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« on: February 27, 2015, 11:50:12 AM »
I don’t like the way crew works in Starsector. Mechanically, I think it still excessively favors smaller and higher-tech ships, particularly fighters, and it doesn’t make sense that, no matter how many elite-crewed fighters and frigates die, there are always enough elite crewmen from other ships to replace them, as if a highly skilled battleship gunner would have any idea how to fly a Broadsword.
Affectively/immersion-wise, I think the current crew system is gamey and kind of creepy (you buy and sell crewmen and marines like slaves). It makes not just people but ships totally interchangeable and saps personality and character out of a game that really needs them. So I tried to come up with an alternative. I think I’ve whipped up a pretty good system: it maintains many of the features of the current one, keeps things very simple from the player’s standpoint, and at the same time creates new opportunities for the player to get attached to (and to customize) ships and has a bunch of features to hang RPG-style events and narratives on as the game gets deeper and more fleshed out.
First, we remove elite/veteran/regular/green crewmen and marines from the commodities at the trade screen.
Instead, we add a Personnel screen. When you’re in port, there’s a section labeled “Hire/Embark” with four buttons—Crew, Marines, Specialists, and Passengers—and, below that, a section labeled “Manage Personnel” which I’ll get to later (and which is there whether you’re in port or not).
If you click on Crew or Marines, you just get a simple dialog box with a slider and some buttons: Hire, Cancel, Max, and (in the case of crew) Min. Select the number of crew or marines you want to hire (up to the limit available at the station/planet where you’re in port). Max sets the slider to fill your fleet’s maximum crew capacity; Min sets the slider to hire enough crew to meet the minimum crew needs of all your ships.
All crew hired here are identical. Their “price,” instead of depending on their quality, is a hiring bonus and depends on market conditions. If you’re at a populous planet, there are tons of crewmen available, and you’re hiring a small number, they may sign on for no bonus, just for three square meals a day and a chance to see the Sector. If you’re at some tiny outpost at the ass-end of civilization and there are only 20 crewmen available, they might squeeze you a bit. Once they’re hired, though, their contracts are fixed and identical, for the sake of simplicity: like now, crewmen use a tiny amount of supplies each day, and marines use a little more. When hired, they are distributed evenly among all your ships up to the minimum crew limit; the rest form a pool of excess/replacement crew.
If you click on Passengers, you see (at most ports) a few different icons with numbers on them. These are groups of people who want passage somewhere else. Mouse over to see where they’re going and how much they’re willing to pay. Some will pay half up front, half on arrival; some might be desperate enough to pay in full up front, while others are unable or unwilling to pay until they get where they’re going. They may be dignitaries, refugees, replacement crews, mercenaries, settlers—anything, really. Depending on their affiliation, you might get a small faction reputation bonus for conveying them to their destination safely and quickly, or a minor rep hit if you take them into combat or three months’ out of their way (or a gigantic rep hit if you take all their money and then push them out the airlock). While they’re on board, they use up your crew limit but consume their own supplies.
If you click on Specialists, you see (at most ports) a few different icons with small numbers on them. You can mouse over to see what they are. One might say “Gunners (Dominator)” and another “Pilots (Dagger).” These are crew—veterans of other campaigns—who have experience with specific ship types. They come in small numbers (probably just 5-25 per stack) and demand very expensive signing bonuses. When you hire them, you are prompted to assign them to a specific ship/wing in your fleet. If it matches their class specialization (i.e. if you stick those Dominator gunners in an Eagle), that ship/wing gets an experience boost. If it matches their hull specialization exactly (i.e. you assign those Dagger pilots to a Dagger wing), that ship/wing gets the experience boost and a small perk: +50% lateral movement for the Dagger wing,* for example, or 10% recoil reduction for the Dominator. These perks persist as long as the ship is not disabled, destroyed, or mothballed, although each ship/wing has a limited number: wings can have one movement-related and one weapons-related; ships can have one movement-related, one weapons-related, and one shields/armor-related.
*Okay, that’s not a small perk. Fighters are a little different. Read on!
(Note: in under-the-hood mechanical terms, these specialist hires are like weapon enchantments or similar in a fantasy RPG. The experience boost and perk are what you’re really paying for; the tiny stack of actual crewmen are simply distributed among all your ships as basic recruits, just as if you’d hired them with the regular Crew button. You might also encounter specialists through narrative events—maybe you talk some fighter pilots at the bar into joining your crew, or convince the brilliant engineers on board a captured ship to switch to your side.)
So how does experience work now?
Each ship gains experience specific to that ship. A ship’s maximum experience is a function of the number of active crewmen assigned to it (the active crew simply being equal, unless the ship is undermanned, to the minimum crew requirement—i.e. exactly the number of guys it takes to keep the ship in fighting trim). I’m not a designer, nor am I a math whiz, so I won’t attempt to develop the system in detail, but this is a rough idea of how it could work: each individual in a ship’s minimum crew raises that ship’s maximum experience by 10 (so a Wolf’s maximum experience is 150). Each new recruit assigned to a ship raises the ship’s current experience by 2 (or, say, 4, if 2 proves too harsh). A ship crewed entirely by fresh recruits thus has 20% of its maximum experience.
No individual crewman is tracked. Each time a ship/wing participates in combat, the ship/wing—the entire crew as a unit—gains experience. If the unit's experience is already maxed out, and the ship/wing does not have the maximum number of crew perks, participating in combat gives the unit a chance to acquire a new perk.
Each time one of the individual crewmen in the unit dies, the unit loses experience equal to the old experience total divided by the crew size, and the lost crewman is replaced with a basic recruit from the fleet’s pool of excess crew (thus making it a net loss of experience for the unit unless it was a green crew to begin with). If my example Wolf had a fully experienced crew (150 total) but takes a pounding in action, and five crewmen are killed, the ship loses 150/15*5 experience, bringing it down to 100, and then gains 2*5 experience when five new guys join the crew. So it’s now at 73% of max experience.
(A new Leadership skill: Training Drills. Each level increases the experience value of a replacement crewman by, say, 0.3—if you max it out, your replacements each give their new ship +5 experience instead of +2.)
It sounds a little complicated (and probably would be for Alex to implement), but from the player’s perspective, it’s simplicity itself, requiring no fiddling around with crew transfers or assigning personnel to particular ships. The only times a player must make decisions about "where crew should go” (in reality, crew are automatically being distributed evenly across ships and the player is really just deciding where buffs should go) are when hiring specialists and when a ship is destroyed, sold, or mothballed.
In such a case, the (surviving) crew are redistributed among the fleet’s other ships but, if the ship had very high experience, the game will generate one or more specialist groups for the player to assign. This will also allow you to move perks from ship to ship. For example, you lose an Eagle but win the battle, and you recover a large portion of the ship’s crew from their escape pods. The game simply adds them to the excess crew pool and/or distributes them among under-strength ships as replacements, but it also gives the player a prompt: "Where should we assign the veteran engineers of the ISS Tragically Torpedoed? +125 experience to any cruiser; +5% shield strength to any Eagle-class cruiser.” After the player deals with that, he/she gets another: “Where should we assign the veteran navigators of the ISS Tragically Torpedoed? +40 experience to any cruiser; +1 burn speed to any Eagle-class cruiser.” If you only have one other Eagle and it has a speed perk you like better than this one, you can apply the experience but simply choose not to overwrite the old perk.
This has two interesting metagame affects, both of which I think improve the game (although I suspect people will disagree about at least one of them). First, uniformity in fleets (or at least using multiples of each hull type) becomes a strength. A destroyer squadron built around, say, four Medusas is much more resilient, experience-wise, than a fleet with a couple frigates, destroyers of three different types, and a light cruiser. Second, mothballing a ship becomes a much more significant decision than it is right now, potentially representing a harsh experience loss (although it would also allow the player to concentrate specialist perks in a smaller number of ships, if he/she had multiples of one hull).
The one time automatic, even distribution of crew to ships stops is if the fleet is undermanned after combat or an accident. In such a case, the number of active crew on each ship is fixed in place—for experience purposes, an unfilled crew slot just counts as a 0, and the ship won’t get experience while undermanned—and the player is prompted to mothball a ship and distribute its crew among the remaining ships. If you don’t, and keep flying around with undermanned ships, whatever new crew you do hire will be evenly distributed among your understrength ships until they’re all fully manned (and your ships will suffer serious CR penalties in the meantime). If you’re at a port and buy a ship that you don’t have enough spare crew for, you get a prompt that gives you the choices of hiring enough crew to man the ship (if enough crew are available at that port), canceling the purchase, or immediately mothballing the ship.
Fighter wings are handled slightly differently from how they are now. The minimum crew requirement of a wing is larger: instead of requiring enough crew to fill just the ships in the wing, you need enough crew to fill each ship in the wing and every replacement chassis (if your crew is understrength, you can still launch the wing—it’ll just have low CR and fewer replacements). Each time a fighter is destroyed, even if it is then replaced, a crewman risks being killed. Fighter wings thus potentially suffer horrible attrition and can be hard to gain experience with. To compensate, fighter crews are much more likely to be recovered from ejection pods after a battle—if you win—and the benefits of high experience for fighters, including the perks, are very strong. In proper Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica, elite fighter wings should be terrifying little engines of destruction.
Finally, going way back to the beginning: the Manage Personnel options on the Personnel tab. This section is always available, although some of the options in it are only available when you’re in port (and others only when you’re not). If you’re in port, you can choose Terminate Contracts, allowing you to fire excess crew and marines (you don’t get any money back, no matter what kind of hiring bonuses you’ve been paying) or break your passenger contracts (in which case you will take a reputation hit and be prompted to pay back whatever advance you got—you can tell them to shove it, of course, but then you’ll take another, bigger reputation hit). If you’re not in port, you’ll have a Jettison Personnel button. Send them out the airlock!
If prisoners are added to the game (which they totally should be), this is also where you’d have options to drop them off at a neutral planet, ransom them, execute them, press them into your crew, sell them to their enemies, etc.
Finally, this isn’t part of the core idea of the crew overhaul, but I think it would add a lot of flavor and tons of interesting possibilities for events and little narrative hooks: the Manage Personnel section could also contain information about the status of crew morale (a single fleet-wide figure) and options allowing you to interact with your crews.
If you do things like terminate crew contracts in undesirable sites (marooning 200 guys on Maxios) or, worse, push excess crewmen out the airlock, morale goes down fast. Taking casualties, operating without supplies, and operating near or over the crew limit will also be bad for morale. Winning battles raises morale, as does operating close to the minimum crew limit (we all like our personal space). You would also have options here to institute fleet-wide policies that would impact morale (and have other effects). For instance, you could choose to give your crews prize money: every time you loot destroyed enemy ships after a battle, every single crewman and marine gets a tiny cut of the take. Or you could have a shore-leave policy: the first time each month you make port, the crew goes off drinking and gambling for three days while you just have to sit and watch your supplies tick down. But it makes them happy!
Various random events and player decisions could also affect morale (maybe you bought everybody a round of fancy drinks at the bar), as would certain officers, when officers are implemented. Maybe you put one of your ships under the command of a brilliant tactician who’s a vicious, hard-assed commander: negative morale. Or maybe you hire a guy as a destroyer captain who’s nothing special in combat but has a real way with the troops: bonus morale. High morale might serve as a multiplier or additive bonus to veterancy effects, or it could just play into an event system—unhappy crewmen will terminate their own contracts and leave you shorthanded when you get to port; there might be mutinies, etc.
Another related but non-essential idea: Treat the fleet’s marine company as a unit in its own right, like a ship or a fighter wing. In the Manage Personnel screen, you can designate an active company size: these are the guys who are ready to launch after each battle and who gain experience in boarding actions. They have a very high supply cost per day, so the player will have to be sparing about how many marines to assign to the active company. The rest of the marines you’ve hired are your reserves, like the excess crew pool for ships/wings. Each boarding action gives big experience gains to the active company, and each active marine who dies is replaced by a raw recruit from the reserves, resulting (probably) in a net loss of experience for the company. Once the company’s at max experience, it can pick up a couple perks just like ships/wings can.
Let me know what you guys think (sorry it’s so long), and tell me if there’s anything I overlooked, any holes in my idea, etc.
