So we have the ability to custom fit our ships, pick out skins, and rename them whenever we want. But what about the people who help our characters run the ship? Don’t they matter too? After all, what is a captain without their crew?
Proposal
The ability to hire, assign, fire, train, and manage the command staff of your ship so as to add bonuses to your ship’s performance. The game is focused on ships, so why not get into the details about what it’s like to run the ship? Now these would be an optional feature that would enhance the performance of the ship, they WOULD NOT be required.
Potential Positions
Each ship would have several positions available to be filled, those include (but are not limited to):
1st Officer: Buffs/ Debuffs the abilities of the other crew members
Chief Engineer: Affects the ship’s fitting / power output / cpu output / capacitor / and module refresh time
Chief Battle Officer: Affects the performance of the ship’s weapons / defenses
Helm Officer: Affects the ship’s mobility, maneuverability, align time, and general evasiveness.
Quartermaster: Affects the storage capacity of the ship’s cargo bay / ore bay / drone bay.
Doctor: Affects the health of your crew members
Cook: Affects the morale of your crew members
Requisitions Officer: Replenishes whatever you tell them to when you dock at a station (you control when they get things).
(And so on)
Crew Needs
Since this game is trying to be immersive, it only makes sense for the crew to have needs that their fearless capsuleer captain must meet. Some needs could be:
Food / Water: If you get a Cook then they will
Life Support: Because they need to breathe obviously
Salary: Better crew members cost more to hire and keep on your payroll. If you don’t pay your crew members regularly then their loyalty will decrease and they will leave you.
Crew Stats
Each crew member would have several stats that determine how good they are at their respective jobs:
Morale: Affected by how long it’s been since last docking at a station, how good the Cook is, how good their salary is, how recently they were paid, how long they’ve served on a particular ship,
Health: Affected by the status of the ship’s Life Support system, the ship’s Doctor, and the status of the ship itself.
Loyalty: Some people are more loyal than others and will stay with you a while, others might grow weary of your command style and quit working for you, some might take up a better offer on another ship and leave you unless you can beat the offer.
Skill: A variable that increases over time and with experience, affects the crew member’s performance.
Talent: A constant variable that acts as the crew member’s base stat, it affects the crew member’s performance.
(and so on)
Again, this would not be a required feature. It would be a way to enhance your ship and possibly add to the immersion.
Additional Ideas
Here are some wackier ideas I had as well, I’m not married to it though and I don’t think it would happen:
Boarding Mechanics: Make it possible to board and hijack ships, would require marines and security mechanics though.
EVE Asset Editor: Make a tool for players to use to make custom skins, ship models, and so on for players to submit for consideration.
Technically, capsuleers have full control over all of their ships’ systems from within the capsules, so crew is often non-present or doesnt matter for the ship’s performance.
On another hand, NPC ships that don’t have access to capsuleer technology are way less efficient because they have crews and chain of command.
Well then all we need to do is say that these are cybernetically enhanced crew members or something and that should basically fill the lore hole.
The point of this is to give the players yet more aspects of control over their ships and add a more immersive experience beyond just navigating menus.
Sure, but by that same logic no one prevents you from buying a toy spaceship IRL and pretending that it has a captain named Commander Cheesehead and a dog made of pretzels. What I’m trying to say is that there is potential for additional gameplay elements in EVE that could expand upon the experience more. It’s one thing to roleplay with theater of the mind, it’s another if a game helps facilitate a nuance. At least I think so.
Thank you! I feel like after the failure of Dust that CCP could use some kind of stunt to help keep EVE moving forwards with its development beyond just adding a ship or two here or there and maybe another station.
But eve is a game about ships blowing up - having crews that affect anything makes no sense, especially with stats and other fluff because one ship blown up and you have to re-train whole crew.
That’s why I said it’d be an optional feature. I imagine end-game players putting a full crew onto a Titan or something theyr’e pretty sure will survive. But for little, cheaper ships I don’t imagine people using it.
And I think it adds a new level of danger, risk, and reward when it’s not just your ship that’s on the line, it’s your crew too.
What I meant was, you aren’t forced by the game to have a crew on your ship.
For the meta, yeah it’d become a big feature. But it’s not like the meta, as it stands, is holy and cannot be changed. Heck, maybe CCP could run beta-tests with this mechanic to see how people like it before implementing it in the game? Just because things are a certain way doesn’t mean they can never change.
Would this change the meta? Definitely, but that’s not always a bad thing. Imagine people vying to recruit top-tier crew members, pitching battles with even more decked-out ships, and having to be careful and judicious when picking a ship to assign a crew to.
And if you’re worried about the lore then what if we say that a capsuleer is good at running all aspects of a ship, but these cybernetically enhanced crew members are specialists at specific parts of a ship yet could never run a whole ship themselves? Like the difference between a swiss army knife and a machete. One is a general tool, the other is a specialized tool.
Too much coding for gyrostab meta 17 basically.
Ship crew is ship basic stats green numbers when you sit on it is your skills n mods.
We have new abyssal slime as latest augmentation…where does it stop.
Lore wise you augment ship performance ,you are not end all be all smallest ships can be solo driven larger the ship larger complexity and crew needed or heavy automation read robots,drones,android’s,zerglings.
Pods are adhoc addons for ships they removed one room and slotted a pod with ancient jove tech they discarded like old black and white tv set.
all of these things sound like really cool idea’s, though I think if it was something that could be greatly affected by the amount of isk being put into the crew, this would probably make eve feel even more lopsided than it already was, it would be best if isk was out of the question, and morale was based on recent kills, experience, or getting out of tight situations, And if this were to be a thing than I think it should be something everyone has, you would start with a certain crew, and the more you do with them, the more useful they become, though, that will likely have issues too. As for the ship hijacking, I think that a hijacked ship should become less functional the further the hijack progresses, the less functional the ship would become, like being nueted, only passive mods would shut down too, or the shield would collapse, or whatever. Custom skins would be interesting, but I think a better idea would be variation on existing SKINs, like moving where color is applied.
I have read this post several times and I still have no clue what you just said.
I’m suggesting making the crew act as modifiers to the ship’s base stats, instead of them just being implied.
I think you have a point with taking isk out the equation, sort of a way to level the playing field as it were. Though it really depends on what kind of experience CCP wants to create for the players in the end.
There is no such thing. If something is possible, it will become mandatory. That’s why people “could” go run Abyss sites in any Cruiser. But you know what they use? The Gila… You know why? Because that’s pretty much the best ship for Abyss sites. Sure, there are folks who like to challenge themselves to use something else just to be different. But the “meta” is to use the Gila. If you come up with a way to buff your stats, it’s not going to be something people do on occasion to be wacky. It’s going to be something people always do, and the wacky people will be those who don’t.
Also… Crew modifiers have been discussed MANY times before, and it always ends up just being another form of Rigging. What you want is already being accomplished by Rigs. So if you want, just pretend your fitted Rigs are really your Crew doing things.
As for the “lore” behind it… it doesn’t matter. Capsuleers are 99.9% in control of their ships. The crew might be the ones handling the actual ammo crates and Cap charges when you click “reload”. But that’s about all they do. Your Pod interface runs everything else. If you want to learn just how disposable the crew is, go read this…