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[Offensive_Name]

I can't be the only person who misses this system, it added another level of progression and tactics deciding which ships got the best crew, and it hurt when some of your elite crew died. Why was it removed and is it possible we will ever see it again?

[Megas]

Main reason (may be) less work for Alex.

I dislike crew Tetris and glad to see crew levels gone.  It was also a form of inverted difficulty.  Low CR greens and standard in early, all elite by endgame.

[Plantissue]

I can't say I miss it either. Though there was something rather nurturing about seeing your green crew turn elite. Warm fuzzy feelings.

[SCC]

I wish crew levels were back, even if they all sold for the same price and were indistinguishable in general, save for providing more CR and even if what Megas said is true.

[Alex]

Yeah, in addition to being fiddly to manage for ships, it was just a crazy amount of additional work for any campaign-level features using crew, and it was a constant source of hard-to-fix bugs. Not having to worry about it has probably saved months of dev-time (to use on other things!) by this point

[BringerofBabies]

A relatively simple (and fairly meaningless) way of doing it would be having different crew have different levels of crew supplied vs crew wages - experienced crew would get paid more per individual, but be worth more than their pay in terms of how much staffing they supply (1.5x wages vs 2x "crew value", for example). Barring the need to override a bunch of the core game's math in lots of places, I would imagine that would be relatively easy to mod in.

[AgentFransis]

I think Starship Legends solves this in a more or less satisfactory way. Ships "level up" as you use them in combat, gaining some minor positive and negative modifiers to the ship's stats depending on their performance in combat. This represents growing experience and legacy in a ship's crew. A crew also gains or loses faith in their commanding officer. Thus an officer that performs well and keeps it's crew mostly alive will be rewarded with a highly motivated crew and a better performing ship, while your ship with the reckless captain that likes to accelerate to ramming speed when spotting an Onslaught will end up with a disgruntled crew that will underperform.

[SCC]

Starship Legends is neat, but it's another RNG factor on top of many RNG factors the game already has. I don't want to have to save scum battles to have certain ships get certain traits. With weapons, ships and blueprints, I at least can do something to increase my odds and keep trying indefinitely. The last time I checked, those traits weren't really that consequential, either, which meant that I got frustrated over ultimately minor things, and that the mod does nothing to bridge the growing gap between player fleet and other factions' fleets.

[AgentFransis]

Well yeah, it's mainly for flavor and to reward you for using the same ships for a long time. If you're anal enough to save scum for that I can't help you. So what that it's RNG? Life is unpredictable, learn to embrace it.

What more can you really expect out of a crew experience mechanic in a spaceships game anyway? It's not like we're discussing infantry experience in an ancient world strategy game. The ships mostly do what they do and the crew are mainly techs. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for it to have a big impact nor would you want to introduce some kind of element of grind.

[Goumindong]

Starship Legends is neat, but it's another RNG factor on top of many RNG factors the game already has. I don't want to have to save scum battles to have certain ships get certain traits. With weapons, ships and blueprints, I at least can do something to increase my odds and keep trying indefinitely. The last time I checked, those traits weren't really that consequential, either, which meant that I got frustrated over ultimately minor things, and that the mod does nothing to bridge the growing gap between player fleet and other factions' fleets.

You could modify starship legends to only give CR buffs and then you could not take the other CR buffs in the game

[Locklave]

Main reason (may be) less work for Alex.

I dislike crew Tetris and glad to see crew levels gone.  It was also a form of inverted difficulty.  Low CR greens and standard in early, all elite by endgame.

Everything in this game and in most games is an inverted difficulty.

Money/Ships/Weapons. Everything starts garbage and w/e you can get your hands on, then endgame have unlimited money and all the best BP.

Endgame you can just suicide battleships at the enemy stations, who cares if they die you can just build more. I'd assume you'd want to avoid that with an elite crew (didn't play back then so can't be sure). This doesn't sound like an improvement, but I could be wrong.

[SCC]

You could modify starship legends to only give CR buffs and then you could not take the other CR buffs in the game

I have just looked into it and it seems that I could make it work somewhat, but there's an issue in that base CR level is 70%. Anything above and ships get bonuses, so I either make them mostly meaningless (which has the issue of this whole thing not having much of a point in the end), or I make Fleet Logistics 3 redundant, which is not good either. I cannot lower the base CR only for the player in any simple way that I know of and people I've asked don't know, either. It's a shame, it was almost there.

[Megas]

Well yeah, it's mainly for flavor and to reward you for using the same ships for a long time. If you're anal enough to save scum for that I can't help you. So what that it's RNG? Life is unpredictable, learn to embrace it.

Starsector is a game, not life.  I do not want to embrace potentially annoying features in the game.

With built-in hullmods coming, player may probably want to keep the same ships, to avoid story point burn for replacement ships (if points are tedious to accumulate like grinding alpha cores from Ordos).

[AgentFransis]

Annoying to you maybe. Whole genres are based on encountering unpredictable scenarios and dealing with them. Randomness creates replayability.