Colony population

[Royce]

Honestly, the time required to learn skills should change completely... it should work more like this:

Current training time for a Tier 1 skill is 12 hours a rank or 108 hours total: 12/12/12/12/12/12/12/12/12

Instead of being a flat time for all 9 ranks, it should instead curve with something like this...

1 hour
2 hours
4 hours
8 hours
12 hours
16 hours
18 hours
20 hours
24 hours

That's 105 hours, which is practically the same amount of time but a much better curve for the game.

Because as it stands right now, having to wait literally DAYS just to get a single rank in a skill (+2% dmg to cruisers??) is kind of tedious and un-fun for me.

That's the absolute reverse of how the tutorial implies it works. According to the tutorial:

Researching new ranks is considerably faster than learning a new technology.

That is not actually true, but it would make more sense IMO. The first rank often unlocks access to a ship type or grants an ability, while additional ranks just increase the skill's effectiveness. If the first rank was easy to acquire, everyone would have at least one rank of each skill, and player builds would become more homogenous and boring. If anything, the first rank should take the longest, and subsequent ranks should be quicker.

[JetJaguar2000]

I'm not sure I would go that far. I think there is still a place for skills that grant you access to a new ship or ability taking a long time to learn. I actually kind of like the dilemma of deciding whether now is a good 3 day period to start learning something big, or if you should leave your queue open to learn something shorter that you might need soon (like another rank of Advanced Shipyards).

But yes, there is something obnoxious about the timing of some skills. For sure the bonuses per rank are pathetic; 2 or 3 days research for +2% in some tiddly wink stat is sad. Anything that is going to take multiple days to complete feels like it should have a big payoff. There are a huge number of skills in the list that I would just never consider wasting time on (basically all the purely stat-based ones that don't grant access to new technology).

Keep in mind, as I implied above, subsequent ranks of a skill are SUPPOSED to take significantly less time to learn (according to the tutorials). I don't think this is working properly right now. I don't know if it's a bug, or they decided against it, or what. I do think if they get that aspect working, it still needs to be tuned per-skill. The idea of subsequent ranks in Advanced Shipyards, for example, taking less than 12 hours is frightening. I wouldn't want to see a situation where people could double their fleet capacity overnight.

[Royce]

But yes, there is something obnoxious about the timing of some skills. For sure the bonuses per rank are pathetic; 2 or 3 days research for +2% in some tiddly wink stat is sad.

I would love to have some clarity on what the percentage increases are actually a percentage of. They always seem to do far more than the number would lead you to believe. For instance the 3% increase in RO production at first increases the amount by an infinite percentage, then by much more than 3% leading me to believe it is something like 3% of max possible production, not a current value. So while it sounds like a tiny increase, it actually has a dramatic impact.