Hey DMC,
This is the best thing I’ve read all week. Thanks for saying so.
I’ve logged all your feedback and added it to the pile of fixes and improvements on the slate.
The last 6 months have been an incredibly rewarding learning experience for me and I’ve been very grateful for all your support and feedback.
EVE Crews – what’s coming next
The crew interaction rebalance wrapped up with v1.69.434. It was the longest run of work the project has had: department cohesion, crew alignment, per-department recruitment orders, the Notorious trait, the XO loyalty trace, and the friction between pirate crews and the empires they came from. With that finished, I’ve gone back through my notes, the bug list and this thread to put together a picture of what comes next.
A word on pace first. I have less time now than I had over the summer, so I’m not putting dates on any of this. Everything below has a plan behind it, and the fixes will come first.
Most of what I set out to build when the project began in April is now in the game: XO promotion and the Active Reserve, the passenger trade with its Hospitality department and Chief Purser, and a first version of the colony mode.
Fixes in the queue
Several of these came from reports in this thread, most of them from DeMichael Crimson’s 176-session write-up.
- XO hull adaptations. The adaptive drill event could grant adaptations past the XO’s slot limit, which is how DeMichael’s XO reached 8 of 6 slots. That event will respect the cap from now on. Nobody loses anything: adaptations already paid for in Command Citations stay exactly where they are.
- XO mentoring on older saves. An old save migration reset the count of officers an XO has served with. That stops established XOs from earning Mentor, and Mentor unlocks the rehabilitation programme for officers carrying traits like Miserable. Correcting the count should open that programme up to long-running crews.
- Officer traits on away ops. Most positive officer traits currently have no effect on station away ops, and three entries in the risk table name traits no officer can hold. Boarding uses a separate model with its own table, and in that one Relentless makes an officer more likely to get hurt. The two models should agree, and an officer’s traits should count in both. Whether experience and rarity should count as well is also on the table.
- Crew composition checks. The check that decides whether Minmatar crew object to slaves in the hold misreads ship-wide numbers on any ship that doesn’t have exactly three crewed departments. It will be changed to use the ship’s actual headcount.
- Recruitment pricing. Filling every department at once can miss the Authoritarian press-gang discount earned by filling each deck in turn. Separately, the ‘outside region’ labels on the recruitment screen can disagree with the quoted price. Both will be brought into line.
Quality of life
- Department headers with hard numbers, such as ‘DEPLETED (89/125)’, and dormant departments no longer shown in the same red as a genuine fault.
- Empty berths drawn as an empty locker, so a vacancy no longer looks like a crew member.
- A departure entry and a session divider in the ship’s log, so each voyage reads from start to finish.
- Each department panel showing its own standing recruitment orders and what the last rotation brought aboard.
- A memorial rite that acknowledges how long ago the officer died, for when the ship has been too busy to hold it straight away.
- A clearer signal on the Bridge for whether a session made or lost ISK.
- Loyalty history that stops reporting the same session’s change twice.
- A cleaner start-up, without the brief flash of a raw system number or of a new ship’s name on the old hull.
- A new name for ‘Bring Home’ on Shore Leave, since EVE already uses ‘home’ for something else.
Features on the horizon
Ship’s Stores as an event trigger. I mentioned this earlier in the thread. Cargo events depend on ESI’s hourly asset cache, so they’re slow to respond and largely out of the player’s hands. Linking events to items arriving in the Ship’s Stores means the player’s own actions, such as boarding, acquisition details and colony work, can bring them about. The cargo triggers stay as they are, and this adds a second route in.
Survival technology. Lauralite’s point about post-Triglavian safety standards opened up something I’m keen to build: a progression for fitting a ship with modern survival equipment, so crew survival improves as the capsuleer invests in it. New technology existing doesn’t mean every ship in New Eden has it. The same chronicle also ties a crew member’s chances to where their pod sits on the hull, and I’d like to model that too.
Passengers in a ship loss. At the moment the survival report covers crew only. Charter passengers will get their own outcome, with consequences for the capsuleer’s reputation as a carrier.
Hull accuracy. Blockade Runners and Deep Space Transports currently share one hull class, even though one of them is roughly twice the size of the other. Splitting them is overdue. The Odysseus deserves accommodation that matches its expedition hold. Berth numbers across the board will be reviewed once Lauralite’s Delegate Zero sources arrive. I’m also looking at the ship maintenance bay, so that the ships inside it can mean something to the crew.
Docked sessions. A session that can pass while docked, so station operations resolve and medbay patients recover without an undock. This touches nearly every system in the game, so it will get a design pass of its own before any code is written.
Longer-term tidying. A proper use for biomass reserves, which at present only accumulate. I also want to consolidate the Bridge and Crew tab panels that currently show overlapping information.
Further out
These are the bigger ideas. Each needs design work before any code, and some may change shape along the way.
EVE Colonies, rethought. The colony mode works, but it has grown more complicated than it should be, and I want to redesign it before building anything more on top of it. Several plans wait on that redesign: colonial faction standings, recruiting planetary specialists, and incidents at stations and stargates that pull the ship and its colonies into the same story.
Crew moments as they happen. The game already tracks when a department loses the officer holding it together, or when a new hire settles a troubled deck, but it records those changes quietly. I want the XO to notice them and say so at the moment they happen.
Player-written events. The long-term aim is a published event format, so that players can write events of their own for the game to run.
Translation-friendly pages. Making the app work cleanly with browser translation tools, for players who don’t read English.
A local version. At present EVE Crews learns what happened from ESI, which updates on server timers, and from game logs submitted by hand after a session. The EVE client already writes those logs to disk as it plays. A version installed alongside the client could read them as they are written, so the crew can react to a fight while it is still going on, and to a change in the hold without waiting an hour for ESI to catch up. It is the furthest away of anything here, and the idea I find most exciting (well, second only to Fenris Games actually including a crew feature officially in-game).
Several of the fixes above exist because someone here wrote down what they saw, and a report with a screenshot is still the fastest route to a fix. Please keep them coming.
… I will admit there were a few times that it got frustrating… Course that should be expected when in the process of finding issues to be fixed…