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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Every ship requires officer  (Read 3295 times)

tomatopaste

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Every ship requires officer
« on: July 28, 2021, 12:06:44 AM »

Considering how powerful skills are, ships without them act as pretty much cannon fodder. My suggestion is requiring a ship to have a commanding officer before it can be deployed in combat. This would see a lot more skill-related counterplay in the player can pick targets based on skills, and since there would be fewer targets with no unique characteristics to stomp combat would be more interesting. This also has the effect of limiting fleet size based on the number of officers the player is fielding.

Some tweaks to accomodate this would be allowing the reassignment of officers in combat and/deployment, making officer leveling more nuanced, and increasing the rate at which officers can be acquired, potentially through capturing, promoting etc.
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SCC

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #1 on: July 28, 2021, 01:10:08 AM »

Alternatively, the base number of officers could be decreased. It was 4 previously and it was fine. Officerless ships worked, even if getting more officers was probably more efficient. Now it's possible to field nothing but officered ships, not because you planned for it, but because you just run out of deployment points faster than out of officers.

JUDGE! slowpersun

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #2 on: July 28, 2021, 06:36:32 PM »

What, you can't trust NCOs to do their job?  Man, good thing you never were an officer in Vietnam, prolly woulda ended up fragged.  But I digress.  Not every ship needs an officer, but maybe instead game should just generate one time NCOs for every battle to basically show up as placeholder portraits.

Alternatively, I guess having NCOs represented as tiered crews with some experience vs new crew without might work, but the game apparently used to do this back in like pre-0.7 version and that got dropped.  But now marines have experience pool.  So maybe it gets brought back.  Who knows?
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Megas

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #3 on: July 28, 2021, 07:20:05 PM »

Base CR with crew xp (in earlier releases):  Green=50%, Normal=60%, Veteran=70%, Elite=80%.

Base CR today:  Unskilled=70%, with Leadership skill=up to 85%.

Unskilled today is equivalent to old veteran crew, and with skills, better than old elites.

And Combat Endurance or Reliability Expertise (depending on release) adds 15 or 20% to get up to 100%.

Goodbye crew levels and good riddance crew Tetris.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #4 on: July 28, 2021, 08:02:14 PM »

What, you can't trust NCOs to do their job?

An NCO is a non-commissioned officer.


I support an officer requirement for every non-mothballed player ship for lore reasons and limiting player power. The player would logically need people they can trust commanding their ships, lest whoever is in charge just waltz off, and more tightly limiting the size of player fleets would allow challenging battles without bloating AI fleets to ridiculous proportions. Maybe allow the player to run ships without officers once they have a Military Base - or something to that effect.
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shoi

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #5 on: July 29, 2021, 12:23:48 AM »

every ship does have an officer. the unassigned ships are just captained by people who are completely un noteworthy. Same concept with the colonies with no admin.

as for the actual suggestion itself.. eh. mite be neat. idk, have to see how the new skills shake out
« Last Edit: July 29, 2021, 12:27:14 AM by shoi »
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JUDGE! slowpersun

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #6 on: July 29, 2021, 01:27:45 AM »

What, you can't trust NCOs to do their job?

An NCO is a non-commissioned officer.


If you're so pedantic as to claim that since an acronym contains a word, it must be that word, I hope you have good health insurance.  Otherwise having that doctor of Philosophy remove your appendix will go swimmingly, I'm sure.  Plus, NCOs work for a living.  And get paid less.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #7 on: July 29, 2021, 08:34:04 AM »

My point was in Starsector terms ALL the player's officers could be NCOs - it is abstracted out either way.
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JUDGE! slowpersun

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #8 on: July 29, 2021, 10:11:24 AM »

My point was in Starsector terms ALL the player's officers could be NCOs - it is abstracted out either way.

It was, but then the game dropped crew experience (unless it gets brought back in some form).  So now crew is just another commodity necessary to run ships.  Just can't stack 'em up like cordwood in the ship's engine to go faster.

In conclusion, that's why REAL officers get saluted!
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6chad.noirlee9

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #9 on: July 29, 2021, 01:26:48 PM »

i think the experienced crew should make a comeback, even if a small one

you can say otherwise all you want, but an NCO is a far cry from a baseline recruit; regardless of how good your officer is,
 if they dont have a decent NCO backing them up it will severely limit what they can do to the point of the officer doing NCO things when they should be doing CO things.
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JUDGE! slowpersun

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #10 on: July 29, 2021, 02:48:19 PM »

i think the experienced crew should make a comeback, even if a small one

you can say otherwise all you want, but an NCO is a far cry from a baseline recruit; regardless of how good your officer is,
 if they dont have a decent NCO backing them up it will severely limit what they can do to the point of the officer doing NCO things when they should be doing CO things.

I agree, at least in a limited form.  Doing experience pools for what is essentially a commodity just seems kinda clunky.  Like normal crew is still just a commodity, but some crew either act as NCOs but suck until passing some threshold and become normal NCOs, or you just have to spend extra money to buy regular NCOs.  Tradeoff is that NCOs make un-officered ships have slightly higher CR (but have no skills or maybe one skill), and can sometimes be promoted to officers (brevet style, basically).  Still, even that suggestions seems kinda clunky, since most officers top out at level 5 and player only goes to 15.  Maybe by 1.0 release, when player finally is allowed to get to level 20?  Dunno.

Although I guess this would also mean that if such an additional system were to eventually be implemented, it should also apply to marines.
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6chad.noirlee9

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #11 on: July 29, 2021, 04:31:54 PM »

an NCO is just regular crew with experience that lead the rest of the crew, they are not ever actually officers in any capacity, and every NCO, no matter the experience, answers to and salutes every officer, no matter how new.
NCOs in this case woudl actually just be more and more experienced crew.

i would like to see specialty crew you can hire in the form of faction crew, as well as see an experience system

i HATE the "crew is a commodity" aspect that dominates the game currently
it honestly disgusts me from a thematic and gameplay perspective

besides that, having a few top leve hegemony crewmembers giving +15 armor, and a few this and that giving other small bonuses just really sounds cool to me
i really would like to see some sort of incentive to keeping the HUMAN BEINGS that make your ships work alive: i mean not everyone is an insane pather, and the idea that people would just "shut up and die" is LUDICROUS and really i dont see it happening that way

my case in point that it is possible would be the marines: they are now experienced based

i mean really though, how fun would it be to come across some highest level possible specialists in crypods?
to me it would add much needed flavor to the crew dynamic, and make shopping at the different markets much more fun in the long run

searching for the perfect crew to assign to each ship would be nuts and add more to the endgame

the only real issue would be the new mechanic necessary in order to assign crew: but compared to everything else that has been done coding wise with/in starsector its doable, if something a bit further on the to do list currently

well, thats my vote anyway
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Gothars

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #12 on: July 30, 2021, 11:48:36 AM »

Alternatively, the base number of officers could be decreased. It was 4 previously and it was fine. Officerless ships worked, even if getting more officers was probably more efficient. Now it's possible to field nothing but officered ships, not because you planned for it, but because you just run out of deployment points faster than out of officers.

I would like that. Maybe not down to four, but at the moment it feels like a bit too many.

Or alternatively, make officers useful in other things than direct fleet confrontations, like support ships or scouting. Or leading a support fleet from your colony. Let us see which options the command tab will bring in the future.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #13 on: July 30, 2021, 12:06:27 PM »

Decreasing the base number of officers disproportionally hurts smaller ships.

Another idea is to have limits on the total number of officers skills rather than officers. That way you could choose to have 10 low level officers on all your smaller ships or 4 super high level officers on a few big ships. Or something like that anyway. You would still want a max number of skills per officer, so you don't get crazy god officer shenanigans.
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Yunru

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Re: Every ship requires officer
« Reply #14 on: July 30, 2021, 12:43:04 PM »

Stray thought: Give ships a DP modifier for having an officer?
That way having a lot of officers on smaller ships can be a thing without having the same officers on capital ships being better.
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