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[Kriby]

Topic sort of sums it up. Make the crew inventory stack experience like marines have, make unskilled crew give equivalent to 50% max CR without other modifiers. Capped skill crew might result in 70-80% CR without modifiers? To taste.

Inspired by another post where people mentioned crew feeling like a commodity, which I agreed with.

[Yunru]

Let's not go back to those days.

[SCC]

Alex disliked crew experience, because it forced him to deal with several different crew commodities. I liked crew experience for what it did to my fleet, not because of economy or externalities. I wouldn't mind it coming back.

[Megas]

Aside from crew tetris, another reason why I dislike crew xp is 50% CR at early game.  Ships get low CR after one fight.  Then by endgame, everything has 80% CR base.  It was part of the inverted difficulty problem back then.

[Kriby]

Inverted difficulty does make sense as an argument for why CR should be left out of it. Maybe better crew could reduce supply/fuel usage by some percentage? A nice convenience factor for not throwing crew into a bonfire every battle.

I also clearly walked on a landmine by not having experience with a previous implementation. Did that crew system also work like the marines do right now? I don't see how you can play "tetris" with the marine stacks.

[SafariJohn]

Crew used to come in 4-5 levels, with each level being its own stack. Ships at the top-left of the fleet screen got the best crew, bottom-right got the worst.

Reducing supply/fuel usage also creates inverted difficulty, though less egregious than CR.

[Kriby]

Ok, yeah, I wouldn't want to add something that requires that level of micromanagement. Just let the crew be a big pool that affects the whole fleet equally based on their experience like the marines do.

I think you can wiggle around the inverted difficulty thing to actually make it add some finesse to the end-game. Let smaller crew pools gain experience relatively quickly, so in the early game lost crew has less of an impact. Once your crew pool grows to a thousand or more, it starts to take more time to organize and train them properly (more diverse ship types in the fleet, more complicated ships, steeper crew/officer ratio etc). In effect you could ride your way into end-game fleets with a crew pool that starts out pretty well trained and generally stay that way, until you lose an onslaught or two worth of crew. Then you need to replace a ton of crew with newbies, and you'll be feeling the lack of their experience while they take relatively long to train.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

Ok, yeah, I wouldn't want to add something that requires that level of micromanagement. Just let the crew be a big pool that affects the whole fleet equally based on their experience like the marines do.

Look, it was before my time also and I kinda am of the opinion it will eventually make a comeback in at least a limited form.  But I guess it got dropped because it basically became a free money generator over the course of any single run, really destabilized player experience (also, significantly predates colony system, which is an intentional free money generator that isn't really that free).  Also, there was the crew tetris thing where player had to track different versions of the same commodity...

Edit: forgot to mention crew tetris!  Also spelling.

[robepriority]

What's telling about this is issue is that I haven't even seen a mod reimplement crew experience (the closest being starship legends and their ship reputations). I think instead of experience, we could do something like camaraderie:

With a small, early game fleet, crews are closeknit with each other and their captains, meaning when starting it's at 100%.
Larger fleet sizes put a divisor on it, which can be made up for with battles with high crew survival rates.

This applies to the entire fleet, so no multistacks, and also prevents the inverted difficulty curve.

[Megas]

Ok, yeah, I wouldn't want to add something that requires that level of micromanagement. Just let the crew be a big pool that affects the whole fleet equally based on their experience like the marines do.

Look, it as before my time also and I kinda am of the opinion it will eventually make a comeback in at least a limited form.  But I guess it got dropped because it basically became a free money generator over the course of any single run, really destabilized player experience (also, significantly predates colony system, which is an intentional free money generator that isn't really that free).  Also, there was the crew tetris thing where player had to track different versions of the same commodity...

Edit: forgot to mention crew tetris!

The main reason it was dropped was to simplify dev work under the hood for Alex.

But it also had gameplay annoyances discussed previously.

As for training crew to sell, I did not do that, at least not if I did not max the skill that raised crew xp and halved crew requirements (at max level).  While I had plenty of elites late, I did not have so many that I could sell them.  Only if the player took the crew skill to the max did player really had a surplus of elites to sell.

Also, in few of those releases (all of the 0.65a ones), food runs from Tartessus to Sindria/Volturn was the biggest money and xp maker by far.  Dwarfed everything else (even combat) by a wide margin.  80% xp from food runs, 20% xp from named bounties (which leveled up much slower back then, and no fleet with a dozen capitals).

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

What's telling about this is issue is that I haven't even seen a mod reimplement crew experience (the closest being starship legends and their ship reputations). I think instead of experience, we could do something like camaraderie:

With a small, early game fleet, crews are closeknit with each other and their captains, meaning when starting it's at 100%.
Larger fleet sizes put a divisor on it, which can be made up for with battles with high crew survival rates.

This applies to the entire fleet, so no multistacks, and also prevents the inverted difficulty curve.

That sounds suspiciously like a morale system to me...!

[Goumindong]

I also would not mind a crew experience system coming back. I like the idea of familiarity with a ship making my fleet better feels very cohesive*. A subtle push to keep the fleet together and not swap ships at every opportunity.

Though if I could choose to have a crew experience thing it would probably just be a non-combat CR multiplier effect. That is at max value it would halve the CR costs of anything you did but not effect the supply costs. So if you normally had a max of 70% CR and had a normal 10% CR cost for combat(or getting hit by a storm) that cost 10 supplies normally; after combat you would have 65% CR and it would still cost 10 supplies to refit.

*very similar to the legendary ship thing though I dislike the negative modifies on that mod and would prefer that acquiring bonuses was more consistent and less combat oriented/finicky.

[Megas]

If crew get experience again, maybe their bonuses should be campaign/QoL level.

Suggestions for elite crew bonuses:
* Less crew casualties (because they have more hp, like high-level d&d adventurers instead of low-level commoners).
* Less skeleton crew requirements (they are more motivated and know what to do, so they get more done).
* Less supply drain (they know how to be more efficient and not eat so much junk food).

Definitely no CR.  No fun having ships in the yellow after one fight early in the game.

[JaronK]

I think it works better if you just have officers give their crews experience when they stay on the same ship for a while.  This manifests as the officer giving bonuses with a specific ship, and those bonuses being somewhat random but related to the officer's normal skills.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

I think it works better if you just have officers give their crews experience when they stay on the same ship for a while.  This manifests as the officer giving bonuses with a specific ship, and those bonuses being somewhat random but related to the officer's normal skills.

Maybe, but that kinda cuts against swapping officers between ships (since the implication is that a ship's crew stays with the ship, not follow the officer).