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Suggestions / Re: Crew/Officer Roles Expansion
« on: March 15, 2023, 08:18:29 PM »Something that could be done with officers is make each ship have a number of officer slots depending on ship size... something like 1/2/3/5 slots. Each officer only gets 1 skill, and you remove the officer limit.
Larger ships still get a full skillset, but it's provided by a team of officers rather than just the captain. This will hurt the performance of smaller ships but at the same time it's easier to include them in your fleet because there's no more officer limit.
You might even have a "captain" slot, so whoever is in that slot gets their skill treated as elite and they determine the ship's personality. This makes skills far more modular and you don't have to worry about firing and retraining new officers to optimize your fleet.
Of course, there are downsides. You lose that feeling of leveling up and growing alongside your team, but maybe there can be a way for officers to still level up even though the only provide 1 combat skill. Maybe as they level up they gain logistic skills, things like reduced maintenance or improved rate of xp gains for marines.
The other problem is the lower cap on effectiveness for smaller ships, but you could argue that all ships should just get the same number of slots, or there may be some other way of balancing things. It seems like spamming large numbers of smaller ships generally outperforms the same dp worth of larger ships, and the only reason that doesn't work in the campaign is you run out of officers. If you remove the officer limit then frigate spam would probably be too powerful, so giving them only 1 slot might be just the right nerf to keep them in check.
I think this might be pretty cool and intuitive- damage control specialist, marine leader, fire control officer, chief engineer, cap'n and similar. I like the idea!