Skill Training
Greetings, dear friends.
The objective of the Skill Training mechanic is to keep you positively engaged for a long time and to encourage you to play the game in the way you find the most enjoyable. By always rewarding you over time, the game allows you to play the way you really want, even when the game isn’t rewarding you explicitly for your current activity.
Skill training is a mechanic that governs the progression and development of your character’s skills. Skill training occurs in real time, even when you are offline. This means that your character continues to train skills even if you are not actively playing the game. Skill training is based on a time-based system. The rate at which your character gains Skill Points (SP) can not be modified through any ingame means.
Skills determine what activities your character can perform, such as flying specific ships or using certain modules, and how effective your character is at various tasks, such as shooting or scanning.
When you want to train a skill, you add it to your skill queue. The skill queue acts as a list of skills that your character will train one after another. Every second, your character will gain SP in the skill it is currently training, and when it reaches a certain threshold, the skill will level up, permanently giving you bonuses.
Whether you only play a bit every month or several hours a day, the skill training is always rewarding everyone in the same way. This allows you to plan your progression and long-term goals even if you have limited playtime.
Motivations
The skill training system aims to make your character permanently stronger over time, and more importantly, to free you, the player, from a strong extrinsic motivator. Extrinsic motivation is driven by rewards, incentives, or consequences from others or the environment. In MMORPGs, this often takes the form of experience points, skill points, levels, or other mechanics that boost your character’s power, most otften directly gained through active gameplay.
In ASTRO MAGNA, the main extrinsic motivation is locked behind a time-based progression, freeing you from the pressure of keeping up with other players’ power levels and encouraging you to enjoy the journey rather than racing to the end. You can still gain power through ships, modules, and implants, but these assets are considered temporary since they can be destroyed. Also, this temporal form of power requires ongoing effort to maintain when you lose it. Meanwhile, a significant and lasting part of your character’s power comes from skill training, which is a permanent improvement and continues happening automatically when setup.
With the most effective way to get stronger limited by time alone, intrinsic motivation takes over. Intrinsic motivation comes from within and is driven by personal interest, curiosity, enjoyment, and a genuine desire to engage in an activity for its inherent rewards. As you wait for skills to level up, you’ll naturally set your own goals and start pursuing them, leading to a way more meaningful and richer experience.
Many players are not used to this kind of gameplay and may struggle initially, asking themselves, “What do I have to do?” when the real question is, “What do I want to do?”. The concept of a “Main Quest” given to you by NPCs doesn’t exist here. You define your own objectives. That freedom to choose and pursue your own unique path is what makes accomplishments truly rewarding.
Skills
Normal Skills
Normal Skills have an exponential SP cost and are capped at 5 levels, with each level requiring 5 times more SP than the last. These skills are used for all capped improvements, such as boosting weapon damage or ship HP.
They also serve as a strong catch-up mechanic: reaching Level 4 is quick, costing just 20% of the total training time while granting 80% of the skill’s benefits.
Here is an example table for a Normal Skill
| Level | SP Needed | SP Total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 400 | 400 |
| 2 | 1600 | 2000 |
| 3 | 8400 | 10000 |
| 4 | 41600 | 50000 |
| 5 | 208400 | 250000 |
Static Skills
Static Skills have a constant SP cost per level and no cap, allowing indefinite training. They have been designed to enable players to expand their operations on a single character instead of forcing players to create an army of alternative characters to accomplish their goals. These skills are used mostly for scaling activities, such as Industry or Trading.
Here is an example table of a Static Skill, which stops at lvl 8 for display purposes. The static progression goes on forever.
| Level | SP Needed | SP Total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 50000 | 50000 |
| 2 | 50000 | 100000 |
| 3 | 50000 | 150000 |
| 4 | 50000 | 200000 |
| 5 | 50000 | 250000 |
| 6 | 50000 | 300000 |
| 7 | 50000 | 350000 |
| 8 | 50000 | 400000 |
Bonuses
Each Skill Level grants a permanent, cumulative stat bonus to your character. The bonus is identical per level and applies for each level trained.
Example
Light Missiles
- +5% Damage per level
Example Breakdown
- Level 1: +5% Damage
- Level 2: +10% Damage
- Level 3: +15% Damage
- Level 4: +20% Damage
- Level 5: +25% Damage (max level)
Skill Levels must be fully trained to gain their bonus, and skill points are permanent - you cannot untrain skills or recover SP.
Difficulty
Skill Difficulty determines the SP cost to level up different skills, acting as an SP multiplier. Starting at Difficulty 1, Level 5 costs 250,000 SP, and each additional Difficulty would require 250,000 SP more at Level 5.
| Difficulty | SP at Level 5 |
|---|---|
| 1 | 250.000 |
| 2 | 500.000 |
| 3 | 750.000 |
| 4 | 1.000.000 |
| 5 | 1.250.000 |
| 6 | 1.500.000 |
| 7 | 1.750.000 |
| 8 | 2.000.000 |
| 9 | 2.250.000 |
| 10 | 2.500.000 |
Basic skills have a Difficulty of 1, making them faster to train. As you progress and complete lower-difficulty skills, you might want to start training higher-difficulty skills, which take longer, but often unlock more advanced gameplay features.
Skill Requirements
Advanced skills often have prerequisites, requiring certain basic skills to reach a specific level before you can begin training them.
This design creates a progression structure, ensuring players gain foundational knowledge and capabilities before accessing more specialized or powerful abilities. It also balances gameplay by ensuring everyone develops this solid foundation, making the experience fairer for all. Additionally, the prerequisites create a series of milestones that give players clear, long-term goals and unlock opportunities for meaningful specialization as they advance.
Skill Categories
Skills are divided into two main categories
- Combat (Ships, Weapons, Defenses…)
- Non-Combat (Mining, Industry, Trade, Research…)
Skills within the same category often enhance a single activity, allowing related skill bonuses to stack and provide a noticeable boost when combined. Driven by a desire for optimized performance, players tend to feel pressured to focus exclusively on either Combat or Non-Combat skills, leading to specialization in one category while neglecting the other. However, this approach can feel limiting, as it may require sacrificing the gameplay opportunities that the other category offers.
To explore both aspects without compromise, players often create a secondary character dedicated to training skills in the category their main character ignores.
This split between Combat and Non-Combat skills exists for a very specific purpose - to allow you to train both categories at the same time, removing the need for secondary characters.
Skill Queue
Your character continuously gains Skill Points by training the first skill in the Skill Queue. When you add a skill to the queue, it is assigned to either the Combat or Non-Combat Skill Queue, with both queues training simultaneously in parallel.
If a Skill Queue is empty, your character accumulates up to 250,000 untrained SP for that category, which can then be applied to any trainable skill of that category on demand.
Training Focus
Your character gains 1 SP per second, and you can choose how to allocate these points by selecting a Training Focus. This focus can be changed anytime, allowing you to experiment and optimize your training schedule.
You have 3 Training Focus choices: Equal, Combat, Non-Combat
| Focus | Combat | Non-Combat |
|---|---|---|
| Equal | 0.5 SP/s | 0.5 SP/s |
| Combat | 0.67 SP/s | 0.33 SP/s |
| Non-Combat | 0.33 SP/s | 0.67 SP/s |
This system lets you develop your character in both areas simultaneously while specializing in your preferred gameplay style. You no longer need to sacrifice one for the other, allowing for a more proficient exploration of all gameplay aspects.
For players not interested in multiple styles, this feature allows you to train skills that may pique your interest later, serving as a background task. Once you’re ready to explore those skills, you can dive in and see if you enjoy them, effectively treating it as a free bonus.
Neural Synchronization
To ensure MMORPGs remain engaging, it’s crucial that time invested in the present is valued more than time spent in the past. This requires effective catch-up mechanics for new players, allowing them to more easily compete with long-established players.
When contemplating whether to start playing a long-lasting MMORPG, no one wants to feel so far behind that there’s no chance to compete. What would be a very strong deterrent for newcomers has instead been replaced by a very strong incentive via the catch-up mechanic on the most important power aspect of the game. Additionally, this mechanic grows in efficiency over time, so the more years after the game’s release, the more powerful the incentive becomes.
Neural Synchronization enables players to train at an accelerated rate based on the difference in SP between them and the top player with most SP. This catch-up mechanic boosts SP gain for all players except the top player, gradually reducing the multiplier as SP is gained, making it easier for new players to become competitive. With this mechanic, everyone is catching up to the top player at different speeds without altering the relative SP order.
Neural Synchronization is a breakthrough rooted in advanced cloning technology, allowing newer pilots to access a shared pool of knowledge. Through each clone transfer, pilots receive subtle neural imprints from the most veterans pilots, accelerating skill development. Over time, as skill levels converge, the synchronization effect diminishes.
This mechanic, while designed for new players, also has the added benefit of welcoming back veteran players who quit the game in the past.
Formula
With this formula, the Top Player will always train at 1.0 SP/s, while everyone else will train at slightly more than that, but will never reach the Top Player’s current SP.
Conclusion and Goals
Skill training is a core mechanic designed for patience and long-term strategy, rewarding continuous commitment and allowing players to truly specialize. Most importantly, it grants the freedom to pursue personal goals. By shifting objectives from “have to do” to “want to do,” the system enhances player agency, making the experience more meaningful.
The goal of these skill training changes is to create a system that values each player’s unique journey, encouraging freedom, choice, and mastery over time. This system aims to create an environment where every player feels empowered to set their own path, find their own challenges, and define success on their terms - without feeling locked in a race or overshadowed by others.
Thank you for reading. Let’s redefine what’s possible in this genre!