@Sabotsas: Thanks for the vote of confidence
If that is indeed the goal I am 100% on board.
I don't know if that's the "goal", exactly, but the simplification here would certainly open the door to that kind of thing. As well as - and I think this can get lost in the shuffle sometimes - let me do more other things instead of fixing crew-level-related bugs, or it taking longer to add in something that works with crew, etc.
Just consider that there is more to crew than just the core
game mechanics. It is also about progress / accomplishment / rewards.
Yep, definitely aware of that. It doesn't have to come from crew, though - as more stuff opens up (say, outposts) it an come from that as well.
While that is true from a game mechanics standpoint I would like to have some kind of customizability (experience, weapons, gear).
Especially when thinking about outposts / planets I would imagine that we will see (boarding / invasion) troops much more often.
Honestly, that feels like an awful lot of work for what'd ultimately be treated as an abstacted resource. In a game where actions involving marines were played out as an actual game, sure, that might make sense.
At the moment patrols hunt me down all the time, but they never find anything, which makes them look rather silly and the whole thing less interesting than it could be. (Even if I had something illegal, I'd probably just dumb if before they catch up.)
If you have lots of cargo (even if it's legal), they'll find it "suspicous" and you'll get a rep hit. The chance of it being suspicious goes up with the amount of cargo you have relative to your capacity. So if you just buy a ship off the black market but don't carry around a lot of cargo, yeah, chances are they're not going to nail you for anything.
Agreed, I wouldn't miss the different ranks. I think more colorful crew varieties could help much more to "bring the world to life". I'm thinking rare specialist classes (medical, engineering, accounting) that change corresponding fleet stats. Here different pay grades would be make sense and be player controlled. Or passengers: refugees, diplomats and tourists that earn you money/rep but maybe consume certain goods. Basically, turn the vertical crew levels into a horizontal palette of interesting options.
Yeah, that could be very interesting! So long as it's things that avoid relying on a specific type of crew being on a specific ship - i.e., as you say, fleet effecs, not ship effects. (Man, thought something was wrong with my eyes for a second, with the colors. Well done.)
And, yes, just more people-types in general.
- Even though I trade both ways, suspicion level will steadily increase with no obvious impact to bring it back down. -> This should be more forgiving. As I understand it, once you're done trading and return to the market a second time, you can't decrease your 'old' suspicion level by fair trading. You should be able to.
Normal trade will make it go down, yes. It can just take a lot - if you've offloaded a bunch of drugs or organs, that "punches above its weight" in terms of cost, so you may need to sell several times the cost of normal goods. It also does go with with time.
If your suspicion level went up due to completing an illegal procurement mission, btw, the amount it goes up is based on the reward, so that can be even harder to shake.
Basically, the idea is that if you do serious smuggling, you're not going to be able to cover it up entirely.
- Black market trading and patrols are two very separate things. I assume only a tiny, tiny fraction of players will actually buy illegal goods.
Well, it's more about *selling* illegal goods and fulfilling illegal procurements - both make a lot of money, and I'd expect playes do both frequently.