video: Asgard vs Xenon K .... well couldn't be called vs

[Imperial Good]

What do service crew contribute to other than repair on a combat ship?

General ship skill. For example faster mining speed, faster response times e.t.c. Some large fraction of ship skill is from the captain, with the rest being from service crew. Full service crew skill requires filling the ship entirely with maximum skilled service crew. Marines count at empty slots as far as service crew skill goes, irrespective of the skills of the actual marine.

a) The "spork" is neither a good spoon or a good fork. There is a reason for marines to be marines and crew to be crew...

Nothing stops you having 5 star marines which are also 5 star service crew. Morale is used in both rolls and you can level up engineering and boarding by changing the role of the crew person. Such crew could also be 5 star managers and 5 star captains if they were levelled as such.

b) How is the crew going to be automatically replaced? And, more importantly, shouldn't this also be for the player's own ship(s) negating the (not in my liking at all) spacewalking aimlessly on a station?

Most realistic/sensible option would be that the ship gets an order to fly to an equipment dock and orders on more crew. The crew that gets placed is special and matches the roll profile of the ship job, similar to when the ship is built. This would mean that players need to repeatedly board the ship in the same location and not leave it alone for any length of time.

In addition to this the AI should respond to being boarded and send a large defence fleet to guard the ship. These ships should defend the boarded ship when near and become hostile to anything it is hostile with. The ships should then guard it until it can make its way to an equipment dock to replenish its crew. This large defence fleet should instantly hostile the ship if boarding was successful and attempt to destroy it for 30 to 60 minutes.

The player already has a lot of options to replenish crew and move crew around from the map view. No walking on platforms required, unless you want to find reasonably skilled crew.

[jlehtone]

What do service crew contribute to other than repair on a combat ship?

General ship skill. For example faster mining speed, faster response times e.t.c. Some large fraction of ship skill is from the captain, with the rest being from service crew. Full service crew skill requires filling the ship entirely with maximum skilled service crew. Marines count at empty slots as far as service crew skill goes, irrespective of the skills of the actual marine.

There is data for mining efficiency. Are there other measurements?

Player empire stats show sum of skill points. The ship UI shows "average crew skill". If the sum of skill is the determining factor, then why does UI bother with the average? An Asgard with only the Captain and Asgard that has Captain and 360 Service Crew can both have average skill 5.0 but huge difference in absolute skill points.

How many 1-star engineers have same skill as one 5-star?
Are there diminishing returns? Say 180, 240, or 300 engineers, how much performance is lost by dropping crew from 300 to 180? From 180 to 20?

If ship types A and B have identical loadouts, but A can take more crew than B, then does that mean that B matches A if they have same crew and is more efficient with full crew? (E.g. Phoenix Vanguard vs Sentinel.)


In real life there are only so many persons that one can cram into the seat of the tail-gunner. What you can have is a reserve person that steps in when the front line musketeer drops dead. It would make sense to have "active posts" that are a property of ship or equipment. Crew over the active posts would give no benefit. Some faction could have more automation, e.g. less posts per turret. Pirates would prefer those, if they were in the boarding business.

[aquatica]

I wouldn't mind having warships with two "stocks" of crew. Service crew 180 persons and Marines up to 200 for example, totaling at 380. Max capabilities would be with 180 service crew (5 star) and 200 marines (5 star).
Maybe even add prioritize on it, so if marines get wasted on boarding attempts, Service Crew would start to fill in the ranks to a point (let's say that as long as there are 100 service crew around, marines would always be topped up after boarding attempt). That would effectively make 200 marines to be 280 marines making boarding a quite a lot harder to do!

Oh, and add biological weapons. Low-skilled crew and marines would be more vulnerable than high-skilled crew, because more skilled crew would know how to protect against it. I think that would make boarding effectively difficult (as it really should be).