Marines should act like service crew

[flywlyx]

In other words, a person that is not assigned as pilot would do service tasks whenever on ship, and fight if sent to board something?
Then we would have pilots, managers, and crew (but all of them would have more or less of every skill).

Even real-life marines still have to perform shipboard duties while on board.
I have no issue with marines contributing their full engineering skill to the crew skill calculation—this way, I wouldn’t need to keep any service crew on ships, and everyone could just be marines.

[GCU Grey Area]

The logic behind the slider is that when the player adjusts the engineer slider, the pilot slider moves along with it. Players should be capable of doing simple math to determine how many engineers remain if they remove a certain number of pilots. If this level of calculation is too complex for a player, then the task itself might already be too challenging.

Doesn't sound remotely challenging, however it would still add extra clicks, slider drags & time to the process. Even if it's just a few extra seconds per ship it adds up. When dealing with full carrier complement of S/M ships (say 48 S ships +12 M) every extra second each ship takes adds an extra minute to the process, which simply isn't necessary.

Assigning high-level pilots to marines requires selecting each one individually, which involves significantly more clicks compared to simply dragging a slider.

I don't do that stage individually. Bulk transfer of up to 100 group trainees from my HQ to 'marines' aboard my carrier works fine & takes very little time.

[Raptor34]

When marines aren't busy boarding ships, I think they should contribute to the overall ship skill level, just like service crew.

What it the point to assigning certain crew as marines? So they are available to be sent on boarding missions. But why not allow them to contribute to ship skill level when not being sent over on pods?

In other words, a person that is not assigned as pilot would do service tasks whenever on ship, and fight if sent to board something?
Then we would have pilots, managers, and crew (but all of them would have more or less of every skill).

Why leave it at there? Let most skilled person on ship to automatically be the pilot?

Now that there would be no distinction to marines and engineers, no green/veteran/elite, one just needs new ways to pick the skill levels one wants. Perhaps with a bit more convoluted clicking than now?

Well, yes. If the ship is in trouble and you have the skill to do something about it, are you going to sit around and let the ship break and burn down around you just because you are officially designated as a marine?
And you'll probably have less clicking too now that you don't need to keep having your crew changing their name tags calling them marine or service crew.
As for the pilot, you can already do that with a single click of the button right under the pilot's name which auto selects the best crew member btw, but people would generally want to handpick their pilots for their looks.

The logic behind the slider is that when the player adjusts the engineer slider, the pilot slider moves along with it. Players should be capable of doing simple math to determine how many engineers remain if they remove a certain number of pilots. If this level of calculation is too complex for a player, then the task itself might already be too challenging.

Doesn't sound remotely challenging, however it would still add extra clicks, slider drags & time to the process. Even if it's just a few extra seconds per ship it adds up. When dealing with full carrier complement of S/M ships (say 48 S ships +12 M) every extra second each ship takes adds an extra minute to the process, which simply isn't necessary.

That's why I'm suggesting that you can just select the fighters, mass select them even, right click on your pilot storage and click "choose best pilot" and it just picks them the same way you click on the button that says pick the best captain from crewmembers currently and the game just auto selects the best one.
It'll definitely incentivize me to rescue all those guys floating around if it wasn't so difficult to move pilots around.

Assuming we are talking about universal crew here, then the service crew, pilot, marine distinction would only be used for bookkeeping and also to determine where they stand within the ship.

[flywlyx]

Doesn't sound remotely challenging, however it would still add extra clicks, slider drags & time to the process. Even if it's just a few extra seconds per ship it adds up. When dealing with full carrier complement of S/M ships (say 48 S ships +12 M) every extra second each ship takes adds an extra minute to the process, which simply isn't necessary.

If pilots were separated from the service crew, you could simply have one ship dedicated to pilots and another for service crew. A carrier lacking crew impacts the entire fleet's performance, whereas having a dedicated ship for service crew makes more sense. I believe many players follow this setup, as training service crew with construction ships is a common practice.

I don't do that stage individually. Bulk transfer of up to 100 group trainees from my HQ to 'marines' aboard my carrier works fine & takes very little time.

Well, there is a pilot training program, so unless you're not using it to train pilots, the issue still remains.

[azaghal]

When marines aren't busy boarding ships, I think they should contribute to the overall ship skill level, just like service crew.

What it the point to assigning certain crew as marines? So they are available to be sent on boarding missions. But why not allow them to contribute to ship skill level when not being sent over on pods?

What I propose is that all crew can do all tasks, and instead split them into 2 types of crew instead which instead of restricting what skills apply when, instead acts as a safety net so you don't just accidentally send off all your crew to go board.
So like you'll have universal crew which are used for anything. Service crew which hard locks them to your ship.
For defense, frankly there is no reason service crew shouldn't contribute to defense. 10 guy with guns is no better than one engineer opening the air locks.

Some of these suggestions sound a bit convoluted to me if the main goal is just to have the marines behave as service crew when not boarding (thus contributing to ship repairs/efficiency and morale training). Isn't what Falcrack and Raptor34 have mentioned up there sufficient to cover almost all of the currently used patterns by players?

As for the pilots - just introduce an additional category for them, and have them also behave as regular crew in ship performance calculations (and contribute to repairs and gain morale). Maybe having a manager category could be helpful as well while at it? There's also that ship trader position, but truth be told I am not even really sure what it is for.

For promoting the best crew member to captain - replace the current promotion button in the information tab with drop-down menu and a "Promote" button next to it. Populate the drop-down menu with the best candidate out of all crew at the top (selected by default so you do not have to pick it by hand), followed by "Unassign" (to make it possible to easily unassign the pilot altogether), followed by top 10 crew members sorted by their piloting skills. Each crew member name would get listed with some kind of icon or profession name next to it (Service Crew, Marine, Pilot, Manager). The best candidate would have a small asterisk/star or something next to it as well. Alternative to top 10 crew members could be listing top three captain candidates out of each category.

Best regards,
Branko

[GCU Grey Area]

That's why I'm suggesting that you can just select the fighters, mass select them even, right click on your pilot storage and click "choose best pilot" and it just picks them the same way you click on the button that says pick the best captain from crewmembers currently and the game just auto selects the best one.
It'll definitely incentivize me to rescue all those guys floating around if it wasn't so difficult to move pilots around.

Assuming we are talking about universal crew here, then the service crew, pilot, marine distinction would only be used for bookkeeping and also to determine where they stand within the ship.

I don't necessarily want the best pilot for every ship. 5* pilots tend to be reserved for destroyers, 4* for fighters & frigates, 3* for freighters, etc. I find it's important to be able to select specific individuals for particular ships. An auto-selection method such as you propose would not be helpful for the way I play the game, particularly if it eliminated my primary means to distinguish between personnel I've trained to different degrees in the various skills. If anything I'd prefer more ways to distinguish between them, e.g. a 'reserve pilots' category for ship crews, rather than having to call them 'marines' even though most of them would be utterly abysmal at the job if they tried it.

If pilots were separated from the service crew, you could simply have one ship dedicated to pilots and another for service crew. A carrier lacking crew impacts the entire fleet's performance, whereas having a dedicated ship for service crew makes more sense. I believe many players follow this setup, as training service crew with construction ships is a common practice.

My fleets are big enough as they are & function well enough, even with a sizeable proportion of pilot/marines aboard each carrier. As long as overall crew skill for the carrier is at least 4* it's good enough as far as I'm concerned. Really do not want to have to add dormitory ships as well to every fleet.

I don't do that stage individually. Bulk transfer of up to 100 group trainees from my HQ to 'marines' aboard my carrier works fine & takes very little time.

Well, there is a pilot training program, so unless you're not using it to train pilots, the issue still remains.

Think you may have misunderstood. To be clear, they are trained using the 'Aerial Maze' pilot training facility. However while at my HQ they're classified as 'group trainees' until they leave, at which point they are bulk transferred as 'marines' to one of my carriers. Slider has 'group trainees' at the HQ end & 'marines' at the ship end.

[Raptor34]

That's why I'm suggesting that you can just select the fighters, mass select them even, right click on your pilot storage and click "choose best pilot" and it just picks them the same way you click on the button that says pick the best captain from crewmembers currently and the game just auto selects the best one.
It'll definitely incentivize me to rescue all those guys floating around if it wasn't so difficult to move pilots around.

Assuming we are talking about universal crew here, then the service crew, pilot, marine distinction would only be used for bookkeeping and also to determine where they stand within the ship.

I don't necessarily want the best pilot for every ship. 5* pilots tend to be reserved for destroyers, 4* for fighters & frigates, 3* for freighters, etc. I find it's important to be able to select specific individuals for particular ships. An auto-selection method such as you propose would not be helpful for the way I play the game, particularly if it eliminated my primary means to distinguish between personnel I've trained to different degrees in the various skills. If anything I'd prefer more ways to distinguish between them, e.g. a 'reserve pilots' category for ship crews, rather than having to call them 'marines' even though most of them would be utterly abysmal at the job if they tried it.

That's why I also suggested keeping the distinction, but only for bookkeeping and also so that it positions the crew in the appropriate position on the ship. Like I like having marines standing around, but it's categorically worse than making them all service crew.
So if you want to cordon off a part of them as your reserve pilots you can still do it, for the rest who don't care, and just want to be able to quickly get good pilots without needing to go through the whole song and dance, we can just right click.

[flywlyx]

My fleets are big enough as they are & function well enough, even with a sizeable proportion of pilot/marines aboard each carrier. As long as overall crew skill for the carrier is at least 4* it's good enough as far as I'm concerned. Really do not want to have to add dormitory ships as well to every fleet.
...
Think you may have misunderstood. To be clear, they are trained using the 'Aerial Maze' pilot training facility. However while at my HQ they're classified as 'group trainees' until they leave, at which point they are bulk transferred as 'marines' to one of my carriers. Slider has 'group trainees' at the HQ end & 'marines' at the ship end.

I always keep a human resources ship for pilots stationed near HQ since assigning pilots is instant, but transferring them from HQ to the ship takes time.

Service crews are constantly training on construction ships, so I never encounter the issue you're facing.

[GCU Grey Area]

That's why I also suggested keeping the distinction, but only for bookkeeping and also so that it positions the crew in the appropriate position on the ship. Like I like having marines standing around, but it's categorically worse than making them all service crew.
So if you want to cordon off a part of them as your reserve pilots you can still do it, for the rest who don't care, and just want to be able to quickly get good pilots without needing to go through the whole song and dance, we can just right click.

Fair enough, I'm just dubious that an automated system such as you propose would be able to reliably pick the 'best' pilot for the job, when the definition of 'best' varies considerably depending upon what that job is. It's not just a matter of best stats. Sometimes even identical ships, performing the exactly same role, have different personnel requirements in my games e.g. fighter pilots for my main fleets usually have somewhat lower stats than those which I assign to personally flown destroyers (if they're going to be working directly for me I want the best of the best). Not convinced it would be that easy to design an automated system which can take that sort of things into account, meaning I'd either have little use for the system or would end up spending an inordinate amount of time correcting it's mistakes, neither of which is particularly appealing.

I always keep a human resources ship for pilots stationed near HQ since assigning pilots is instant, but transferring them from HQ to the ship takes time.

Service crews are constantly training on construction ships, so I never encounter the issue you're facing.

No issues here, the existing personnel management systems do a good enough job for my purposes. I also train service crew on construction ships, however I don't like assigning them directly from construction ships due to the time it takes to transfer over long distances. This is why I prefer to move them to my carriers first, where they wait until I need to assign them to new subordinates. Means that when each new ship docks at the carrier the crew it needs is already in close proximity so the transfer time is very quick. I keep my reserve pilots on the same ship for the sake of convenience & saving a few seconds each time I need to assign personnel to a new ship - having pilots on the same crew list as the service crew & both in the same location as the ships that need them makes the process more efficient.

[Raptor34]

That's why I also suggested keeping the distinction, but only for bookkeeping and also so that it positions the crew in the appropriate position on the ship. Like I like having marines standing around, but it's categorically worse than making them all service crew.
So if you want to cordon off a part of them as your reserve pilots you can still do it, for the rest who don't care, and just want to be able to quickly get good pilots without needing to go through the whole song and dance, we can just right click.

Fair enough, I'm just dubious that an automated system such as you propose would be able to reliably pick the 'best' pilot for the job, when the definition of 'best' varies considerably depending upon what that job is. It's not just a matter of best stats. Sometimes even identical ships, performing the exactly same role, have different personnel requirements in my games e.g. fighter pilots for my main fleets usually have somewhat lower stats than those which I assign to personally flown destroyers (if they're going to be working directly for me I want the best of the best). Not convinced it would be that easy to design an automated system which can take that sort of things into account, meaning I'd either have little use for the system or would end up spending an inordinate amount of time correcting it's mistakes, neither of which is particularly appealing.

But the thing is the way you do it isn't the most common way, for the rest of us, we just want our best pilots, which most of the time are basically shot down one's and probably only 2-3 stars to quickly pilot new fighters.
The thing is as it is, there is not much point to pilots ejecting, because it's a real PITA to put them on new ships, a simple system as currently exists for choosing the best pilot from the current crew members, but expanded so it can pick it up from other ships would be a major QoL improvement.

[jlehtone]

In other words, a person that is not assigned as pilot would do service tasks whenever on ship, and fight if sent to board something?
Then we would have pilots, managers, and crew (but all of them would have more or less of every skill).

Even real-life marines still have to perform shipboard duties while on board.
I have no issue with marines contributing their full engineering skill to the crew skill calculation—this way, I wouldn’t need to keep any service crew on ships, and everyone could just be marines.

How about this:
* Marines do contribute their engineering skill when they are on a ship
* Service crews contribute their fight skills, when their (NPC) ship is boarded
* Neither learns from that experience

That would increase the difficulty of boarding a bit and not penalize keeping marines marines as much as current system.
You would still have to do the current training routines, if you want the "secondary" skill get better.

[Raptor34]

In other words, a person that is not assigned as pilot would do service tasks whenever on ship, and fight if sent to board something?
Then we would have pilots, managers, and crew (but all of them would have more or less of every skill).

Even real-life marines still have to perform shipboard duties while on board.
I have no issue with marines contributing their full engineering skill to the crew skill calculation—this way, I wouldn’t need to keep any service crew on ships, and everyone could just be marines.

How about this:
* Marines do contribute their engineering skill when they are on a ship
* Service crews contribute their fight skills, when their (NPC) ship is boarded
* Neither learns from that experience

That would increase the difficulty of boarding a bit and not penalize keeping marines marines as much as current system.
You would still have to do the current training routines, if you want the "secondary" skill get better.

Well, it'll be less tracking of stuff.
But I'll mention it again, but ideally each crew would have a learning aptitude stat which basically tracks how well they learn a skill. Under the current X4 system, that would be the same for a crew and all stats, that's why they all learn all skills equally well, and basically crew is only differentiated by their names and appearances.
Under my proposed system, crew would have some skills they learn better and some they learn worse, so say just because someone is good at learning how to shoot someone, they might not be good at learning engineering stuff. And someone good at learning how to fly, might not be good at learning how to shoot someone in close quarters. That way you have a natural distinction of crew, despite them all pitching in to do what they can, some of them would just lag behind if doing things they have no aptitude for.
Of course you can train them all to be 5 stars in all skills with time, but unless you use something like X4 terraforming training or crew seminars, it'll take a long long time. So no just throw all your marines in a CV and suddenly you get a whole bunch of PhDs in your boarding crew. And actually on that note, I'll also make training to 4 stars for pilots and other things much easier, at least for high aptitude pilots. Maybe if Egosoft still wants pilots to take forever to train, you can set the baseline guarantee to be medium aptitude pilots.

As a QoL, any crew you mass recruit from a shipyard/EQ dock would naturally have the appropriate learning aptitude for the skill you recruited them for, so no need to worry that your new batch of marines would suck at learning how to shoot better.

And of course, crew do not necessarily just have aptitude for one skill, going by low, medium, high, most of them would have high in their primary skill and low in a second skill, but the second skill would be random and not necessarily synergistic like combat/engineering.
And actually on that note, I'll also make training to 4 stars for pilots and other things much easier, at least for high aptitude pilots. Maybe if Egosoft still wants pilots to take forever to train, you can set the baseline guarantee to be medium aptitude pilots.
Most mass recruited crew from shipyards would guarantee high aptitude in the primary skill, and it would also guarantee that they would not have high aptitude in more than one skill, those you need to hunt yourself.
And if you recruit off the dock, you can even find wider variation, both from those with no aptitude for anything and all the way to geniuses with high aptitude in anything, or even some with medium in all, any combos you can imagine. So if you want a do anything crew, this incentivizes you to go hunt. But for standard ship ops, shipyard recruitment is good enough.

Also another change, I think in the current system you basically need to fill up your crew slots for good performance or something right? Like if you lack crew your ship becomes much worse?
Under the new system each ship would have a "necessary" crew complement which is less than the amount of crew it can carry, as long as you meet that, your ship would perform at near-max performance, leaving you space to carry spare crew. You can have spare crew provide a bonus to the ship too, but it rapidly runs into diminishing returns so that even if you fill them up, it doesn't really change much.
This way you can even differentiate further between different ships too, like ships with high automation or something can run at near-max with a very small crew complement and the rest can be basically passengers, while some ships even with large crew sizes might need to fill most of them with necessary crew for actually crewing the ship and not much space for things like marines.

[flywlyx]

No issues here, the existing personnel management systems do a good enough job for my purposes. I also train service crew on construction ships, however I don't like assigning them directly from construction ships due to the time it takes to transfer over long distances. This is why I prefer to ...

You need to consider that all these constraints already highlight the inconvenience of the current system. It should be as simple as selecting all the ships that need pilots, right-clicking on the source, and assigning them in a single screen instead of doing it one by one.

[flywlyx]

How about this:
* Marines do contribute their engineering skill when they are on a ship
* Service crews contribute their fight skills, when their (NPC) ship is boarded
* Neither learns from that experience

That would increase the difficulty of boarding a bit and not penalize keeping marines marines as much as current system.
You would still have to do the current training routines, if you want the "secondary" skill get better.

Does a different title suddenly make someone incapable of learning? I highly doubt most people would understand this without a lengthy explanation, which makes this limitation completely counterintuitive.

X4 is already packed with unnecessary constraints that do nothing but hinder user experience and system performance. I don’t see any reason to add more.

[jlehtone]

Does a different title suddenly make someone incapable of learning? I highly doubt most people would understand this without a lengthy explanation, which makes this limitation completely counterintuitive.

They don't pay attention to the secondary tasks. You are right though, the current: "Marines do not contribute to service tasks" is simple and clear rule, "easy" to understand.

As a QoL, any crew you mass recruit from a shipyard/EQ dock would naturally have the appropriate learning aptitude for the skill you recruited them for, so no need to worry that your new batch of marines would suck at learning how to shoot better.

Considering Egosoft's trend to keep documentation thin, there would be no indication what aptitudes each person has. If you forget that you initially hired someone as marine, then you will perhaps later notice that they are slow learner on their current occupation.

[Raptor34]

As a QoL, any crew you mass recruit from a shipyard/EQ dock would naturally have the appropriate learning aptitude for the skill you recruited them for, so no need to worry that your new batch of marines would suck at learning how to shoot better.

Considering Egosoft's trend to keep documentation thin, there would be no indication what aptitudes each person has. If you forget that you initially hired someone as marine, then you will perhaps later notice that they are slow learner on their current occupation.

For starters I'm expecting that it'll be for X5 since it's a major overhaul.
So with that said, I'm expecting that such details would be mentioned somewhere on the crew page.
Also what you said is irrelevant because I forgot, this is meant for universal crew anyway, so there is no "current occupation".

Edit: Also the issue you brought up gave me an idea. Aptitude could be shown by colors too. So currently we just have the stars right, under the aptitude system, we can color the stars and the empty boxes, bronze for low, silver for medium and gold for high. That way we get to keep the UI simple.
Though of course as you noted, Egosoft sucks at documentation for god knows what reason. Really makes it hard to troubleshoot what's a bug and what's intended if we do not know well, what's intended in the first place.

[azaghal]

To me, personally, it feels like the aptitude system would be a bit too micro for a game that tends to push you into having thousands and thousands of crew members and having only three professions. I am not saying it's not a cool system, but it would make much sense in situation where you are running a single ship with bunch of different possible roles etc. This would also feel a bit underwhelming given how squishy the NPC crew can be - lots of dead people when that one destroyer gets pummeled to death. Otherwise, given how clunky the management interface is even with this bare minimum progression system, it feels like it would only make things even worse...

In fact... A game that does have something like this is Rimworld - but that is a completely different beast - it is way more oriented towards individual characters in the game.

[Raptor34]

To me, personally, it feels like the aptitude system would be a bit too micro for a game that tends to push you into having thousands and thousands of crew members and having only three professions. I am not saying it's not a cool system, but it would make much sense in situation where you are running a single ship with bunch of different possible roles etc. This would also feel a bit underwhelming given how squishy the NPC crew can be - lots of dead people when that one destroyer gets pummeled to death. Otherwise, given how clunky the management interface is even with this bare minimum progression system, it feels like it would only make things even worse...

In fact... A game that does have something like this is Rimworld - but that is a completely different beast - it is way more oriented towards individual characters in the game.

It's more X5 thinking tbh, because I'll be surprised if it isn't overhauled and expanded going into it.

That's why buying them enmasse from a shipyard guarantees appropriate aptitude crew, so you don't have to micromanage them.
And also unlike the current system, under my proposed system, ships don't need to fill up with crew, they would have a crew complement instead that you need to meet, anything beyond that would rapidly run into diminishing returns. They'll still contribute, but it'll be like if say you have a 100 capacity and 20 crew complement, that 20 crew would provide like 80-95% of the possible stats. The rest would rapidly run into diminishing returns, mainly because they are still crew on board a ship, and as I keep mentioning, you're not going to sit around when the ship is dying. The idea is that you can then use these extra slots to store "passengers". So marines, spare pilots and all those things.

Of course ideally you can get super genius crew with high aptitude in everything for an elite ship, but that will not be necessary for normal day to day ops. Like ship mods, that's more something you keep for your personal ship. And even a little something to do in late game, like hunting for loot, but ultimately not actually that impactful.
Though I'll also note that under this system it means you need to send actual engineers over to repair your boarded ships, but if you also make it so you can ferry repair drones over, I don't think that's a bad thing.

[azaghal]

Of course ideally you can get super genius crew

Not a frequently used phrase in an X series game I would settle for barely competent at this point in time...

[flywlyx]

They don't pay attention to the secondary tasks. You are right though, the current: "Marines do not contribute to service tasks" is simple and clear rule, "easy" to understand.

But this contradicts reality, as even marines onboard still have to take part in ship maintenance.This restriction lacks any real-world basis and offers no benefit to gameplay.All it does is force players to convert their service crews into marines before boarding.