new "mental stability" skill

[Tekky]

What?

I propose that a skill named "mental stability" should be added to the game, which increased the morale of the dupe. It should be possible to invest more than one skill point into this skill.

 

Why?

Currently, it often happens that dupes have several skill points available that cannot be used due to morale limitations. If my suggestion were implemented, then it would always be possible to use the skill points that you earn. For example, even if a dupe is at its morale limit, it would always be possible to invest skill points into the dupe, by investing half of his available skill points into the dupe's mental stability and the other half into other useful skills.

That way, a dupe's morale would still be important, because if a dupe has sufficient morale, it would not be necessary to "waste" skill points on a dupe's mental stability. However, morale would no longer place a hard cap on the skills a dupe can learn, but rather a soft cap.

[Sasza22]

I`m not sure about this. It gives something for lategame when you want to dump your skillpoints but early it kinda invalidates setting up decor and morale requirements. You might as well ignore decor early, just go by the path of least resistance with adding mental points and just making a grat hall (that`s usually easy and gives a lot) then not build any morale stuff until lategame when you use the skill scrubber for extra points.

Might be overall a good idea but it kinda overrides some early morale stuff.

[Tekky]

The strength of the morale bonus from the mental stability skill should of course be a matter of balancing. The bonus should not be so high that other sources of morale become significantly less important.

[Tekky]

Instead of requiring the player to explicitly assign skill points to mental stability, it would be simpler if all unused skill points would automatically count as assigned to mental stability. As soon as an unused skill point is assigned, the mental stability morale bonus is lost.

This would also be in line with how morale works currently: When you assign a skill point, you get a morale penalty. With my suggestion, the main difference would be that whenever you earn a new skill point, you get a morale bonus ("mental stability") until you assign the skill point to some other skill.

That way, earned skill points will never be useless, but will always provide some kind of bonus.

[Coolthulhu]

The OP's variant sounds tedious.

8 minutes ago, Tekky said:

Instead of requiring the player to explicitly assign skill poiints to mental stability, it would be simpler if all unused skill points would automatically count as assigned to mental stability.

This doesn't sound tedious by itself, but it would have tedious side effects: if dupe morale rose with time (regardless of whether it did so automatically or by tedious assignment), it would be optimal to continually advance dupes to keep them near their "potential".

Current skill system has one big advantage: once you assign skills according to dupe's bedroom and food, the dupe stays "optimally configured" for hundreds of cycles, until food is improved or the dupe needs to be made into an astronaut. This is much, much better than any advantage that could be gained from having a manual sink for skill points.

[ONIfreak]

I think it would be more beneficial to change skills so you have to "pay" more for higher skills. Therefore you will need to gather skill points to get some higher lvl skills instead of just having one skill a trash can where you just dump all non used skill points.