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In FTL: Advanced Edition, when a character on a ship with a cloning bay dies, they are cloned. That character loses some skill points.

How many skill points? Is it a percentage or set number?

Aside from "avoid dying" is there any way to reduce the amount of skill point loss?

Joe the Person
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ChargingPun
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1 Answers1

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Having just sabotaged a perfectly good attempt to finish an EASY run (Yes, I play on EASY -- I'm a pansy), I discovered the following:

  • Skill loss is a flat amount.
  • Skill loss is applied to all skills.
  • Skill loss is not random.
  • Skill loss is different for different skills!
  • Piloting is affected -20% of a bar (-3 dodges)
  • Engineering is affected -20% of a bar (-3 dodges)
  • Gunnery is affected -20% of a bar (-13 shots)
  • Shielding is affected -20% of a bar (-11 impacts)
  • Repair is affected about -16% of a bar. (-3 repairs)
  • Combat is affected -12.5% of a bar. (-1 kill)

Thus, if you had perfect skills (full yellow bar) it would take 10 deaths to empty out piloting, engineering, gunnery, and shielding. It would take 12 deaths to empty out repair, and it would take 16 deaths to empty out combat.

Additionally, there is nothing magical about having reached a full green bar with a skill that prevents loss at all, although that might be kinda neat were it the case. So if you have 16 dodges in your piloting skill (a full green bar and 1 dodge beyond) and are cloned, you lose 3 dodges, removing your green bar benefits, leaving you at 13 dodges (about 87% of a green bar.)

BlackVegetable
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    Sounds like some awesome SCIENCE! was done here, but I wonder if this is true across all difficulty levels; I wouldn't be surprised if the skill loss is higher on harder runs. Then again, maybe it isn't, and it just relies as usual on the game just plain being harder... – Kromey Apr 08 '14 at 14:37
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    I'll look into that on harder difficulties, but honestly, I'm not good enough at the game to make that a simple task. Doing this required getting a crew member to maximum skill in every field of expertise (no, I'm not going to tell you how, but it wasn't cheating!) Doing that on normal/hard sounds like a huge pain. – BlackVegetable Apr 08 '14 at 14:38
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    Hey, if I had the skills to make a go of it at Normal/Hard I would -- but you've already out-classed my lackluster abilities! Besides, maybe somebody else will see your methods and my comments and fill in the void for the both of us. :) – Kromey Apr 08 '14 at 14:44
  • Do you lose the same number of skill points regardless of race? Humans have lower thresholds. – ChargingPun Apr 08 '14 at 15:58
  • @ChargingPun That's something I just thought about. I'll test that separately. I suspect you lose the same number of skill events (such as -3 repair) and thus the percentage of the bar would be different because humans require less. I'll try to investigate. – BlackVegetable Apr 08 '14 at 15:59
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    Leveling piloting, dodge, shield and weapons from zero to max is trivial in a single battle, if you have enough patience, and more shield than the enemy has firepower. The rest not so much. – vsz Apr 08 '14 at 16:14
  • Can a clone still reach max level in a skill? Or did I interpret something wrong? – Robotnik Apr 08 '14 at 23:52
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    @Robotnik Cloning has no impact on the maximum skill levels. – BlackVegetable Apr 09 '14 at 00:03
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    Another way to look at it is that any skill is decreased by as close to 10% as possible without going over 10%. (10% because, remember, there are two levels of skills.) If repair or combat took off one more skill point, that would push the percentage over 10% of the total (4/36 for repair = 11%; 2/16 for combat = 12.5%). – Kyralessa Jun 16 '14 at 23:41
  • Could you add to this answer if the penalty carries from one level to another? I mean, if crew had level 2 of a skill, cloning enough times would get it to 1 or 0? I think it does, reading your comment but could you confirm and explicit it? – Mauricio Pasquier Juan Apr 14 '17 at 23:59
  • @MauricioPasquierJuan I'm not quite sure what you're asking. What do you mean by level? Do you mean level 2 = yellow bar, level 1 = full green bar, level 0 = empty bar? – BlackVegetable Apr 15 '17 at 18:41
  • @BlackVegetable yes, exactly that – Mauricio Pasquier Juan Apr 16 '17 at 17:30
  • @MauricioPasquierJuan I think I answered your question more directly with my update. – BlackVegetable Apr 16 '17 at 18:01