Taking into account the discussion here (and on other threads), we’re planning to make the following changes:
Skills will change from boosting enemy health to boosting mission difficulty (i.e., spawning more difficult enemies). If we assume a mission has a nominal difficulty from 1 to 100, Veteran might add +20%, SSH +40% etc (these percentages will be tweaked). Additionally, harder skills will remove RNG limits that would normally prevent it from spawning all-miniboss waves (similar to the ones seen on other threads). Attack frequency and projectile speed will also be increased.
In return, harder skills will yield more points (driving you up the rankings) and more keys (even more than what they do now).
It’s impossible to remove the random element from a procedural generated universe. The galaxy currently has over 18000 missions, it’s not reasonable to expect that each one will be perfectly balanced as if it were hand-tuned. If a predictable experience is what you’re after, play the previous episodes. So, yes, it will still be possible to be screwed by the RNG, but it’s going to be a much rarer event than what it is now (as explained on another thread, the generator currently has a bug causing excessive difficulty). Favourites were created with this in mind: so that in your explorations you will cherry-pick the missions that you enjoy the most and replay them as many times as you’d like (and also combine them into shared challenges, but that’s another story).
Discuss.