Hah, had to look up all the JA stuff
Sounds like a game I'd like. Not the first time hearing about it, of course, but never did play it.
Ok, with the usual caveat that we're talking about unimplemented features, and things could thus change...
Do crew members get experience outside battle? That is, could you have part of your fleet sitting in part of space protecting an outpost (for no other reason, let's call this place Chitzena). In the meantime, you are out kicking seven shades of the proverbial out of the evil queen's army over at somewhere-else-ville.
So, inevitably you lose a few ships so return to pick some up at Chitzena (because you like to operate with a lean force) and thankfully one of your officers (let's call her Ira) has been training your crew up from say green to regular, at a resource cost, while you have been gone.
Yeah, probably some function of the Command skill would let you and your officers train up crew. I doubt you could get them to veteran that way though, and certainly not to elite. If you're preparing for a major campaign, you could also train up some elite crew yourself in smaller battles, dropping them off at an outpost for safekeeping (and to let your green crew fly the ships).
Obviously I'm thinking about what Jagged Alliance 2 did with Militia (which was a different mechanic, but handled in a similar way, which made me think of this) but I could see that it might mitigate frustration associated with having lots of resources, yet potentially having to start from 'green' with each new ship.
Hmm. That's an interesting idea, I haven't really looked at it from that angle. It seems like you wouldn't have to start from 'green' unless you actually lost all your experienced crew, though. So when you buy/build a new ship, you could just put it at the head of the line and have your elite crew operate it. You have to keep extra crew on hand to replace losses, so you'll probably have more experienced crew built up than you strictly need if you're having good success in fighting. Then you could pick up new ships and run them effectively without having to compromise the rest of your fleet.
I really like the idea of falling back to an outpost to recrew and resupply after a tough fight. If the outposts can potentially build up their crew a bit, that helps flesh it out. Also seems to make the world feel a bit more alive - "hey, those guys gained experience while I was gone - they must have been doing
stuff."
Is there even going to this sort of 'sub-fleet' type of option (where you don't have direct control over them?
Yeah, I'd like to have this. With outposts, you will be able to exchange crew & cargo explicitly, to let you do these kinds of things. As far as sub-fleets, that's a bit more nebulous for now. The same old problem of coming up with a way to do it that lets you do most of the things you want w/o it being a chore.
Would you expect them to be involved in enough scrapes to get them up in experience anyway?
Most likely, but again somewhat TBD.
What do you and Ivaylo want Santa to bring you for Christmas?
More time to work on Starfarer, definitely! I'll speak for Ivaylo here too, even if he would want something else