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[Baqar79]

Rather than comment on the build thread, I thought I would start up a new thread to talk about ideas that might work instead of the current crew promotion mechanic as Alex is thinking of removing this feature.

I do like having some sort of crew mechanic (I always build reinforced bulk-heads to protect them), but I know that the value of their contribution is fairly small, so I was actually hoping that they would become more important in some form so that hull-mods like "reinforced bulk-heads" are a better choice.

To the idea...

Now it doesn't really make sense that officers have all these fancy skills; They might be good at one thing, but as an officer, I would imagine that most of what makes them great is utilizing the strengths and weaknesses of the crew below them to operate an effective command.

Why not have it so that officers require crew to be assigned to them in order to function.  Those crew would need time to acclimatize to the officers routines and idiosyncrasies, so when assigning a new officer to a ship, the newly assigned crew might apply a -50% modifier to that officers abilities (and the same penalty to their experience). 

Slowly with time and battle experience that negative modifier would drop down to 0% giving the ship the full benefit of the officers skills, with normal experience progression.

If sufficient numbers of your crew dies, perhaps you might lose some of those crew members working closest to the commander; and so a few new slots open up, creating a new -% modifier by averaging the overall experience of the older more experienced crew with the newer recruits required to fill the gap of those that died while being assigned to that officer.

In addition have the number of crew required by that officer scale with the ship crew size. 

An officer may only need 15 crew assigned to them to function at 100% with the wolf; but assign them to the onslaught and suddenly they need another 500 crew to function.  This has the side effect that the officer needs time to work with the new crew and ship systems to get back up to 100% efficiency; this means that transferring officers to new commands is a fairly painful process.  I'm not sure if this will be a good thing or a bad thing.

I would expect that having more crew on a larger ship command would take longer for an officer to get comfortable and to be able to push his/her crew to their maximum, but perhaps this -50% penalty could require the same time & combat experience in order to get back up to 100% regardless of the assigned crew size in order to simplify things.

I also like the idea of crew having a small chance to be promoted to an officer if that ship is currently not under command; though that will probably complicate things...as would the idea of having multiple officers..so I'll leave that for now

Oh and I had an even more complicated idea, we could assign crew to the actual skills that the officer has currently learned so that the penalty only affects the new skill which has a fresh crew assigned to it. (this means your officer will need more crew assigned to them as their skills and experience grows); but I think this might be time consuming to implement.

I'm certain there are others with better ideas out there, so feel free to share!

[Wyvern]

Hm.  I'm going to guess that the complexity of crew is all in the calculations for which level of crew gets assigned to what vessels?  In that case, having different types of crew might not actually make things less complicated...

How about this, then: for (non-fighter) ships, "crew experience" is determined on a per-ship basis rather than a per-crew basis - justified as the crew needing to adapt to the foibles of this particular vessel.  Loss of crew due to hull damage results in a loss of crew experience for that ship - though, for small losses, this might not be enough to reduce max CR.

That should give you a similar feel of advancement, with significantly less complexity.

(Though, to really benefit from less complexity, you'd probably also need to change stats around a bit - make it so that purchasing a ship includes purchasing its skeleton crew complement, those crew stay as part of the ship unless it's mothballed*, and the max crew stat changes to maximum number of passengers rather than including the skeleton crew complement.  This would make the player's crew as shown in inventory represent available replacement crew rather than all crew, and would also greatly simplify storage / retrieval of large ships.)

Fighters should probably be handled differently due to the way they hemorrhage crew - if crew experience is tied to ships and lost from crew casualties, fighters would never get anywhere.  For now, I'd probably just automatically give fighters the benefits of fully experienced crew, and look at the issue again when you get to the skill revamp.

_____
* Edited in a footnote: This means that the mothballing confirmation dialog should include "This will lose all crew experience for this ship!" - and, if applicable, a second warning of "Mothballing this ship will put your fleet over its passenger capacity!"

[Baqar79]

I was trying to get at experience on a per-leader basis (so the assigned crew to that leader = skeleton crew component).  If we move the officer we lose all of that accumulated experience (which I thought would be better done as a -% modifier to that officers skills), so that the crew will need to retrain with a new officer from scratch.

Of course this would mean there would be no point in going above the minimum crew except to create a partial buffer to protect those assigned to an officer.  Perhaps if you assign the entire crew, you would be penalized with slower progression with the -% modifier, but perhaps the modifier could go from -50% -> +10% instead of -50% -> 0% with a skeleton crew assigned.

If experience is done per-ship or per-officer I can see that fighters will still be a problem as described.  I'm hoping that a similar idea where fighters get assigned to per carrier will happen in the future (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=9628.0) and perhaps then the way they work can be changed a little. 

It would probably complicate things enormously, but if carriers also got a "fighter pilot crew" count (in addition to the regular crew count), from which the pool of crew are drafted into newly created fighters; it may stop the problems with crew bleeding experience assigned per-ship or per-officer basis.  There would be no experience for that crew, but in order for fighters/bombers/etc to be launched, they need to have the available crew as well as another ship wing.

I'm getting a bit off topic, but I guess though this is where it would be great to have an officer that can offer fighter specific buffs; perhaps we just need to add another skill tree that provides buffs for fighters.

[Alex]

Hah - this is very interesting!

The idea to have ships level up, basically, we've been kicking around internally for a long time. More of an attachment to ships and all that. It does get a bit weird with things like mothballing, taking crew losses, leaving it under-crewed for some time, etc. Reducing crew to just "crew" might make those easier to handle, though. Another way to go here might be to get rid of crew-as-separate-from-ships entirely.


The idea to have ships "acclimate" to officers (or officers acclimate to ships, either way, really) before the full officer bonus is applied is also something I'd been thinking about - actually, considered it while initially implementing officers. It's neat, but what does it bring mechanics-wise? It makes it so that once you assign an officer to a ship, you're discouraged from reassigning them. If, indeed, constantly swapping officers between ships was something the game encouraged, then that might be a good solution.

But it doesn't currently, and you might even pick different skills/personality depending on what the intended ship is, so there's already some concept of an officer being suited for a ship, without an "acclimation" period.

It would also raise some thorny questions. For example, what happens when you transfer command to another ship mid-battle? What about in the campaign, does this acclimation also apply to you the player?

All in all, I think this is a neat concept that's probably too troublesome in implementation/mechanical details.

[Megas]

Another way to go here might be to get rid of crew-as-separate-from-ships entirely.

This is what I plan to do for a ship mod for another game.  (Have not yet been able to work on it yet, but that is beside the point.)  Rather than deal with the headaches of implementing crew, I decided crew is yet another integral part of the ship.  If the ship is recovered on the field, it cannot fight very effectively until player repairs it at a friendly shipyard or equivalent (call it hiring crew or whatever).  Handy when crew is human at first, but then player goes to alien space later... permanently, and needs something more abstract for plausible handwaving.  (I do not care how my ship works; I only care if it can move and fight.  I got a space game to blast ships!)

But it doesn't currently, and you might even pick different skills/personality depending on what the intended ship is, so there's already some concept of an officer being suited for a ship, without an "acclimation" period.

I do this already.  Missile Specialization 10 is the most powerful skill to give an officer, yet it is completely useless if assigned to a ship without missiles.  I have missile and non-missile officers, and assign to ships as appropriate.

Also, I have considered hiring ten Timid officers to enable Pilum spam from Vigilances.  Never tried it yet; did not want to waste time grinding several more officers specifically for that job.


As for ship acclimation, I use officers mostly to keep my ships CR high (they all have Combat Aptitude 10), and I frequently bump the officer out of his ship so I can use it!  Late in my 0.7.1 game, I put officers in my smaller ships and when I need a small flagship for the job, the officer gets yanked into my Paragon while I take over the Medusa, Hyperion, or Tempest he was in.

[Wyvern]

I'd be all in favor of any solution where storing / retrieving ships was less likely to force me to go store / retrieve crew in order to get fleet-wide CR levels back to normal.

I'd also be all in favor of any solution that made me less averse to running flying coffins (aka fighters); right now one of the reasons I avoid fighters is because I just don't like the guaranteed casualties that they generate.  (Back when Wasps were zero-crew drones, I actually used them quite a bit.  Now... not at all.)

Abstracting crew out entirely and making ships gain XP instead would solve both of those issues.  And then the player could be made to care about critical hull damage by anything from loss of ship XP to a chance of applying negative hull mods (removable in dock for a fee...)

On the other hand, I don't really like the notion of getting rid of crew entirely; it feels too game-y to me, especially for a game that's trying to represent a gritty broken-down future where life is cheap.  (On which note: I'd make marines cheaper, and use some other mechanism to make refurbishing a captured ship an expensive proposition; maybe even replace the current "engines come on" boarding dialog with one where "scans indicate X ship can be repaired, given Y supplies and Z marines to clear out its current crew".)

[nomadic_leader]

Let me take the other side; though rarely does anyone agree with me.

First off the game does encourage officer swapping at some points; with a fleet of 3 ships you can have 10 officers and swap them depending on what kind of engagement you're entering. They can't die and they don't cost money so there you are.

Crew: Love them. Leveling crew up is enormously, viscerally satisfying for reasons I cannot quite articulate. I guess because it reminds you that you're managing actual humans, and it creates additional emotional resonance when you lose fighters or ships, or take casualties. Otherwise it's just ships; it might as well be robots. In fact I think the game should give a more detailed breakdown of what types of crew were lost after engagements, and in your character tab should be a tally of the cumulative casualties your fleet has suffered for each type of crew; perhaps with some effect on your renown. I'd love to see even more types of crew like prisoner conscripts, passengers, etc with suitable CR effects.

That said, tying crew to individual ships and eliminating them as a free-floating commodity might also be interesting-- but only if your ship could still lose a bunch of elite crew from taking lots of damage, and have to start over with new ones. Still overall I think the system you've got now is perhaps more fun.

Why is the current system maybe better than having ships level up? Because this is a fleet management game so you should encourage attachment to certain fleet compositions, not individual ships. Encouraging attachment to ships makes people miserly, cheap, save scummy, and solo-ey because they're afraid of losing a ship.

The reason why everyone does this is because markets are so incredibly recalcitrant about actually producing new or rare ships at a high frequency, and boarding isn't an effective way to get new ones. As a result people are afraid to take risks, they just get ships they like and they never try anything new with their fleet. (this all should be changed)

Ships should be more ephemeral so people must experiment more with unusual fleet compositions and weapons loadouts. Weapons can get destroyed and lost in combat already. Time and battle should also slowly degrade ships: Let's say each month of campaign should reduce a ship's max CR and maybe speed by 1%. And every time a ship takes hull damage beyond 10%, it should only be able to repair it's hull value up to 90% of the previous max. This way ships would gradually age from the rigors of space travel to be suitable only for beginner captains who can't take advantage of their full CR, and serious battle damage would begin to irreversibly compromise the structure.

To me it seem pretty evident that fleet building should be the focus, not individual ships. A floating crew mechanic you have now fits nicely with this. If you do decide to go with individual ship levelling up, and encouraging ship attachement; then you should also have some irreversible hullmods so ships don't change their entire personality in 1 second and back the next. But in doing so you will be really encouraging the worst tendencies of players and reducing the fleet level picture.
 

[Megas]

If ships degrade permanently, with no way to restore peak stats, then my first priority will be to get steady replacements to maintain the best stats, and scuttle or eliminate the lemons.

[Alex]

Ships should be more ephemeral so people must experiment more with unusual fleet compositions and weapons loadouts. Weapons can get destroyed and lost in combat already. Time and battle should also slowly degrade ships: Let's say each month of campaign should reduce a ship's max CR and maybe speed by 1%. And every time a ship takes hull damage beyond 10%, it should only be able to repair it's hull value up to 90% of the previous max. This way ships would gradually age from the rigors of space travel to be suitable only for beginner captains who can't take advantage of their full CR, and serious battle damage would begin to irreversibly compromise the structure.

I think this is a very interesting idea. That'd certainly put an end to being miserly with ship losses, wouldn't it? On the other hand, players might become more miserly with deployments - i.e. they've got a shiny new Medusa, but risking permanent damage in a fight with some pirates? Then again, if there's time-based decay... hmm.

Yeah, this is very interesting. I also think a lot of people would hate with a passion That said: will keep this in mind; might be a useful approach after industry shapes up, depending on how that affects player behavior regarding ship losses. We'll see!

[Baqar79]

I am pretty miserly with ship losses, I guess it's like collecting; you want to keep everything in pristine condition without ever removing it from it's package.

I have to admit I don't like to lose ships and don't really have a problem with reloading to try again.  It's just a particular play style, that perhaps isn't very realistic, but is still enjoyable in any case.

So the concept of having ships degrade over time sounds terrible, yet I can see that it would force you to utilize them in battle since they are going to decay regardless.

What about getting rid of the idea behind destroyed ships and allow any ship to be retrieved from battle, but with permanent damage applied (yeah, I know this isn't a new idea at all).  Now as a miserly fleet captain, I would be like "whatever, I'll just reload, my ship sucks now" and try the fight until I don't lose any ships (or ships that I care about).

I wonder if having a mechanic where high level relations with certain factions might open up the ability to have "expert technicians" fix ships associated with that faction up to 100% (repairing all permanently damaged components); at a high cost of course. 

This though polarizes the player to choose ships built by the faction they are associated with and of course it means that my play style (buying all my ships on the black market and never associating with factions) would have to change, but it might be an interesting mechanic as suddenly you have a very good reason for joining a faction (to keep your babies at 100% ).

Back to the crew mechanics:

Perhaps we need to look at making officers a little bit more complex to make swapping between different ships a preferable thing at least initially.  I'll go with the idea that crew is assigned to officers for now (with that -50% starting penalty), but it can be adapted to per ship.

Have hired officers have a maximum command size and a ship preference and provide a "familiar with crew bonus":

-Officer preferred ship: Wolf (confers unique bonus for the specific ship eg +100 flux dissipation)

-Officer preferred crew: (10-50) - Negative penalty outside of this class of ship ( less than or more than the preferred crew confers a penalty in some way)

-Officer familiarization bonus - Random skill on top of already available skills (granted on reaching familiarity with the crew (-0% penalty))

So why transfer captains?

Well you first have to find a captain type (cautious, steady, aggressive) and an Officer preferred crew to match up to the ship you want commanded.

Having the officer preferred ship line up with your requirements will be require quite a bit of luck, so most people would find officers that have a preferred crew around the correct number and have those assigned to a ship.

When that officer reaches familiarization, a random bonus is given to that officer (some skill or buff).  Now if you happen to purchase the correct ship for that officer, transferring that officer will not only remove the familiarization bonus, but now that officer will need to become familiar again with the crew.

The trick is, that familiarization bonus may actually be more beneficial than the unique bonus given to that officer by being assigned to there preferred ship.  If you transfer the officer, it may be that you will end up with a familiarization bonus on their preferred ship that isn't as useful and the whole transfer may of been better off not happening.

[Megas]

I would like to be able to acquire blueprints and autofactories so I can churn out as many ships as I want.  Got a blueprint for Medusa or Hyperion, and control of an autofactory?  Happy times!  I get to produce as many ships as I have resources and not care about ship rarity.  (Trying to acquire some ships normally is a royal pain.  For example, as a possible Tri-Tachyon game, I might start as Scarab and eat the rep. penalty so I do not need to deal with trying to find one later.)  Okay, I do not get variant bonuses like XIV, but... oh, well.

We really need Industry.  That would help in crew and ship decisions.  Do we want rare, durable, and priceless artifacts; or do we want renewable and disposable assets?

With rare ships, anytime I lose a ship as rare as Hyperion or Tempest, it is an automatic game reload, no ifs-and-butts.

[Midnight Kitsune]

Ships should be more ephemeral so people must experiment more with unusual fleet compositions and weapons loadouts. Weapons can get destroyed and lost in combat already. Time and battle should also slowly degrade ships: Let's say each month of campaign should reduce a ship's max CR and maybe speed by 1%. And every time a ship takes hull damage beyond 10%, it should only be able to repair it's hull value up to 90% of the previous max. This way ships would gradually age from the rigors of space travel to be suitable only for beginner captains who can't take advantage of their full CR, and serious battle damage would begin to irreversibly compromise the structure.

I think this is a very interesting idea. That'd certainly put an end to being miserly with ship losses, wouldn't it? On the other hand, players might become more miserly with deployments - i.e. they've got a shiny new Medusa, but risking permanent damage in a fight with some pirates? Then again, if there's time-based decay... hmm.

Yeah, this is very interesting. I also think a lot of people would hate with a passion That said: will keep this in mind; might be a useful approach after industry shapes up, depending on how that affects player behavior regarding ship losses. We'll see!

Please for the love of the noobs, DON'T do this! This would cause several problems and most of them would hurt the new player. Problems like making combat further punishing, putting a timer on the campaign for ships, and would greatly increase the chances of stranding new or even veteran players in uninhabited systems! Oh and it would also discourage exploration due to worries of being stranded

[Wyvern]

There are a number of games out there that have variations on "everything you use breaks".  I hate that mechanic, and would simply mod it out of Starsector if it turned up.

On the other hand, having ships slowly degrade over time and battle isn't necessarily a bad idea...

For example, I remember a wonderful van my parents used to own; for a while, ordinary maintenance kept it running at peak efficiency.  Eventually, though, it started to wear out; nothing ever actually broke down, but it needed more frequent and more expensive maintenance to keep it in top shape.

Something like that could work well - present a wear-and-tear meter that would slowly climb with accrued time and hull damage; the higher the meter goes, the more supplies it costs to keep the ship running at full CR.  You could reduce that wear-and-tear meter by an expensive overhaul (price tag similar to what you'd pay for a new ship), by deliberately reducing the ship's maximum CR, or by accepting one or another of the negative hull mods used by D class ships*.  The key difference here is that you don't ever hit a "I can't use this ship at all" point, just maybe a point where "Hm, this thing's getting expensive to run, maybe I should invest in an overhaul or a new ship".

This would combine interestingly with a ship-based XP progression, especially if the potential advantages offered more interesting options than just increased maximum CR; you'd eventually** have a choice between using shiny new personality-free ships that are (relatively) cheap to run, or old hard-to-maintain clunkers that don't look like much anymore but can make .5 past lightspeed.

(Although at this point, some intrepid modder will inevitably decide to add pokemon style evolving spaceships...)

* This would need to be done something like officer skills - use a random seed that's stored with the ship so that, when it passes a certain level of wear and tear, you have to pick between an immediate jump in maintenance costs or some specific and non-save-scummable D hull mod.
** Edit: And it's important to note that this is very much eventually - ship degradation should not be an issue that a new player needs to worry about, but something that slowly happens over multiple game years.

[Talkie Toaster]

Crew: Love them. Leveling crew up is enormously, viscerally satisfying for reasons I cannot quite articulate. I guess because it reminds you that you're managing actual humans, and it creates additional emotional resonance when you lose fighters or ships, or take casualties. Otherwise it's just ships; it might as well be robots. In fact I think the game should give a more detailed breakdown of what types of crew were lost after engagements, and in your character tab should be a tally of the cumulative casualties your fleet has suffered for each type of crew; perhaps with some effect on your renown. I'd love to see even more types of crew like prisoner conscripts, passengers, etc with suitable CR effects.

Is a better way of making crew 'human' without having them level up making them sometimes get promoted to officers? If you earn > LARGE_AMOUNT of XP from a single event (a combat, or a transaction) one of your crew might be promoted to an officer or whatever the noncombat officers are going to be. It'd be great if the officer skills are linked to the event that created them too (e.g. if you get tons of XP in a fight but take tons of damage, maybe they spawn with Damage Control).

Unless the creation rate was incredibly low though you'd rapidly get too many officers, unless officer death on ship destruction is added. And at high levels it'd potentially just be an annoyance if you've got a full crew of level 7-8 officers and your crew keep popping up as level 1-2 chumps and asking for a go on the wheel (I guess you could turn spawning off if you have no ships needing an officer).

E: If multiple crew types become a thing too, maybe you could do promotion that way. E.g. take on 'unskilled labour' for cheap that don't count towards your skeleton crew requirements but have a chance to turn into ratings/engineers/smugglers(?) when you gain XP related to that role.
Actually, I assumed figuring out multiple crew types would be easy but it's not really. Anything effect beyond 'rating: counts as crew' or 'engineer: not crew, but increases supply spend rate'  seems like it'd just overlap with officer/noncombat officer effects.

[Baqar79]

I would like to be able to acquire blueprints and autofactories so I can churn out as many ships as I want.  Got a blueprint for Medusa or Hyperion, and control of an autofactory?  Happy times!  I get to produce as many ships as I have resources and not care about ship rarity.  (Trying to acquire some ships normally is a royal pain.  For example, as a possible Tri-Tachyon game, I might start as Scarab and eat the rep. penalty so I do not need to deal with trying to find one later.)  Okay, I do not get variant bonuses like XIV, but... oh, well.

We really need Industry.  That would help in crew and ship decisions.  Do we want rare, durable, and priceless artifacts; or do we want renewable and disposable assets?

With rare ships, anytime I lose a ship as rare as Hyperion or Tempest, it is an automatic game reload, no ifs-and-butts.

That is a pretty good point, I don't know how industry will work; but the idea of building your own faction does appeal.

I do prefer the idea of rare, durable artifact ships over mass producing them, though if you can obtain blueprints and build them yourself, they are going to lose that.

But we have had faction specific elite models (like the XIV fleet on Hegemony); so if we could extend elite ships to all factions, we could still have fairly rare ships, while being able to mass produce the base model.

As for the instant reload on losing a rare ship; I was thinking along the lines of something like this:
-Ship wear 0% -> 50% - some loss in performance, perhaps higher CR deployment cost
-Ship wear 50% -> 75% - weapon slots start become disabled
-Ship wear 75% -> 100% - speed/flux generation (as in the pirate hulls) fails until the ship is pretty much worthless.

When you successfully finish combat, you have the opportunity to salvage any destroyed ship, but with a damage level around 75% -> 100% .  The only way to bring this up to spec would be to have very good faction relations (by aligning yourself with them) with the ship manufacturer.

This does mean though that you can acquire any ship you fight against, so it might not be such a good idea if the pirates/bounties have some amazing ships, so perhaps just restrict restoring destroyed ships to your own would be better.

Just an idea to try and make it a little more appealing for players like myself to risk putting my good ships in battle, while knowing that I do have the opportunity to repair my favorite ships back to 100% providing I have good relations with the faction responsible for producing that ship.

To offset the problem with a new player having to deal with this, perhaps certain ships should be ubiquitous enough, that their wear and tear can be repaired back to 100% at any old station (at a much greater cost).  Or perhaps the parts are so common there might not even be any additional cost to repairing the ship back to 100%