Novel idea...i like the approach to deepend corporate interaction.

Lots of potential for skill trees here that could tie into the upcoming patch. Example...CFO skill tree might give you a small passive interest accrual to the main corp wallet per level....say 1.5% per level. Recruiting skill tree could give you a bump of ISK per new recruit based on WPs earned that aren't taxed straight from the player or increased salvage drops for new recruits.

Consultation would be a skill attribute found within the Corporations skill tree which allows you to share your corporation skills completely, even the current (and only) corp building skill, with another corp while remaining in your own.

ItGÇÖs an interesting idea, but there would need to be a limit to the number of consultants to prevent people from abusing the proposed system. Also the skill trees you have suggested could easily be switched over to a squad leader skill tree. Only allowing those bonuses to be obtained in combat. Your proposed consultant skill tree would fit better as a squad leader skill tree. Also your weapon service supplier skill would have to be changed, or it would be changed further down the road. With the end goal eventually being there are no NPC vendors.

I think it is an interesting idea, but I donGÇÖt think there is any demand for the position, or at least not needing to add it as a mechanic. There is currently nothing stopping any player from acting in the consulting/spy role, itGÇÖs only a matter of finding someone to pay you for it.

Also the skill trees you have suggested could easily be switched over to a squad leader skill tree. Only allowing those bonuses to be obtained in combat.

How about Squad Leader Skills being a path progression of the consultant skill node. Call that person a Tactical Liaison Supports Coordinator. A sub-path of this would the R&D specialist skills I talked about. They would be tuned to cater to more on-field battle avantages.

How about Squad Leader Skills being a path progression of the consultant skill node. Call that person a Tactical Liaison Supports Coordinator. A sub-path of this would the R&D specialist skills I talked about. They would be tuned to cater to more on-field battle avantages.

If you look at it only from the battle/market environments then I think the classes proposed should change. Move away from the pure combat boost because the consultant is not actually going into combat with you. Make the bonuses they provide something that will help in battle or in the market without just giving the players a stat boost.

Change weapon specialist to Artillery commander and allow it to have an effect on orbital bombardments. Not an increase in damage, but perhaps a change in the WP required before one can be earned. Or if the mechanics for it were changed lowering the targeting time for the ships EVE side.

The proposed Medical Researcher could increase the amount of time a player can remain incapacitated, increasing the amount of time they have to be revived.

There could also be a scientist based tree allowing for corporations to increase the number of clones produced per cycle, or decreasing the number of clones lost due to transportation. You could also create a skill tree that allows you to earn more money back from selling excess clones. Although I would imagine that at some point a corp with to many clones will be able to see them on the market to other corps.

If you changed the skills from pure combat enhancers it could make it more interesting. It would also prevent an overlap in squad leader based bonuses that I assume are eventually going to show up. I still believe there needs to be a limit on the number of consultants simply to avoid abusing the system. If you limited the number to say 5 it would prevent people from having an obvious way to abuse the system. Unlike EVE Dust is F2P and creating an alt account and collecting passive SP is to easy.



I feel like the role of a consultant should remain as a supportive role. The bonuses they grant should be of a tactical nature, not a stat boost.

Very cool concept. I love that it deepens the skill tree and the benefit of working with a corp without giving the big corps a massive advantage over the little guys. I am assuming that having multiple people with these roles and skills would not have cumulative benefits as this would make large corps massively over powered.

The current mechanics allow the squad leader to give their squad leader status to anyone else in their squad. It would make sense for the squad to lose the gains provided by the former squad leader in favor of the new squad leader. Although maybe the change should only take place after you visit a supply depot? You donGÇÖt want someone switching to a squad leader that increases bleed out time or decreases death timer just as they die.

It would allow for the possibility of more interesting battles, and the consultant or advisor role could create an interesting complexity to the overall game.

you could cap off the total number of advisors a corp could have, and if you had multiple people with the same skills they could act the same way a module does when you stack it. That could allow a Corp to specialize in a certain aspect without giving larger corps a huge advantage.

There could also be a scientist based tree allowing for corporations to increase the number of clones produced per cycle, or decreasing the number of clones lost due to transportation. You could also create a skill tree that allows you to earn more money back from selling excess clones. Although I would imagine that at some point a corp with to many clones will be able to see them on the market to other corps.

Each property size would be able to hold a set number of vehicles. In addition, the size of the facility would contribute toward the percentage multiplier of producing a successful BPC with the selected vehicle, weapon or installation placed into the garage.

(Corporation) 3 Vehicles; 1 weapon cache; 0 deployable installations; 2% Production bonus
(Megacorp) 6 Vehicles; 2 weapons caches; 1 deployable installation; 7% Production bonus
(Transstellar Empire) 15 vehicles; 4 weapons caches; 3 deployable installations; 12% Production bonus

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
Base Value for Success rate of single BPC production per day before Facility Attributes
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

Militia Grade Item 80%

Basic 70%

Advanced 45%

Proto 25%

Officer 1%

If something like squad leader skills were added, and the current mechanic of changing the squad leader remained it would be easier to use the depot to transfer the bonus. With the current mechanics you are capable of changing suits at the depot, effectively changing your statistics if you change classes. It would make more sense to keep whatever the previous squad leaders skill bonuses were until you returned to the depot.

ItGÇÖs easier than having a cool down system that would have to change character stats on the fly. You could still use a cool down system to stop people from constantly switching squad leaders, putting greater importance on the squad leaders skills.

As far as looking at the consultant/advisor idea I think discussion should be limited to how it could work given the current game mechanics. There is currently no way for players to produce anything Dust side, and until those mechanics are introduced it makes any discussion of skill trees difficult. Not that the idea isnGÇÖt interesting. The idea of a small squad infiltrating an enemy base and having some sort of effect on the latter PC battle is a neat idea.

Those all seem like good possible skills that could have an impact on how the plays. The only thing I could think of to add would be a skill tree revolving around shared squad vision for the squad commander. Possibility of a decreased delay before a shield recharges. Overall it seems like a solid idea that everyone could benefit from, and not just corporations. With the squad finder being added into the 1.5 update the squad commander role becomes even more important.

A question regarding the consultant role. If a corporation squads up with another player who is outside of their corporation does that player receive the gains of that corporations consultant or their own?

Combat trainer +1% passive wp per lvl

Combat trainer +1% passive wp per lvl

Earlier today I was thinking about an corporation attribute that offers a bonus to isk returned from battles; however, this gets wonky when considering an end goal mindset that eve capsuleers will pay dust mercs to fight over contested lands.

If you changed the skills from pure combat enhancers it could make it more interesting. It would also prevent an overlap in squad leader based bonuses that I assume are eventually going to show up. I still believe there needs to be a limit on the number of consultants simply to avoid abusing the system. If you limited the number to say 5 it would prevent people from having an obvious way to abuse the system. Unlike EVE Dust is F2P and creating an alt account and collecting passive SP is to easy.

I'm just curious if the server could handle this type of shared skill interaction. It's adding in a lot of new variables to track.

(Recompiling ideas from a topic found here)

I am tremendously happy to see the new changes coming to corporation roles with 1.5. It is a great step in adding complexity and quality of life adjustments to a great game. What if we could take the idea forward with an interaction skill called "Consultation?"

Consultation would be a skill attribute found within the Corporations skill tree which allows you to share your corporation skills completely, even the current (and only) corp building skill, with another corp while remaining in your own. As a 4x skill, each additional level will allow you to share your abilities with another corporation of your choosing, up to a maximum of 5 corporations. This ability to share skills with multiple corporations will allow for a self-marketable player asset that can assist alliances and 'rivals' alike for a chosen retainer fee (or work pro bono). The trick is this information on corporate interaction is not visible unless obtained via word of mouth, or simply a corp director taking a screen cap of their own corporate dossier and sending it off through various channels. Finding out one of your high executives is consulting with the enemy could make for some very juicy metagaming.

The real depth, and necessity of consultation interaction would be the addition of further corporate skills which affect the attributes of all members within the corporation. Attributes can be lost or significantly lowered within a corporation if the consultant severs connection with the corporation. To illustrate, if a tier 3 level 5 weapons specialist leaves a service agreement with a corporation, those attributes will revert to the next highest attribute of either another consultant or corporation member who holds a skill ability in that category. Currently, I want to simply focus on the (proposed) Research and Development Specialist Attributes within the corporation skill tree path.

The path begins with R&D Specialist Director, and moves onto each path. Skill costs within each path are as follows below.

Tier 1 (2x Skill) 621,840 sp at Lv 5
Tier 2 (6x) 1,865,520 sp at Lvl 5
Tier 3 (12x) 3,731,040 sp at Lvl 5

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
Total investment 6,218,400 sp
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

Again to reiterate, these attributes are applied across the board to all members of a corporation who either a.) have the services of a consultant providing access to skills, or b.) an in-corp member, most likely on the director board, providing these skills.

-----|---------->Weapons Specialist
(Tier 1) Weapon Component Salvage Support (1% higher chance of receiving officer weapon per level)
(Tier 2 Unlocked lvl 5 ^) Weapon Munitions Management (2% larger ammo pool reverse for all weapons in corp)
(Tier 3 Unlocked lvl 5 ^) Weapon Service Supplier (1% discount to all weapons purchased from NPE vendors)

-----|---------->Dropsuit Protocol Design
(Tier 1) Sensor Development (3% bonus to dropsuit scanning radius of all corp members per level)
(Tier 2) Biotic Module Development (1% bonus to all biotic module efficacy of all corp members per level)
(Tier 3) Systems Protocols Design (1% bonus to dropsuit cpu and pg of all corp members per level)
*I like the risk associated with last second suit invalidation on this last tier. It increases the importance and risk of leaning on such a corp member in a PC environment.

-----|---------->Medical Response Coordinator
(Tier 1) Nanite Injector Adaptation (2% bonus to efficacy Nanite Injector revives)
(Tier 2) Repair Tool Enhancement (3% bonus to repair tool efficacy on target)
(Tier 3) Medical Respondent Survivability (1% bonus to self repair with repair tool active on target)

-----|---------->Vehicle Specialist
(Tier 1) Vehicle Engineering (2% bonus to torque and speed output per level)
(Tier 2) Vehicle Cooldown Management (3% bonus to vehicle module cooldown per level)
(Tier 3) Vehicle Systems Design (2% bonus to vehicle cpu and pg of all corp member vehicles per level)

Again these skills can be lost or significantly diminished if the corp member or consultant providing these skills leaves your service. Sensible corporate CEOs would be wise to invest in the vehicle and dropsuit R&D specialist roles for a greater safety net. Only auditors, directors, and CEOs of a corporation have veiwing access to see who is a consultant working with their corporation.

Edit / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

As these skills are more long-term passively based attributes, a recurring payment ability would work smashingly well with helping CEO's and Directors manage their retainer agreements with various consultants. This would simply work in the manner that you click on a player and designate to "pay x every x number of days."

Yeah, changes to consultant-corp relationship attributes should change at downtime. I do think that CEO's and directors should be notified immediately of any changes to consultancy status so they have time to prepare. The amount of time might get sketchy though if changes are revolving around the downtime.

To illustrate, Corp A and Corp B are set to take part in a PC battle one day from now.
Corp B pays Corp A's consultant to ditch ship for Corp B, 15 minutes before the downtime, hindering Corp A's ability to hire a new consultant before the down time. This new change in consultancy gives Corp B and edge over Corp A in the following day PC battle.

Does that scenario sound acceptable. I believe so.

Jadu, I would be fine with extending the merc initiation window by 3 to 5 days, while keeping the corporate window set to a day. I think this would discourage players from using dummy corporation accounts to switch between perks too frequently. Additionally. the added time of perk retention during that re-initiation window would allow for example defecting mercs to remain useful for longer in their new subversive partnership.

Oh..oh...oh. I think I see what you're getting at. A player could remain a free agent with all their perks indefinitely by continually rejoining and cancelling their status with a corporation as long as they don't go over the initiation timer.

Didn't think about that one. That might get a little funky. If someone is willing to go to that extent, I say more power to them.

The initiation timer could always work in a different way. Similar to the biomass system, you couldn't leave the corporation until the timer ran down. It's kind of like a two week notice, that either you, a personnel recruiter, a director, or CEO can initiate. However, in this case I would only clock the timer at 48 hours, max. Once the 48 hours were up, you would no longer have the attributes of the corporation and no longer be with the corporation.

The only problem I have with this system is it strikes me as too restrictive. What do you guys think?

I don't want to make you a sad panda, but I agree that these should definitely be squad leader skills. :( Good ideas though