Marines should act like service crew

[Raptor34]

...
Then it should only apply when players are recruiting crew. The problem is that this designation is useless in most situations but still requires extra player input during those scenarios.

I strongly disagree that it is "useless". Just how would you sort and distinguish which crew you want as marines and as service crew if they were one homogeneous mass? Crew currently can be conveniently divided by skill levels using these designations. Without that, how would you do it? I'm honestly confused as to how that might work. You do realize that the crews are chosen by the player to be in those categories, not the game. The game only supplies you with the skill levels and a way to divide them into useful categories.

Or would you just send them all into battle irrespective of their skill levels, sacrificing high level engineering crew to the meat grinder of a boarding op? Or attempting to use marines with no engineering skill as miner or trader crew? It sounds to me like you'd prefer all crew to be generic, with one generic skill to do all tasks, removing all the 'Think' from the whole process.

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew, you're basically saying the game is stupid enough to not pick the highest ranked crew for the appropriate job.

[flywlyx]

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew, you're basically saying the game is stupid enough to not pick the highest ranked crew for the appropriate job.

The game actually recognizes this—when deploying marines, you can choose between elite, veteran, and rookie.
That’s why I find the designation mostly redundant, as the skill rating already serves the same purpose. The only time it’s somewhat useful is during recruiting and transferring, but even then, the system already sorts crews based on skill level in those scenarios.

[GCU Grey Area]

Can be useful to have a marine designation for other purposes. For example, I often store substantial numbers of unassigned 4* pilots aboard my carriers, so when I give that fleet new ships I have a convenient source of highly trained pilots to replace the 0* pilot the shipyard or wharf provided. I use the marine designation for them so they're separate & distinct from the carrier's service crew.

[Raptor34]

Can be useful to have a marine designation for other purposes. For example, I often store substantial numbers of unassigned 4* pilots aboard my carriers, so when I give that fleet new ships I have a convenient source of highly trained pilots to replace the 0* pilot the shipyard or wharf provided. I use the marine designation for them so they're separate & distinct from the carrier's service crew.

True, but wouldn't it be easier to park them on a specially named ship instead? Like I use M ships to hold crew I want. Though I can see the RP potential of leaving them on the carrier itself.
Otoh, if Egosoft actually does revamp the crew system, then they can just let us designate them as pilots instead and allow a one click button to automatically swap out pilots. I envision selecting a ship, right clicking a carrier in your case, and then clicking a button which basically swaps out your current pilot for the highest skilled crew that is designated as a pilot. Let you do that with multi select and it'll drastically simplify crew handling and also incentivize late game players to save their pilots rather than deal with the tedium of manually replacing pilots.

So for X4, I guess it'll be like all crew are multi-purpose crew. Because if the ships on fire there is no reason a pilot or marine wouldn't pick up a fire extinguisher or otherwise help out.
Then you can manually or like currently use the sliders to mark crew as a specific crew type, so everything, pilot, manager, marine, service crew, for bookkeeping purposes. Actually, going back to the above, we should not even need to designate a crew as pilot, the game should be smart enough to just pick the best pilot from the crew, like the current system where you click the button to replace your captain with best crew member, the manual designation is more for bookkeeping and for you to easily glance at your crew and tell how many skilled crew from a specific skill is available. Though of course note I'm not saying it automatically picks a captain, you still do that yourself, I mean more if you tell it to autopick then it can do that, just like now.
Actually, a secondary use of the manual designation system is also to place your crew, like how crew officially designated as marines stand at guard, crew marked as pilots/managers can hang out in the lounge or whatever. But when in combat, all crew work together so they don't ****** die when the ship explodes.

Though for X5 I expect that not all crew gain all skills at the same level, as I mentioned earlier, not everyone can be a multi-disciplinary genius. Though the game should also have those too, that's where the expensive crew are. And of course when auto buying from shipyards, the shipyard would automatically provide the appropriate crew, so you don't get stuck with marines who suck at learning how to shoot better. While I would like those to slip through for realism, for actual gameplay that would suck and just be tedious unless X6 gives you HR to automate that lol.

[LameFox]

You can sort your crew by their skill as a captain anyway. I tend to put recovered captains from my lost fighters into a construction ship as service crew, so it keeps their morale up.

[stooper88]

If I may offer a different perspective, I have multiple ships of various sizes that are *dedicated* to boarding. As such, all of the crew on these ships are qualified marines in that they have been purposefully gathered for their boarding skill levels. However, referring to the Star Trek analogy, I view my marines more like the multi-faceted "starring-role" characters who possess valuable starship skills yet are still competent to handle themselves on "away" missions. During boarding engagements, they arm themselves and carry out the required objectives. Otherwise, they revert to their normal crew roles and carry out ship duties. Admittedly, it's not completely realistic as specialization does exist and does strongly matter in the real world. But given that I, as the PC faction leader, have vastly more absurd abilities, I think it's okay to allow some hires to be semi-heroic. Also, during the age of sail, it's not as if "regular" sailors didn't normally partake in close quarters combat, but quite the contrary. Hence, I don't feel it's necessarily a conflict to use the same crew to handle both sets of assignments.

As I don't have a current interest in terraforming and have not developed any training facilities for pilots or marines, all of my personnel's skills have been grown organically. Through repeated boarding operations, I've accumulated a very large stable of elite marines. However, these same marines have also developed into very skilled service crew simply by alternating their roles as fitting. When making boarding selections, development of boarding skills is continuously prioritized by choosing recruits and veterans before filling out remaining pods with elites. And when not conducting boarding, development of engineering skills naturally resumes and accrues for all personnel. For my boarding ships, there's never any dilemma over sending a wrong person for the job because every person is purposefully being groomed for both jobs.

[stooper88]

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew, you're basically saying the game is stupid enough to not pick the highest ranked crew for the appropriate job.

The game actually recognizes this—when deploying marines, you can choose between elite, veteran, and rookie.
That’s why I find the designation mostly redundant, as the skill rating already serves the same purpose. The only time it’s somewhat useful is during recruiting and transferring, but even then, the system already sorts crews based on skill level in those scenarios.

To further add to this point, the game not only distinguishes between elite, veteran, and *recruit*, but it also automatically selects the HIGHEST skilled individuals from each category. For example, if during boarding selection you select a set of marines from a pool of five-star and four-star elites, it will exhaust all of your five-star marines before choosing from the four-stars, (more specifically, 5.0 star > 4.7 star > 4.3 star > 4.0 star > and so forth).

The advantage to this is that the "best" marines (within each skill tier) are allocated for each boarding operation. The disadvantage is that it hinders deliberate training of lower skilled marines rather than higher. So, for example, in order to rank up my four-star elites, I need to manually pre-exempt the five-star elites by switching them to service crew or moving them to another ship. Otherwise, the lower skilled members of each tier tend to stagnate (in the absence of targets with sufficiently large
crew capacities).

[GCU Grey Area]

True, but wouldn't it be easier to park them on a specially named ship instead? Like I use M ships to hold crew I want. Though I can see the RP potential of leaving them on the carrier itself.

Not really. M ships just aren't big enough for the number of pilots involved. Typically like my fleets to have at least 50 or so extra pilots, just in case things go spectacularly badly & e.g. the fleet needs to replace it's entire fighter complement. It's just more convenient to have them all in one place aboard the carrier, rather than scattered over several smaller ships.

You can sort your crew by their skill as a captain anyway. I tend to put recovered captains from my lost fighters into a construction ship as service crew, so it keeps their morale up.

You're quite correct & I do this whenever I'm assigning pilots, to make sure I assign a pilot of the appropriate skill level to their new job. Problems however would emerge when assigning service crew to new ships if they're mixed together with pilots - could no longer use those convenient sliders to assign service crew without inadvertently assigning pilots to a service crew role at the same time. In my fleets recovered pilots go back aboard their carrier to await assignment to a new ship.

[vvvvvvvv]

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew

IIRC Sliders reoder crew in seemingly random order. You can't, for example, Ctrl+Click-select person #1, #3, #4 and #7 in ordered list and make them unassigned. When you start dragging it picks people pretty much randomly.

[Raptor34]

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew

IIRC Sliders reoder crew in seemingly random order. You can't, for example, Ctrl+Click-select person #1, #3, #4 and #7 in ordered list and make them unassigned. When you start dragging it picks people pretty much randomly.

Do they not pick by best crew?

[jlehtone]

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew

IIRC Sliders reoder crew in seemingly random order. You can't, for example, Ctrl+Click-select person #1, #3, #4 and #7 in ordered list and make them unassigned. When you start dragging it picks people pretty much randomly.

Do they not pick by best crew?

Seem to pick the best.

It is true that we cannot cherry-pick select individuals conveniently.

[stooper88]

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew

IIRC Sliders reoder crew in seemingly random order. You can't, for example, Ctrl+Click-select person #1, #3, #4 and #7 in ordered list and make them unassigned. When you start dragging it picks people pretty much randomly.

Do they not pick by best crew?

My experience is that the sliders take in order of highest to lowest skill, but randomly within each group of crew with tied skills.

Also, the "skill" in question is the combined skill for the role, thus taking into account both the primary skill (boarding, piloting, engineering, etc) and secondary skill (morale). This adds some unpredictability due to combined skills being boosted by very high morale or depressed by very low morale.

[vvvvvvvv]

Considering you can just use sliders to reorg your crew

IIRC Sliders reoder crew in seemingly random order. You can't, for example, Ctrl+Click-select person #1, #3, #4 and #7 in ordered list and make them unassigned. When you start dragging it picks people pretty much randomly.

Do they not pick by best crew?

It is unclear, I do know for sure that it is difficult to unassign marines with highest engineering (not a typo) skill, for example.

[flywlyx]

You're quite correct & I do this whenever I'm assigning pilots, to make sure I assign a pilot of the appropriate skill level to their new job. Problems however would emerge when assigning service crew to new ships if they're mixed together with pilots - could no longer use those convenient sliders to assign service crew without inadvertently assigning pilots to a service crew role at the same time. In my fleets recovered pilots go back aboard their carrier to await assignment to a new ship.

On the contrary, I’d argue that mixing them and improving the transfer interface would be even more beneficial.

For example, suppose you want to transfer 50 service crew from Ship A to Ship B, but among them are 5 elite pilots. In the transfer interface, you move 55 service crew from Ship A to Ship B. You then notice that the transfer tab indicates those 5 elite pilots are included in the process. At this point, you simply move those 5 elite pilots back to Ship A. Once all adjustments are made, you confirm the transfer.

In this approach, the transfer interface essentially acts as a temporary holding area, allowing players to fine-tune their transfers before finalizing. This makes the process more intuitive and easier to manage.

[stooper88]

IIRC Sliders reoder crew in seemingly random order. You can't, for example, Ctrl+Click-select person #1, #3, #4 and #7 in ordered list and make them unassigned. When you start dragging it picks people pretty much randomly.

Do they not pick by best crew?

It is unclear, I do know for sure that it is difficult to unassign marines with highest engineering (not a typo) skill, for example.

Sorry, I think I understand the source of confusion. When unassigning/reassigning crew members within a given ship, yes the order seems to be quite random. However, when transferring between ships, the order is according to combined skill level (highest to lowest) for the current role and tier. Indeed, it's very cumbersome, but I use it to reshuffle crewmembers if/when I need fine-grained control. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way that doesn't require an extra ship.

In the image below, clicking on the Specialist slider automatically selected the highest skilled members of that crew role and tier. By converting all personnel into a specific role (e.g. service crew), it's then possible to pick specific (combined) skill levels for engineering. Note, it's even possible to mix-and-match by manually selecting (under the expanded transfer individuals interface).

[vvvvvvvv]

<snip>

Sorry, I think I understand the source of confusion. When unassigning/reassigning crew members within a given ship, yes the order seems to be quite random. However, when transferring between ships, the order is according to combined skill level (highest to lowest) for the current role and tier. Indeed, it's very cumbersome, but I use it to reshuffle crewmembers if/when I need fine-grained control. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way that doesn't require an extra ship.

In the image below, clicking on the Specialist slider automatically selected the highest skilled members of that crew role and tier. By converting all personnel into a specific role (e.g. service crew), it's then possible to pick specific (combined) skill levels for engineering. Note, it's even possible to mix-and-match by manually selecting (under the expanded transfer individuals interface).
<snip>

I'm very sure you realize this is a very roundabout way of doing things.

Consider this scenario:
"From all crews select three marines with highest engineering skill and move them to unassigned".

OR:

"From entire crew select and unassign 5 people with highest morale"

[GCU Grey Area]

You're quite correct & I do this whenever I'm assigning pilots, to make sure I assign a pilot of the appropriate skill level to their new job. Problems however would emerge when assigning service crew to new ships if they're mixed together with pilots - could no longer use those convenient sliders to assign service crew without inadvertently assigning pilots to a service crew role at the same time. In my fleets recovered pilots go back aboard their carrier to await assignment to a new ship.

On the contrary, I’d argue that mixing them and improving the transfer interface would be even more beneficial.

For example, suppose you want to transfer 50 service crew from Ship A to Ship B, but among them are 5 elite pilots. In the transfer interface, you move 55 service crew from Ship A to Ship B. You then notice that the transfer tab indicates those 5 elite pilots are included in the process. At this point, you simply move those 5 elite pilots back to Ship A. Once all adjustments are made, you confirm the transfer.

In this approach, the transfer interface essentially acts as a temporary holding area, allowing players to fine-tune their transfers before finalizing. This makes the process more intuitive and easier to manage.

Waste of dev time for my purposes. Current implementation works fine for me - transfer pilot, then bulk transfer the crew. Quick & easy, takes just a few seconds per ship, around 5 minutes in total for the full S/M complement of an average sized carrier (somewhat longer for the bigger ones). Your suggestion seems unnecessarily convoluted, adding an extra couple of steps - first needing to transfer unwanted pilots back to the carrier, then dragging the crew slider a second time to fill those missing 5 crew slots (hoping that none of those 5 are yet more pilots that'll need to be sent back & replaced). Bear in mind I do this for every single ship in the fleet, including all fighters & frigates. Every additional click & slider drag would add to those 5 minutes, so not terribly keen on such changes.

[stooper88]

<snip>

Sorry, I think I understand the source of confusion. When unassigning/reassigning crew members within a given ship, yes the order seems to be quite random. However, when transferring between ships, the order is according to combined skill level (highest to lowest) for the current role and tier. Indeed, it's very cumbersome, but I use it to reshuffle crewmembers if/when I need fine-grained control. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way that doesn't require an extra ship.

In the image below, clicking on the Specialist slider automatically selected the highest skilled members of that crew role and tier. By converting all personnel into a specific role (e.g. service crew), it's then possible to pick specific (combined) skill levels for engineering. Note, it's even possible to mix-and-match by manually selecting (under the expanded transfer individuals interface).
<snip>

I'm very sure you realize this is a very roundabout way of doing things.

Consider this scenario:
"From all crews select three marines with highest engineering skill and move them to unassigned".

OR:

"From entire crew select and unassign 5 people with highest morale"

Yes, I agree that it's a very poor method for organizing crews. In fact I'd go further than to say it's merely roundabout. Just to be clear, I have no preference toward eliminating crew classes one way or the other. I was merely trying to clarify how/when it's possible to micro-manage crew compositions using the existing game mechanics, as this is a chore that I already contend with regularly and would continue to need to do so anyway. My use case:

"From all elites, veterans, and recruits, find the 60 LEAST skilled marines and prepare them to board a new target."

Assuming anyone else has struggled with needing to do something like this, I was just offering a solution.

[flywlyx]

Waste of dev time for my purposes. Current implementation works fine for me - transfer pilot, then bulk transfer the crew. Quick & easy, takes just a few seconds per ship, around 5 minutes in total for the full S/M complement of an average sized carrier (somewhat longer for the bigger ones). Your suggestion seems unnecessarily convoluted, adding an extra couple of steps - first needing to transfer unwanted pilots back to the carrier, then dragging the crew slider a second time to fill those missing 5 crew slots (hoping that none of those 5 are yet more pilots that'll need to be sent back & replaced). Bear in mind I do this for every single ship in the fleet, including all fighters & frigates. Every additional click & slider drag would add to those 5 minutes, so not terribly keen on such changes.

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.

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

Mass assigning pilots is another issue that needs to be addressed if they want to improve the gameplay experience, as the current assignment process involves far too many clicks. Like assigning 50 pilots from the HQ to a carrier fleet, way too many clicks.

[jlehtone]

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?

Mass assigning pilots is another issue that needs to be addressed if they want to improve the gameplay experience, as the current assignment process involves far too many clicks.

Indeed.