[Suggestions] About ship crewmembers

[jmrc]

These are the things about ship crewmembers that I would like to see implemented:

- a pilot of any ship gets experience only in battle; the concept is that a freighter pilot who's never seen battle doesn't become a multiple-star pilot and gets transfered to command a large warship. Prevents abusing the training of civil pilots and switching them to military pilots.

- a clear notion of the advantages of having crew instead of marines; the larger the crew, the faster is maneuvering, transfer of wares and making repairs - this gives strategical value of balancing the contigent between crew and marine. No more freighters with 1 pilot and 1 crew, if any...

- any NPC ship when created should have full contigent, with some randomness in the assignment of crew and marines depending on the ship being military, civil or pirate

- DREAM #1: having NPC marines boarding ships

- DREAM #2: having marines assaulting stations

[LameFox]

- a pilot of any ship gets experience only in battle; the concept is that a freighter pilot who's never seen battle doesn't become a multiple-star pilot and gets transfered to command a large warship. Prevents abusing the training of civil pilots and switching them to military pilots.

I find this quite funny as in my experience there's never been any meaningful incentive to do that. If anything I might take skilled pilots out of combat ships before they die and send them to do something where the skill matters more (by unlocking new orders). My large warships don't die for lack of skilled pilots. They can die if I sent them into a fight with too little advantage or, far more often, the AI screwed up in a way that the AI does whether it has 0 or 5 stars. The effect of the faults in it far exceed the designed skill difference, and the handling of personnel becomes an issue long before I hit any sort of economic barrier to just making more ships.

If for some reason you really want to separate these I would propose instead to add another skill, let's call it "combat" for now, and have civilian tasks develop and use piloting and management while combat tasks develop and use piloting and "combat". Then you will never have one entirely teach the other, but you avoid the somewhat nonsensical implication that civilian piloting is not going to teach you anything about piloting.

- a clear notion of the advantages of having crew instead of marines; the larger the crew, the faster is maneuvering, transfer of wares and making repairs - this gives strategical value of balancing the contigent between crew and marine. No more freighters with 1 pilot and 1 crew, if any...

That I agree with. It's ridiculous to have a skill system and just not tell the player what it does or whether it's doing anything.

[Virtualaughing]

Having marines in every ships makes sense in the dangerous world of X. Except if you are a Jainist or something like that in the future.

[jmrc]

I find this quite funny as in my experience there's never been any meaningful incentive to do that.

At early game, when you capture a warship with marines with 1-star piloting and you have a bunch of 3-star in transports, it's normal to transfer one of them to the large warship. You may not care much but an experienced pilot is important for military ships (ship maneuvers faster and hits more).

[LameFox]

I find this quite funny as in my experience there's never been any meaningful incentive to do that.

At early game, when you capture a warship with marines with 1-star piloting and you have a bunch of 3-star in transports, it's normal to transfer one of them to the large warship. You may not care much but an experienced pilot is important for military ships (ship maneuvers faster and hits more).

tbh in the early game (early meaning before I can build them myself) I just don't let ships into fights they can't easily win (e.g. killing kha'ak). This game gives me basically no reason to. They're still bad enough at it to die stupidly from 0-5 stars, their ships are more expensive* and need better equipment than civilian ones, and there's not even the paltry bounty payout if they kill something. Meanwhile as the player I can fly around committing massacres single-handedly. The incentive is very much to use my assets to generate more credits until I have my own economy and essentially transition to an RTS.


*Even if boarding them, the value of sending it to fight must be weighed against converting it to credits and getting myself closer to independence from credits entirely.