More specific assignments than simply "service crew"

[Falcrack]

I'd like there to be more assignments than simply "marines" and "service crew" on board ships, which would directly impact ship function. Here are some suggestions

Navigator: Necessary on larger ships, without one the ship could not dock or undock. Adds to pilot skill level.

Drone operator: Needed to operate drones. The maximum number of drones in operation at one time is limited by number of drone operators.

Turret operator: Needed to operate turrets. The maximum number of turrets that can fir simultaneously is limited by the number of turret operators.

Engineers: Needed for ship propulsion. Lower number of engineers reduces max speed. Not needed on small ships.

Cargo crew: Needed for loading and unloading cargo. No cargo crew would still load and unload, but would be slower than if cargo crew were present.

Maintenance: Needed for ship self repair. Also prevents damage over time. No maintenance crew means ships accumulate damage over time while in flight. Small ships might only need a single crew member in this role.

Each role would have a maximum number that could be assigned, based on max drone and turrets for the ship class. Larger ships would need more engineers and maintenance crews. Each crew could use their combat skill to repel boarding regardless of their assigned role.

[vvvvvvvv]

I'd like there to be more assignments than simply "marines" and "service crew" on board ships, which would

Something similar was done in rebirth. When building station modules, you'd have to hire a guy with a job. Like "Cell Fab Specialist". Or marines were actually managed by Defense Officer. Same Defence Officer was required for large ship weapons to work.

Practical result of that, however, was that you had to do "needle in a haystack search" flying around several stations to call a menu where you'd check if the guy you need is available. Then you hire him/her, drag to the area of assignment (personally), and forget the NPC ever existed.

Which was not exactly an entertaining process to go through.

[Brinnie]

Brings me nostalgic memories of what Lucike brought to X3 with his series of interconnected personnel mods.

[Raptor34]

I see this as either being a gigantic PITA like how XR worked, or being completely pointless because you can assume HR automates the entire thing. It's really too micro it seems.
There can be a compromise though. I've previously suggested that crew should have natural aptitudes for certain things. And to find 100% crew you need to go hunting yourself. But shipyards provide 80% crew which is good enough for the rest of your fleet.
So kinda like modding your own ships, now you get to mod your own crew too.

That aside, I have 2 other suggestions:

A) Elite crew

This is something I can see them implement in X4.

Remember the MARS mod back in X3? And how it warns you that if you turn it on for every ship it has significant performance impacts? Elite crew would be that.
Currently Egosoft tunes the AI for performance, not quality. Elite crew would be doing the exact opposite, it'll tune for quality instead of performance. And within your game settings menu, there would be a setting there for how many elite crew you have with the warning if your hardware might not support it, but it wouldn't let you not do it either.

What I imagine is elite crew would actually have situational awareness for a start. It'll be near-constantly checking to see if other enemies are nearing the area for instance.
It should be able to see and attempt to dodge incoming fire like how a player would.
It should be able to tell what it's engaging and adjust it's flight accordingly. Like being stationary out of range when station busting, perhaps doing driveby shootings or reversing depending on ship performance when engaging capitals, or flying straight and steady when in anti-fighter mode to provide a stationary firing platform for your turrets.
When fleeing it'll be able to tell where the enemies are, where allies are and so where to actually flee too.
And well, whatever else that is good but is too performance-intensive for the current system. But just having one or two capitals with actually good crew would enhance the micro portion of the game significantly. The enemy can have a handful of actually elite ships too, but you only turn on the extra functions when necessary, perhaps it can be a setting, like always on for those with good computers, or maybe only turn on when player is IS or something. Or even just turn it off if you cannot handle it because you run on a potato.

B) Min and max crew counts

This is something that is more likely either if they do a crew overhaul, or more likely for X5.

Currently 100% of crew provides 100% of stats. Basically it means that for best performance you want all your crew to be well, crew. So no marines basically since we don't have official passengers.
So what if ships have a min crew complement required, and if you are below that, you'll suffer performance maluses, like slower fire rates, slower engines speeds, less shield strength and all that. Well, honestly it'll be more understandable and clearer than the current nebulous crew system where the AI sucks more with less crew at any rate.
And on the other end, have a max crew complement too, where if any more crew than that no longer provides any bonuses. And you can use those empty crew slots to carry like marines or other passengers.

I can see 2 other systems that can benefit from this. The first one is boarding. Currently boarding is only to capture enemy ships. But in X5, if crew actually matters and killing the crew reduces ship performance, then why not have boarding solely to kill off their crew? You can even bring back the old needing to keep shields low, but it'll be for teleporting boarding. Boarding pods still shield pen, but if you keep shields low, you can teleport a boarding party aboard and back. Though in this scenario I'll drastically reduce the contribution of service crew to boarding strength. And that's why you have a max crew, the extra space can carry troops.

The other one is crew salaries. You can then have more technologically advanced, expensive ships, but with more automation they'll need less crew and your maintenance costs would be lower.
And well, let's imagine that min crew complement provides say 70% of maximum performance for instance. Then imagine the following ship. It'll have 100 max crew slots, not counting the captain. It'll have a min crew of 20 and a max crew of 80. Then for most of your fleet, probably those doing lower risk, non-tip of the spear things, you can then just run them with only 20 crew and have most of the performance and thereby keep your costs low.
Other things like the Syn or Asgard, old ATF designs, you can imagine that they might need larger crew complements, so these more powerful ships would be costlier to run. Or even the opposite if that's what you want the lore to be like, like the older ships have more advanced automated systems so they need less crew. You can get both another balancing lever and also more flavor just by tuning their crew complements.

[flywlyx]

It could be a fun mechanic if players were limited to a small fleet, but since the current game encourages building a large fleet, this feature would end up being far too inconvenient.

[Falcrack]

It could be a fun mechanic if players were limited to a small fleet, but since the current game encourages building a large fleet, this feature would end up being far too inconvenient.

It might be good if crew could be automatically assigned to these different roles automatically when assigning crew as service crew, with the ability to manually make adjustments if desired. For example, a ship might need 6 turret operators, 10 drone operators, 8 maintenance crew, 4 engineers, 4 cargo crew, for a total of 32 service crew. If you assigned 32 service crew, the game would fill all those roles, but if you assigned fewer, each role might be assigned fewer. You could manually shift more crew to certain roles if needed, but mostly you would not need to think about it.

It would mostly have an effect if for example you shift all your crew to the role of marines for a boarding ops, which would severely limit your ship's function.

[Raptor34]

It could be a fun mechanic if players were limited to a small fleet, but since the current game encourages building a large fleet, this feature would end up being far too inconvenient.

It might be good if crew could be automatically assigned to these different roles automatically when assigning crew as service crew, with the ability to manually make adjustments if desired. For example, a ship might need 6 turret operators, 10 drone operators, 8 maintenance crew, 4 engineers, 4 cargo crew, for a total of 32 service crew. If you assigned 32 service crew, the game would fill all those roles, but if you assigned fewer, each role might be assigned fewer. You could manually shift more crew to certain roles if needed, but mostly you would not need to think about it.

It would mostly have an effect if for example you shift all your crew to the role of marines for a boarding ops, which would severely limit your ship's function.

That would go one of two ways.
It could go to what I said and basically be irrelevant because it'll just auto assign it.
Or you'll be nerfing single ship boarding, however in this scenario, you'll obviously also have ships designed for boarding where you'll have extra space for marines, just like real life ships. In which case... I guess it'll lead to more ship differentiation. But you still need to design the ships in the first place, so practically speaking it'll probably all shake out to be the same thing in the end like what we have now.

Frankly just going with a min crew required would work better, since what you're suggesting is about the same, but more complicated for no appreciable gain.
Like what exactly are you envisioning this would do? I reread your OP and I still cannot see what a simple minimum crew wouldn't already cover.

[flywlyx]

It might be good if crew could be automatically assigned to these different roles automatically when assigning crew as service crew, with the ability to manually make adjustments if desired. For example, a ship might need 6 turret operators, 10 drone operators, 8 maintenance crew, 4 engineers, 4 cargo crew, for a total of 32 service crew. If you assigned 32 service crew, the game would fill all those roles, but if you assigned fewer, each role might be assigned fewer. You could manually shift more crew to certain roles if needed, but mostly you would not need to think about it.

It would mostly have an effect if for example you shift all your crew to the role of marines for a boarding ops, which would severely limit your ship's function.

From my perspective, the current marine distinction is already more of a hassle than a feature—it just forces players to slide a bar before a boarding operation and slide it back afterward. What’s the point? If there were an automatic conversion button, it would probably become the most-used feature in the boarding process. The only real purpose it seems to serve is preventing high-level service crew from being sent into boarding pods—but let’s be honest, I don't have crew with both 4-star marine and engineering skills when I actually care about preserving them, when I have them, I can mass produce them already and don’t care anymore.

Managing crew across my 100 mining ships isn’t fun in the slightest. And if this system ends up further limiting AI performance like the current skill system does, I can easily see players becoming seriously frustrated with it.

That would go one of two ways.
It could go to what I said and basically be irrelevant because it'll just auto assign it.
Or you'll be nerfing single ship boarding, however in this scenario, you'll obviously also have ships designed for boarding where you'll have extra space for marines, just like real life ships. In which case... I guess it'll lead to more ship differentiation. But you still need to design the ships in the first place, so practically speaking it'll probably all shake out to be the same thing in the end like what we have now.

In real life, marines still perform maintenance and other duties—they don’t just sit around waiting to be deployed, unlike how they’re portrayed in X4. The current game design just doesn’t make sense. It feels like Egosoft is still stuck in a 1990s design mindset, where arbitrarily limiting the player is treated as a core part of the gameplay.

[Raptor34]

It might be good if crew could be automatically assigned to these different roles automatically when assigning crew as service crew, with the ability to manually make adjustments if desired. For example, a ship might need 6 turret operators, 10 drone operators, 8 maintenance crew, 4 engineers, 4 cargo crew, for a total of 32 service crew. If you assigned 32 service crew, the game would fill all those roles, but if you assigned fewer, each role might be assigned fewer. You could manually shift more crew to certain roles if needed, but mostly you would not need to think about it.

It would mostly have an effect if for example you shift all your crew to the role of marines for a boarding ops, which would severely limit your ship's function.

From my perspective, the current marine distinction is already more of a hassle than a feature—it just forces players to slide a bar before a boarding operation and slide it back afterward. What’s the point? If there were an automatic conversion button, it would probably become the most-used feature in the boarding process. The only real purpose it seems to serve is preventing high-level service crew from being sent into boarding pods—but let’s be honest, I don't have crew with both 4-star marine and engineering skills when I actually care about preserving them, when I have them, I can mass produce them already and don’t care anymore.

Managing crew across my 100 mining ships isn’t fun in the slightest. And if this system ends up further limiting AI performance like the current skill system does, I can easily see players becoming seriously frustrated with it.

That would go one of two ways.
It could go to what I said and basically be irrelevant because it'll just auto assign it.
Or you'll be nerfing single ship boarding, however in this scenario, you'll obviously also have ships designed for boarding where you'll have extra space for marines, just like real life ships. In which case... I guess it'll lead to more ship differentiation. But you still need to design the ships in the first place, so practically speaking it'll probably all shake out to be the same thing in the end like what we have now.

In real life, marines still perform maintenance and other duties—they don’t just sit around waiting to be deployed, unlike how they’re portrayed in X4. The current game design just doesn’t make sense. It feels like Egosoft is still stuck in a 1990s design mindset, where arbitrarily limiting the player is treated as a core part of the gameplay.

Marines don't handle the fire control or radar though. The odd thing is actually how the ship works just fine even when you dump all your crew. But I guess you can chalk it up to AI handling everything else, modern ships are already heavily automated. I just don't actually know how that works in the X-universe. In Mass Effect for instance, you have AI and VI.
Besides, marines wouldn't be going around performing other duties when you're going to land on the beaches or whatever, or do you really want to wait 10s of minutes to form up your boarding crew whenever you board?

Which is why I like a max crew. That way you can just have those be passengers. On a cruise ship for instance, you ain't asking the tourists to work after all. Though I wonder, what do pilots on carriers do?

[flywlyx]

Marines don't handle the fire control or radar though. The odd thing is actually how the ship works just fine even when you dump all your crew. But I guess you can chalk it up to AI handling everything else, modern ships are already heavily automated. I just don't actually know how that works in the X-universe. In Mass Effect for instance, you have AI and VI.
Besides, marines wouldn't be going around performing other duties when you're going to land on the beaches or whatever, or do you really want to wait 10s of minutes to form up your boarding crew whenever you board?

Which is why I like a max crew. That way you can just have those be passengers. On a cruise ship for instance, you ain't asking the tourists to work after all. Though I wonder, what do pilots on carriers do?

In reality, most marines wouldn’t have the skillset for shipboard fire control or radar operations. Because humans can't be professional in all things. But in X4, it all comes down to star ratings—just press a button, and they instantly have all the skills to be ideal service crew.

As you mentioned, there’s no reason to wait even 10 seconds. So what’s the point of having that slider at all? Whether it's a delay or a slider, the mechanic is fundamentally flawed.
It seems like the entire system was designed under the assumption that AI could also board player ships—but since that core feature is missing, the whole system ends up being pointless.

[vvvvvvvv]

It could be a fun mechanic if players were limited to a small fleet, but since the current game encourages building a large fleet, this feature would end up being far too inconvenient.

It might be good if crew could be automatically assigned to these different roles automatically when assigning crew as service crew, with the ability to manually make adjustments if desired. For example, a ship might need 6 turret operators, 10 drone operators, 8 maintenance crew, 4 engineers, 4 cargo crew, for a total of 32 service crew. If you assigned 32 service crew, the game would fill all those roles, but if you assigned fewer, each role might be assigned fewer. You could manually shift more crew to certain roles if needed, but mostly you would not need to think about it.

It would mostly have an effect if for example you shift all your crew to the role of marines for a boarding ops, which would severely limit your ship's function.

The general issue is that in games things should exist for a reason (and not just in games). Meaning if you have an option to assign people to a turret, and t here's "turret operator" or "gunner" job and a skill, that means it should have significant gameplay effect. Meaning there should be a reason to assign one gunner and not the other.

If you just add gunner, create gunner skill, make good gunners rare.... that's just gating and padded gameplay. It is a boring "needle in haystack" type of problem, where you're punished by worse ship performance if you do not go through the hassle. Meaning exactly like it was don in Rebirth with all those "Energy Cell specialist".

Your current proposal, in my opinion, somewhat leans into punishment territory. "Do X or suffer from debuff". No fun. Something similar was done in Starfield where you had skill tree, but skill tree next level had to be unlocked by absolutely insane "trials". Like "Run to completely drain your stamina and do it 100 times".

Mind you, current implementation of the crew is not good. The effect of having service crew is obscure and well hidden. Apparently they affect repair speed significantly, and, amusingly, with low skilled crew, the ship is more likely to act in self-destructive way. Specifically... skilled crew makes the ship more likely to flee (and survive) if the enemy is dealing too much damage per second. This is not indicated anywhere in the game, by the way, and t he only way to discover this effect exists at all is by reading FAQ where the author apparently analyzed scripts:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 3120616748

So. Going back to the crew. Rebirth generally screwed up with those "cell specialist" and "farmers" and those were a hassle and a waste of time. But there was on area where it was done well. The engineer. Repair skill of capital was determined by a SINGLE engineer and it was immediately obvious that more stars meant higher hull repair on captured ship. So when capping capitals, you'd send this guy over to repair, then recall. That is better than current vague "service crew" implementation.

So while your desire to have more roles is understandable, they should be meaningful. In sense that they're not chores you should finish or else you suffer a debuff, but something with tangible meaningful effect. Ideally, the player should be unable to chose between two candidates, because each have DIFFERENT effect in addition to doing their job. Otherwise they just become cosmetic elements/hassle or one more line in menu.

Basically, see how terraforming is done. You waste materials on something like a Zoo. The reward? The zoo is listed as planetary feature and... that's it. You can't see it, visit it or see its photos. That's a bad way to implement a feature. So a role should not be like that zoo. A "line in ship loadout" you feel with random nobody whose names you won't remember. There should be a meaningful impact.

That's how I see it.

[Falcrack]

The main reason I want this is because I want crew to be more essential to ship function. Personally, I would pair the requirement for ship crew to a crew wages (like with thd Getting Paid mod). So you could just have a ship with just a captain in order to save money, but it could do little more than slowly fly from point A to point B.

Ships used for boarding could have extra space for crew beyond that needed to operate the ship that you could use as marines. So you would not need the full crew capacity to get 100% ship functionality, but you would need the critical crew functions filled.

Not everybody likes managing crew, but I do. More user friendly methods to move large numbers of crew would be nice.

[vvvvvvvv]

The main reason I want this is because I want crew to be more essential to ship function. Personally, I would pair the requirement for ship crew to a crew wages (like with thd Getting Paid mod). So you could just have a ship with just a captain in order to save money, but it could do little more than slowly fly from point A to point B.

Ships used for boarding could have extra space for crew beyond that needed to operate the ship that you could use as marines. So you would not need the full crew capacity to get 100% ship functionality, but you would need the critical crew functions filled.

Not everybody likes managing crew, but I do. More user friendly methods to move large numbers of crew would be nice.

Well, making them more useful is fine, but the crux of the question was "what makes it fun".

Regarding wages, I think that when you hire somebody, you're paying a YEARLY wage upfront. As if you check numbers, a credit can be anywhere between $1 and $100 (juding by 0.99 Cr pizza slice ad and ware costs). That, however, is not specified anywhere in the game, the game is not expected to last a year, and it does not track how long someone served. I requested a feature related to that before:
viewtopic.php?p=5275965#p5275965

[Falcrack]

The main reason I want this is because I want crew to be more essential to ship function. Personally, I would pair the requirement for ship crew to a crew wages (like with thd Getting Paid mod). So you could just have a ship with just a captain in order to save money, but it could do little more than slowly fly from point A to point B.

Ships used for boarding could have extra space for crew beyond that needed to operate the ship that you could use as marines. So you would not need the full crew capacity to get 100% ship functionality, but you would need the critical crew functions filled.

Not everybody likes managing crew, but I do. More user friendly methods to move large numbers of crew would be nice.

Well, making them more useful is fine, but the crux of the question was "what makes it fun".

Regarding wages, I think that when you hire somebody, you're paying a YEARLY wage upfront.

You can think about it as a yearly salary, but for me the tiny amount we pay crew in wages, which is fixed and miniscule compared to our other sources of income, does not represent a meaningful challenge.

What makes the game fun, for me, is a challenge. It is facing and overcoming difficulties, both in military and financial matters. It means being forced to make choices. Do I want this massive fleet? Then I should be able to pay for its ongoing support, not just the initial cost, but running costs as well.

Having this sort of financial pushback in games makes them fun for me. Games cease to be fun for me when they become too easy. Despite the large amount of time I've put into X4, it is always unsatisfying to me when I reach the end game that the strugglwe is no longer there. I want the struggle to continue. I want to have the potential to go bankrupt or not be able to afford to maintain my fleets unless I am clever in managing my assets.

So that's why I am continually pushing for things to increase the challenge of the game, including things like maintenance and wages, because even in a sandbox, if I lose the sense of challenge and opposition, I lose the sense of fun.

[vvvvvvvv]

You can think about it as a yearly salary, but for me the tiny amount we pay crew in wages, which is fixed and miniscule compared to our other sources of income, does not represent a meaningful challenge.

What makes the game fun, for me, is a challenge.

The point about challenge is understandable, but it does not have to come from wages. The other issue here is that in order to be interesting, the challenge has to be sensible and plausible within the world. If wages/maintenance are artificially inflated, then the challenge become "fake" and is no longer interesting to overcome. That's the reason why I'm not using wages mod. Because the challenge - for me - feels fake.

Real world military can operate because it is sustainable. If salaries cost more than a ship, the military stops being sustainable.

I asked search-capable chatbots (grok/deepseek) to pull data about real military ship operation cost.

They provided this:
* Ticonderoga-Class Cruiser --> 1.8..2.2 billion usd to build.
* Maintenance --> 100 million per year.
* Crew salary --> 20-35 million per year.

So that means, maintenance is roughly 5% of initial cost, and salaries ard about 1.5%. The cruiser operates for 30 years. During its life cycle you'd pay double of its construction cost.

I can post links the bot used, but you could ask the same question and g et roughly the same answers. This is plausible numbers for maintenance cost.

The ships in X4 are in 20-50 million range, most of them. So, for 50 million ship, a yearly salary would be 750k and maintenance is roughly 2.5 mil. That runs to 2000 Cr per day on salaries, and 6849 Cr per day on maintenance.

You are already paying comparable sums when you outfit the ships. You're also paying comparable sums for factory workers but in forms of produce.

----

In terms of economics the bulk of challenge comes while you're gathering your first billion. Basically, try rags to riches playthrough. The pressure is quite significant, because you need more money to get more blueprints, and it becomes higher if playing fair. However, past certain point you achieve post scarcity and then, economically, you have won. You have definitely won, once you have all blueprints which will set you back about 7 billion, I think.