free" when learning useful melee combat skills: Nice bonus considering range beats melee, early game martial arts going to a decent black market works wonders.
Learning how to shoot all point-and-shoot weapons with one skill: Neat!
Dominate Animal/Robotics/Pick Pockets being talents: Makes sense, cool.
This apparently came with a few sacrifices though:
The fact that none of these are documented: Lame.
The fact that skills no longer indicate their associated skill: Annoying.
Losing the Cybertech skill and talents: Makes using Cybertech inevitably cause trauma and dysfunction. This sort of ruins cybertech for me, which is a shame, I loved using an Extropian cyborg. Cybertech already sort of sucked, since a mecha pilot with decent cybertech upped their point value so much their Mebsy could be a Savin, meaning harder opponents and lower exp rewards for defeating them, this change just stops them from being worth the trouble.
Perhaps Extropian could be added as an any-time Talent to ignore 3 pieces of cyberware, or made dependent on the Medicine Skill?
As another possible, why not combine Conversation, Taunt and Intimidation under an umbrella "Communication" skill? Worst case you can then split out specialist Intimidate/Taunt actions with a Talent.
2: I miss Chatting.
It's weird, but it was actually pretty enjoyable just talking to people for information whilst making friends with them. With a character with no Conversation skill and average charm, everyone automatically disliked them and that never altered. Even with the conversation skill it seemed a little strange how even the character's loyal friend and lancemate was never more than lukewarm towards them.
3: The cap on number of skills is pretty harsh - especially considering cybernetic enhancement of your brain doesn't help you meet these caps.
With 1 point in Knowledge, you have 8 skills.
5 points 9 skills.
10 points 10 skills.
With 15 points in Knowledge, you have 11 skills.
20 points 12 skills. - This means without double expenditure, you need 15 points + 7500 Exp worth of choices.
To be a mecha pilot you must have: Mecha Piloting + Mecha Gunnery/Fighting.
Arguably you want Electronic Warfare (since it's hilariously powerful with a decent skill in it).
To be able to get missions you still need conversation (having tried it without conversation, you will get 1 job in 10 or fewer, and forget trying to get performance contracts, the check is Conversation + Charm).
To function in normal personal scale activities you need: Dodge + Armed Combat/Ranged Combat.
To have a chance of success with certain annoying missions (find the mecha flying around in space that doesn't automatically attack you, it's easy to spend over a week of game time without succeeding, especially if the little cuss moves around), Awareness is mandatory.
That's five more or less mandatory skills - you will have to engage in personal level activity sometimes, you will definitely need mecha skills, so without these five, you're pretty much shooting yourself in the foot.
There are 20 other skills, most of which are valuable.
Gold:
Taunt/Intimidate: If I recall, Intimidate is awesome and makes the pilot eject giving you a free mecha, Taunt gives apparently the same thing, along with a chance of stat penalty. I don't know the particulars but I'd assume Intimidate has a higher chance of ejection/surrender. Since a free mecha is one of the best possible things you can get, this is awesome.
Mecha Engineering: The coolest part of the game is playing around with mecha, without this skill, you cannot modify mecha, which is like missing out on half that the game has to offer. Also lets you rescue parts of a lancemate's destroyed mecha after winning via Uninstalling the part then shifting it over to your other mech, which is hugely useful.
Electronic Warfare: It's a second/third dodge roll in a system where avoiding hits is _always_ the best option, with Stunt Driving and this, you have three separate attempts to avoid damage from any source. Since almost everything happens in a mecha, this makes it the next best skill after mecha pilotting.
Repair: Required for the best Talent, Tech Vulture, and gives a nice source of exp by fixing everything yourself.
Perform: Repeatable jobs specifically for the perform skill (one of the few non-mecha jobs around), and its own quest chain mean Perform is one of the coolest skills to have.
Silver:
The second two attack skills: It's tempting to invest in ranged combat to make use of that laser cannon you found, or Mecha Fighting to make use of a shield/Rocket Hammer/Foot, Close Combat to let you parry/block/use your Double Lance.
Spot Weakness: Pretty valuable for both personal and mecha scale combat, since a lot of the time a critical hit is going to be the only way you hit/hurt anything at higher reknowns.
Stealth: Well played stealth + smoke bomb will let you beat enemies you have no hope of beating otherwise, even without Ninjitsu. It appears to constantly check itself whenever you're near someone, so presumably it's always training itself.
Science: Quite a few subplots have science as a required skill, and it can be used in place of code breaking for several others, which isn't bad at all. Robotics is safely ignorable, since there's no personal combat opponent a good Double Lance to the skull can't deal with.
Bronze:
Medicine: Healing is easy and doctors are everywhere. There isn't a quest for a doctor either, though constantly taking care of your own treatment is a nice exp source.
It's best use? Reviving your valuable, valuable lancemates. Last I tried (admittedly a few versions ago), you could patch them up even after an hour or so with a high enough medicine skill.
Code Breaking: No door can't be broken through with a Double Lance, and no box that contains anything better than a gold chain is locked. Useful for Exp and a few pennies, including saving a few k and hours on detectives/professors. It may have a few possible uses breaking into corporation's top floors and snagging a few artifacts, but most of this is pretty forgettable.
Shopping: Fairly forgettable considering how easy it is to make cash, but you get exp for shopping!
Toughness: With decent armour you'll probably not lose health anyway, and health points can be trained directly at a gym regardless. It does protect against getting sick, but once you're well equipped, only a very lucky roach or a filth ball can cause that little problem (even through a sealed, undamaged spacesuit!).
Waste skills:
Survival: Worthless. Survival bars weigh nothing, you can't acquire neat stuff from survival, and there's no wilderness to require it.
Mysticism: Obviously.
Insight: There are no investigation quests, there is very little main-plotwise that can't just be handled through Science, and there's very few general uses for the ability outside of its little niche.
So the problem here, among other things, is that having so few skill slots available is pretty severe disadvantage to select starting careers.
Hacker/Computer Programmer/Corporate Executive/Monk/Police Officer/Priest/Shopkeeper/Spy/Athlete/Firefighter/Forensic Investigator/Journalist/etc: Basically a wasted skill.
Soldier: Redundant skill, since specialising in non-mecha combat is a bit of a waste.
X Pilot: Redundant skill, being able to use the rarely useful melee weapons/shields is borderline worth a precious skill slot.
Construction Worker: Redundant skill, and you'll have to get Gunnery anyway.
Before, big deal, it's not a major issue since you could just pick up an extra skill and have a more fleshed out character, but since with 20 knowledge you've still only got 12 skill slots, you're sacrificing about 10% of your character's abilities if you pick any of the above, or 20% of their talents for a 25% increase in available skills.
You can certainly complete the game without getting all the skills (I pretty much completed the game without conversation after all, though the Perform I took on the character was entirely worthless), but this restriction comes at the expense of a lot of the game's sandbox qualities - want someone good at both shooting *and* hitting things, *and* avoiding things? 25% of your skill slots. Want someone good in a mecha at those same things too? 50% of your skill slots.
I want a character with: Mecha Pilotting, Ranged Combat, Dodge, Mecha Gunnery, Close Combat, Electronic Warfare, Code Breaking, Stealth, Mecha Engineering, Repair, Awareness, Shopping, Conversation, Survival and Taunt.
I want a character with: Mecha Pilotting, Ranged Combat, Close Combat, Dodge, Mecha Gunnery, Electronic Warface, Stealth, Repair, Science, Conversation, Intimidation, Awareness, Medicine, Spot Weakness, Survival and Initiative.
I want a character with: Toughness, Close Combat, Ranged Combat, Repair, Mecha Engineering, Mecha Pilotting, Intimidation, Survival, Science, Mecha Gunnery and Dodge.
Of those I can only manage the third without superhuman effort, and even then it requires 15 knowledge.
And that's a shame considering playing Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca would be pretty cool.
4: You have a house! And a family! And they can join your lance! Maybe.
This. Is. Awesome.
All of it.
Every bit.
Let's hear it for randomly generated siblings in the future, and family based plots, because this has so much potential.
5: Personal scale got some new toys.
Which is neat, the uber-boomerang Fan is great, if a little "Xena", and the Inferno Token, unless I've missed it from before, is a nice new addition to the lonely, lonely sonic token. The Double Lance is still awesomely overpowered though, as might be obvious from how much I mention it. It's faster than any other weapon in the game, deals more damage than all other weapons except the Scythes, Chainsaws or a monowhip, and weighs.... 2 kg, allowing it to be handled one handed. Slap on a decent token and it renders any other melee weapon obsolete. This should probably be considered for a tweak to remove armour piercing (not a mono-double-lance), up the weight (since it currently weighs as much as a monomolecular sword), and/or drop the speed to something slower than a knife.
I still hold onto the dream of giving personal scale activities an overhaul one day, with armband based mounts, Biotech cyberware (most likely trauma free and self-repairing), and more in the way of bio/cybertech in general (like a set of arc jet installed wings, hover boots, a biotech implant that gives you fire breath, just expanding the mecha engineering engine over to the personal scale would give incredible freedom).
The lack of personal scale missions is still a bit grating as well, but until the promised conversion takes place I'll not be messing with missions, though there are several easy possibilities:
Hostage Situation: Pirates/Terrorists/Food Critics have captured a building full of hostages.
Go in with Mecha - Probably a bad choice for the hostages, but take out their escape transportation.
Go and hostage negotiate - Travel unarmed and alone to the front gate to talk to the man for a conversation skill resolution.
Infiltrate - Enter through a side door with Stealth/Code Breaking, assassinate pirates or rescue hostages to follow you to safety.
Lab-Experiment: An underground lab complex full of presumably illegal bioweapons (or indeed, a single, multiple square SF 1+ giant bioweapon) has had a major containment breach. Go in your mecha, possible outcomes include:
Giant Bioweapon erupts forth from underground complex, mech battle time.
Enter complex to engage series of high power enemies, Hunters, things worse than hunters, giant attack robots of doom, Alien knockoffs, it's all good, or just enter a huge arena with a single highly dangerous biomonster.
Report problem to authorities investigating the matter, receive some backup for the mission (even on the SF: 0 scale), lawful boost, lower reward, enmity of mad doctor (mad doc's revenge possible follow-up mission).
Take down warship: Either bluff your way aboard and take out the crew (or destroy the reactor and race a self-destruct out of the ship), or fight it to a standstill with your mech. A noteable alternative is to cripple it, but still need to board it to extract an artifact.
Burning Building: A major fire, fly there as quickly as possible. When inside the burning building (and having seen how fire behaves in Gearhead, this should be plenty dangerous enough), destroy wreckage to reach and talk to NPCs to rescue them (each NPC can presumably have a different response as well), potentially resuscitate a few who have succumbed to the smoke, then escape from the premises without burning to death.
6: NPCs hold grudges like a bored midwife.
I fight a single mission against the Silver Knights raiding a territory. I win. I randomly encounter in the same spinner a patrol by the Silver Knights who challenge me to a duel. I have a War Cry and a Galah, they have a Savin and four Buru Burus or so. I run and lose. For the rest of the game, the Silver Knights will never forgive, never offer any missions, and attack me on sight. Awesome, especially since the rest of the main plotline sent me to Silver Knight dominated spinners over and over again.
Since there's no way to have a mission appear on the map and complete it without consulting the NPC first, how about a goodwill quest or buying forgiveness or something? And how about leaving a faction too? I played an Arena Pilot first and was stuck being a member of the Pro Duellist Association the whole game.
7: Main plot plays through a lot more smoothly.
I liked being able to direct the plot that way (and trouncing my rival so often they became my loyal disciple), and having played through several throwaway characters the various arcs that have emerged are all pleasantly varied.
8: Lancemate limit buggy.
Having completed the Cavalier's Club second floor mission the game specifically stated something along the lines of "You are winner! +1 Max Members for Lance!". Beat the aforementioned rival, can I add 'em? No. One lancemate limit. Am I missing something?
I'm about to play through again with a new, cyber-free character with conversation skills, not wasting three skills in having extraneous combat skills, and see if I can't squeeze in Science, Perform and Code Breaking, so I'll probably add more as I think of/come across it.
Edit: It occurs to me that I forgot to mention Initiative! Initiative one of the most powerful skills in the game! Duh me. This skill is so good it's all but mandatory, without it, you can never take more than two actions per minute. With a 16 Speed stat and 6 initiative you take four actions a minute, attack twice as fast, move twice as fast, in a game about action economy, nothing beats it. This just about means six instead of five mandatory skills if you care about effectiveness of your characters.
