sullen knoll
I think compute's in a bit of a weird place, where basically the only value it has is getting efficiency tiers (with everything else being incidental to that). So I had a thought on how to make it more interesting with more scope for upgrades down the line.
The idea is to make compute give skill points that can be distributed to the current fighter stats. I think it'd make sense to let them be respecced at any time for free. You'd still need more points to level efficiency than damage, for example, but you could drop efficiency entirely for damage if you're doing warps, or you could drop durability for manoeuvrability and speed if you're using agile fighters. (On that note, I think the fighter durability fixture might need to improve manoeuvrability, because agile fighters make it completely useless--at least until a rapid fire anti-fighter cap shows up, I suppose)
Compute speed/power itself would then be used to generate skill points. you would generate skill points similarly to how it works now (each completion increases the OOM--maybe not necessarily a full 10x, could make the gaps smaller maybe? Would need to be tuned pretty tightly). Future upgrades could add Fighter Improvement Scaling--either as a delay or as a reduction to the multiplier per level, or an increase in the number of skill points gained per bar fill (which could be a good mastery upgrade).
Over time, you could add breakpoints in each skill, for example 5 levels in efficiency gives you an extra bonus of some kind, both to incentivise spreading points around and to give people meaningful targets to shoot for, while also going some way to counteracting the additive linear growth in each stat.
It'd need a lot of tuning and experimentation to get right, but I think if you're trying to make compute more interesting and worth the investment, this'd be a decent way to do it.
prime glacier