In Sector Unknown, your character and companions will have their own skills and attributes.
Attributes are commonly used to determine your combat skills, but can occasionally be used to outside of combat as well. Combat stats are derived from your attributes and determine your success in combat. And finally skills are used primarily outside of combat in dialogue, through world interactions, and more. The only skills that can be used in combat is Piloting, which determines your skill in space encounters, and Luck which provide re-rolls on failed critical hits and evasions.
Attributes
Below are your attributes.
Strength - Health and Melee Damage
Coordination - Hit Chance and Armor Penetration
Vision - Initiative and Ranged Damage
Speed - Action Points and Evasion
Aggression - Critical Chance and Critical Damage
Intelligence - XP Gain, Attribute and Skill Points per level
With each new level, your Intelligence attribute determines how many attribute points you will be awarded that can be assigned to attributes.
This is as follows:
Intelligence 1, 2 = 1 Point
Intelligence 3, 4 = 2 Points
Intelligence 5, 6 = 3 Points
Intelligence 7, 8 = 4 Points
Intelligence 9, 10 = 5 Points
As well, attributes have an increased cost of adding, meaning if an attribute like Strength for example is 1, it will only cost one point.
Here is the scale for that:
Attribute 2 = next increase costs 1 point
Attribute 4 = next increase costs 2 points
Attribute 6 = next increase costs 3 points
Attribute 8 = next increase costs 4 points
Attribute 9 = next increase costs 5 points
As well, a character's origin and traits also offer bonuses to one of the above attributes (more on that in another post).
Combat Stats
As mentioned, combat stats are derived from your attributes.
Health - Strength
Initiative - Vision
Action Points - Speed
Evasion - Speed
Hit Chance - Coordination
Critical Chance - Aggression
Critical Damage - Aggression
Armor Penetration - Coordination
Melee Damage (Base) - Strength
Ranged Damage (Base) - Vision
As attribute points are increased, the connected combat stat also increases. As well, a character's origin and starting trait also offers bonuses in each of the above combat stats.
Skills
And finally we have skills. As mentioned, these are used primarily outside of combat. These are as follows:
Intimidation - Ability to intimidate people into doing what you want.
Persuasion - Ability to persuade people into doing what you want.
Perception - Ability to notice hints in dialogue or hidden objects in the world.
Larceny - Ability to engage in larcenous and illegal acts.
Luck - Ability to affect combat and non-combat situations in your favor.
Engineering - Knowledge of engineering and mechanics.
Science - Knowledge of scientific and abstract concepts.
Computers - Knowledge of computers and hacking techniques.
Biology - knowledge of biology and medicine.
Finances - Knowledge of finances.
Piloting - knowledge of spacecraft maneuvering and combat.
In Sector Unknown, I have taken a note from some of my favorite RPGs, offering many instances where you or your companions skills can affect situations, avoid combat, and provide more interesting story beats and replayability.
Skill points per level are also determined by your Intelligence (as well as your origin and trait).
The simple formula for Intelligence is for each point of that attribute, you gain a corresponding extra point to assign to your skills.
Closing
That's it for now. Hope this paints a better picture of the skills, combat stats, and attributes in Sector Unknown. These may be tweaked and adjusted closer to EA launch and perhaps even after, but this is the current system in place.
More updates to come!