I’m not sure what CCP’s stance on crew is these days. The guy who was pushing “EVE ships have crew” doesn’t work at CCP anymore… but here’s the old tentative stats.
If CCP ever plans on doing anything with them, personally I lean toward passive stats, as active abilities don’t really make sense. They would make for a good isk sink if you have to do hire on bonuses and monthly salary.
I do think though, if crew are implemented, there should be a drone / robot option that would be somewhere in the range of 60-80% effectiveness of an experienced officer. That way people can kind of opt out of the “take care of the virtual pet” minigame.
Here’s an excerpt from a previous thread of mine:
Continuing the discussion from Space Commander :
New officers could be created from basic crew when enough experience has been accrued.
The mechanics surrounding the handling of officers will be something like this screen shot I’ve stolen out of a BattleTech gameplay video. These officers have traits which will provide different effects to the ships they are stationed on, and those ships will have requirements for the officers which are commanding those ships. (A rookie ship wouldn’t have any requirements, while a battlecruiser would be much more demanding.)
A minimum of a 1 month contract will be signed for an officers employment, (that payment will be paid by the tutorial npc during the npe for the first batch of officers the player receives.)
The player is going to go through a lot of officers during their game play, since the Space Commander gameplay will be designed around losing and replacing a lot of units. With this in mind, an officer market place would be required to sort through the available candidates from a local and global pool of applicants. (I imagine this as a mix of the EVE market with the filters of contracts.)
If the player does not keep up with the contract when payment is due, the officer will remove itself from the player’s employment and list itself in the officer market. Player’s could also voluntarily allow other players to buy out their officer’s contracts (for a set price paid to the initial Space Commander player plus the additional minimum 1 month contract price.)
XP will be gained on a per ship basis, based on the events that that ship partakes in. While the officers crewing the ship will gain traits based on the events they partake in, the experience the ship earns may additionally be spent on the officers to level them up even faster. This experience can be also be spent on upgrading basic crew to officers, as I mentioned earlier. (I suggest creating a template which will automatically level up the crew as it happens, so the player doesn’t have to mess with it mid battle.)
