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[shoi]

I dont know if raising personnel cost would be the right choice in and of itself.
Lets be real, if personnel become more valuable, most people will just save-scum after a crippling defeat and try again.

The main problem is colonies and the massive source of income you get from them, right? With that in mind i'd just nerf them instead, because this will just screw over players that can't afford those losses and/or are playing nomadically.

In my game, I have 1 colony that's size 7, and even without cores I have more money than I know what to do with. If anything, the expenses of running those worlds need to be higher (I feel like this is how it was before though...but it got changed because ppl complain)

And WITH AI cores...hoo boy. they need much bigger drawbacks. It's soooo cliche and boring but maybe they need to go "kill all humans" in certain conditions, or maybe other factions need to actually react to you establishing a presence in the sector and hassling you instead of letting you grow into a superpower in relative peace.

[Midnight Kitsune]

Personally I would do one or the other increases, not both. This way loses still hurt but you dont have a wolf eating half your monthly stipend...
And it makes sense too. I would want more money up front because I could end up dead in a week and not get that extra monthly pay

[isyourmojofly]

Economics is a huge part of game mastery, so it makes sense that difficulty settings should alter the economy in some way. Many mechanics center around supplies, so reducing overall supply costs and reducing the punishment of hazards would be effective. Similarly there could be a reduction in crew losses for easy difficulties.

Yeah, it's quite an easy way to alter the game's difficulty without changing the experience too much. Your point about the Nex insurance payout is also very valid.

I'll say, I like this in general but my concern would be really kicking someone when they're down - i.e. you've just lost a bunch of crew after a tough fight, and now need a ton of credits to even get a few working ships. It seems like it could result in a particularly unpleasant flavor of a death spiral. Will think about this some more, though.

I will say that I haven't found this to be a problem in the couple of runs I've done. If I've taken heavy losses they've stung, but I've still had enough to get back on my feet. I've just had to pare back my fleet significantly. Of course this isn't representative of other people, and I imagine new players particularly would be more vulnerable to the death spiral.

Salaries are if anything more of an issue. I've gone out hunting a bounty that was just a little too big, ended up with a bunch of broken ships, not much cash, and payday coming along shortly. At that point, the prospect of "downsizing" excess crewmembers out the airlock is uncomfortably attractive!

Personally I would do one or the other increases, not both. This way loses still hurt but you dont have a wolf eating half your monthly stipend...
And it makes sense too. I would want more money up front because I could end up dead in a week and not get that extra monthly pay

I think tuning the numbers on this would help rather than picking one or the other. Salaries are important because they slow down growth, and make you think harder before committing to a new ship. As I mention in the original post, I think the numbers I have costs set at are probably a little extreme.

[SCC]

One thing to remember is that while pirate raids and expeditions exist, they are more band-aids for the lack of endgame than real colony disadvantages.
If there's an issue about potentially sending player into a death spiral, then perhaps bigger ships should have proportionally more crew than frigates and destroyers. Low buying price and high salary would soften how punishing it is to lose a lot of crew as well.

[Plantissue]

At this point people are suggesting that we just as well might delete crew and significantly up the maintenance cost of having ships instead.

[Shadowkiller]

I thought a major lore point of this game was that life is cheap and in great abundance, why there's so many Pirates about. Many of the descriptions of major planets in the core sector describe overpopulation and squalid conditions of the poor and homeless, sounds like it would be pretty easy to find some scrubs to fill your ships janitor positions.

[isyourmojofly]

I thought a major lore point of this game was that life is cheap and in great abundance, why there's so many Pirates about. Many of the descriptions of major planets in the core sector describe overpopulation and squalid conditions of the poor and homeless, sounds like it would be pretty easy to find some scrubs to fill your ships janitor positions.

On a spaceship, even the janitor needs to be well-trained. There's *so* much that can go wrong on board a space vessel, even the lowliest grunt needs to be properly qualified. Not that that means it's hard to find personnel; they just can't be literally untrained. I think of it more like you're hiring people who have the equivalent of a driver's license.

Also, signing up for dangerous months-long voyages would command a pretty high risk premium.

[bobucles]

The nature of D-mods suggests otherwise. The crew only need to be skilled enough to replace bad parts with new ones and if they can't fix it, well, that's a D-mod. Ships only need to survive until they land on the next dock, duct tape and prayer is good enough to keep a clunker flying.

[Megas]

Your suggestion is literally ''make this thing more expensive'' which will only make it more of a grind. I remember there was also someone proposing that ship prices increase by 5 times or so, again to prolong the early game. None of this is ''making more meaningful choices'', it's just play longer the rinse and repeat game to get the same thing. And only then do you remove the choices, since if someone wants to play mid game as soon as possible he has to grind forever.

I hear you.  Unlike others, early game is my least favorite part of the game, and endgame (when player is high-powered) is probably my most favorite part, and the sooner I get out of the early game grind, the better.

The slower player progresses, the slower bounties should progress too.

Making things more expensive to extend the early game grind would be more useful as a Hard difficulty setting.  Then again, it is only hard that it takes longer to reach endgame, but once there, it is not really harder, just player took longer to get there.

And WITH AI cores...hoo boy. they need much bigger drawbacks. It's soooo cliche and boring but maybe they need to go "kill all humans" in certain conditions, or maybe other factions need to actually react to you establishing a presence in the sector and hassling you instead of letting you grow into a superpower in relative peace.

I agree only because they make colony skills a total trap to take yourself.  Pather cells might have been enough to stop me... if they worked.  Since they do not, cores are practically risk-free.

On the other hand, I would like to be able to colonize the entire sector, and alpha cores in the current release enable this.  I would not mind cores being demons that will always end badly... if I can comfortably colonize a dozen or more systems or otherwise do not need cores to run an empire.

As for other factions, that only works if they are still there.  If not (i.e., only things left to kill are zombie pirates and hermit robots), then there is no one left to bother the player until player wants to pirate the robots.  I do want to kill all factions to eliminate a major source of babysitting events.  No core worlds, no more expeditions, no more inspections, no more defending helpless core worlds from zombies.  Also, trying to colonize the whole sector includes killing core worlds so player can colonize and claim their worlds too!

[Morrokain]

I would be ok if this was added into a "hard" setting- implemented like the easy mode setting is now- or just added into Iron Mode.

Despite some very interesting and well-put benefits in increasing hullmod attractiveness, the two main issues I see at the moment are:

1) As Plantissue said, it causes over-specialization in certain playstyles. It shrinks the audience of the game to more align with "Rogue-like" rather than implement that kind of challenge into a more difficult start option (so to give players an overall choice to opt in). Grievous69 covered this as well in that some players don't want to be forced to spend the majority of their game in any portion (meaning early-mid-late) through what are technically grind gates. I am actually more ok with that concept as a whole and have enjoyed its implementation in the past (several of my suggestions recently were related to that concept), but the challenge of that is to make each portion of the "grind" meaningful in its own way. That can be really difficult, and, if you mess up- then one portion of the game feels like a slog to get to the rest of the game that is fun. In that sense, I definitely get the concern since we don't even have all three elements of the equation into place yet - endgame is still not a thing.

2) The OP already touched on this, but due to the current design this would kind of be like a "carrier nerf in sheep's clothing" kind of deal. Carriers need adjustments to be sure, but making those adjustments on the broad economical part of the campaign balance is the wrong area to leverage those changes, imo.

[isyourmojofly]

Morrokain:

1) You make a really good point here about there being no end-game content. I think also that without all the content that Alex is adding, the early game will undoubtedly feel like a grind. Perhaps it's too early for us to judge. I can understand that for people who don't like the early game, these changes sound pretty unappealing.

2) Oh yes - there are plenty of rough edges that I think would need to be considered. Any player style that relies on high crew counts (whether strike craft or a Luddic Path junkball fleet) would get hit. This can be mitigated; for instance, low-tech ships might get blast doors built-in for free ("that's how they used to build 'em in the old days!"), or a Luddic Path commission might get you a steep discount on crew prices.

[Terethall]

I've wanted the crew to matter more since I started playing. This game has so much potential to capture a lot of the spirit of e.g. Battlestar Galactica and having more focus on thinking about your crew and caring what happens to them and managing them could be compelling. Higher impact to their death would be useful. Currently I've never even considered the mods that reduce crew deaths because they just don't matter; they're a commodity and a cheap one -- the only goal is to have just enough to meet your needs, like fuel and supplies.

[Plantissue]

I'm the opposite. I don't want to have to care about crew. I don't want to manage people in a game.

[isyourmojofly]

Currently I've never even considered the mods that reduce crew deaths because they just don't matter; they're a commodity and a cheap one -- the only goal is to have just enough to meet your needs, like fuel and supplies.

Right? They just don't feel like they really matter at the moment.

I'm the opposite. I don't want to have to care about crew. I don't want to manage people in a game.

I've been thinking about what you said over the last few days, because yeah; crew costs are just an alternative cost on the player. Most of the times where you'd have to pay for crew (i.e. ship damage) you would have to pay for supplies too. Things like efficiency overhaul and some skills also allow you to minimize your expenses anyway. So why pay twice?

One big reason I can think of is that running out of supplies is utterly brutal. If you're out in deep space with no supplies, you're in deep, deep trouble. No CR means you can't fight, and you can 100% death spiral and lose everything just because you didn't pack enough supplies. Now if you can't pay your crew, it's still pretty rough; you end up deeply in debt. However, you can still fight, you can still play the game, and in the end the costs probably work out (or could be balanced to be) roughly the same.

For new players, the supply mechanic is still a "gotcha"; knowing how many supplies to buy and when is hard, so new players end up wrecked by low CR. Conversely, I think it's pretty evident how much crew you need, when you'll need more (when they get killed), and what to do if you don't have enough (mothball). The worst punishment you'll receive is to lose all your money. But you still have a fully-functioning fleet, and you can easily earn credits back.

So as somebody else already suggested, increased crew costs could be compensated for by reduced supply costs. That way the game doesn't get any harder or grindier, but it increases the options and interactivity of managing your fleet.

[Plantissue]

To be honest I don't mind either way. I'll adapt to whatever game mechanic the game forces me to adapt to.

What do I think other than one line sentences? High crew salary, but lower supply costs to compensate? It just means that battles are cheaper if supplies to recover CR after the battle remain the same. Or if it is the supplies increase proportionately to compensate, then I will not notice any difference other than that I need to buy less supplies or less often. Net monthly cost remains the same. Or if it monthly costs increases, not much will change either. It'll just slow down the rate of progression and ability to fight escalating bounties. Or if crew buying cost increases, all it'll do is discourage certain fighters till income is high enough and increase the cost of buying new ships.

Crew costs will have to be extremely high like 1000 C to make me consider Blast Doors, and even then I'll probably not want it if I think the OP could be better put into flux cap for example, so I don't lose the ships in the first place. Or as previously mentioned, completely avoid combat till income is high enough. Would managing your fleet change at all? Not really, other than the whole avoidance of combat and avoiding certain fighters part.