Introduce crew compliment in ships depending their size , the idea of single pilot in a capsule is ridiculous , even the ship designs present existence of multiple crew with the appearance of windows cockpits and etc , is more like correcting a storyline not actually changing anything at least at the moment.
Maybe learn about lore before you start “correcting” it?
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Ships already have crew, they’re just not a game mechanic. Yet. Hopefully one day they will be along with officers. I like the idea of implementing BattleTech’s officer mechanic.
The following is an excerpt from a previous post of mine called Space Commander, which was an rts feature that would allow players to control npc fleets when their pod was docked in a station. The specific ideas around crew though, could work with capsuleer ships as well.
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I like the idea from an imersion perspective, but mechanically, it might need a lot of rebalancing of everything else to prevent it just becoming power creep.
There is precedent in terms of teams that were implemented for industry in about 2014.
Unfortunately that’s also precedent for how badly this would be screwed up.
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ISD Batman once asked me to run with a bad idea thd. “At least try”. So, for his sake, I do this once a yr.
I like this idea. After so much time in space, the ship should get an extra crewperson/bonuses. the longer the ship doesn’t get popped, the more crew and bonus it gets. Kinda like experience points?
Let CCP try to pull that one off…
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Sounds cool but as long as its all client side and doesn’t make more lag network wise.
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uh… we’re talking about crew. It’s not going to cause any more network lag than having a full cargo hold.
And putting things client side that affect ship performance is a terrible idea; its asking for hackers and glichers to make some script to cause problems.
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I mean’t if they went as far as to add graphic’s for it. Obviously any Ship stat bonuses would be on the server side.
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How about you pay your crew? Your crew has/gains experience and shares loot.
Crew pay, experience levels 1-5, hiring costs scale appropriately.
Crew numbers affect ship performance, fewer crew lower performance, more crew better performance.
Loot value is Captains share, equal share is distributed to crew.
Crew gains experience interacting with environment.
Mining 1X experience sec 0.8-1.0, 2X 0.5-0.7, 3x 0.3-0.4, 4x 0.1-0.2 5x null.
Combat as above PLUS PvE 1x, PvP 3x (PvE scales at mission level).
Commander’s rating is a value determined by, # of missions, loot value of surviving crew.
Never losing a ship= high rating, losing ship every time =low rating.
Commander’s rating affects cost of replacement crew ( the Captain might be suicidal, but a suicide crew costs more)
The first time you fly a ship type you get a free experience 2 crew at the highest minimum crew level.
You can replace crew when docked.
For newbro’s (after losing initial free crew) Eve central bank will loan you the money for an experience 1 crew at minimum minimum
level, auto pay value of loot sold reduced 33% until repaid.
All stats based on above chart.
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I mentioned that in the post.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how that system works in BatteTech. I’m not sure about the sharing loot aspect though. You’re already paying them, and messing around with paying them more based on loot values is a bit, unnecessary. I think this would mostly just encourage players to not pick up “worthless loot” which I don’t think would be good for the market.
Perhaps you could have different types of contracts, and different officers would prefer different types of payment. A pure monthly contract, some sort of slave / indentured servitude one time flat fee, loot share, a side mission (run a level 1-4 mission of the npc’s choice in order to get them to agree to be on your crew. Possibility for turning the player suspect if the request is illegal.)
My thoughts on crew experience had them start out as basic crew, so basically a bunch of items like this:
A non-capsuleer member of a ship’s crew relegated to manual tasks essential for maintaining the operational status of the ship.
… that you could drop into a basic crew compartment on the ship. In the inventory window, it would show upright below the ship in the expanded bays area.
Once the ship accrued enough xp, you could apply that xp to leveling up one of your officers, or upgrade a basic crew member into an officer. Those officers could be applied to the ship in the ship’s fitting window or a special officer bay that had specific slots for different types of officers.
I do like the idea of having officers gain traits based on the types of activities they were engaged in though, which was actually part of my initial design idea.
Solid idea. I think there should be an abandon ship ability too… to have the npcs get to their escape pods before your ship blows up. Doing so will dramatically decrease the performance of your ship… but would lessen the negative impact on your commander rating for a destroyed ship.
Perhaps the escape pods would light a signal beacon as well that would show up as a cosmic anomaly. Recuing stranded crew would give some sort of benefit, perhaps some sort of temporary morale bonus for the crew the player rescued and / or a temporary % discount on future crew contracts for the next month.
I also think officers should probably have a threshold trait to determine how tolerant they are of suicidal captains.
Overall, these costs should remain pretty low. The base cost of inexperienced crew would be in the single to double digit isk amounts (remember a single isk is a ton of money for normal people.) And the base contract cost of officers, imo, should scale based on the market. Your proposed Commander Rating, officer rank (experience level,) traits, and sec status of the location of hire would all influence the contract cost.
To be honest, I can’t think of a time when graphics aren’t client side. Unless you’re doing some sort of cloud streaming.
I suppose you could do some sort of captain’s quarters / walking in ship thing, but unless ship boarding became a thing, there wouldn’t be any need to have any network traffic be dedicated to that gameplay feature.
Most likely, at least for the initial ui, it would just be a separate crew themed cargo bay / ship fitting window.
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hmmm interesting, my idea to simply the concept would be to just update all BPO’s in the game to have “crew” which could be a unit purchaseable from the market.
better yet perhaps add something to PI a “crew training centre” which would allow you to produce them, literally just kinda spawn them every 3 hours or something.
better yet allow alphas to do this and be the only item they can export off the planet, as larger ships need more crews it allows people to cobble together a market very quickly.
we already had some stuff for the internal workings of ships and such, why not add a quick patch update on them to further have crew.
i mean at first ship production would stop, but all those whales with those accounts they recently alpha’d can come back and contribute in a huge way to the ship production demographic in game, everyone needs crew.
additional thought, only allow crew to be trained in empire space (as those planets are populated)
this would strengthen their logistics lines and with resources being distrubuted the way they are, it might also help increase trade and exports out to the sov null alliances.
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I think it makes more sense to have it be a monthly contract than just be be part of the manufacturing cost.
Firstly, they’re not automatons, they’re people who have their own goals and aspirations and most people wouldn’t want to be locked into perpetual servitude.
Secondly, having them be part of the manufacturing process doesn’t really change how the vast majority of players would interact with them. The idea to make crew be part of game mechanics is to aid in immersion, so if you hide them from the players, they might as well not exist in the first place.
Thirdly, having a reoccurring monthly contract is a good isk sink that’s tied to actual game play. Instead of just having CCP pile on a bunch of market taxes on us, the ability to hire npcs gives players an actual benefit for engaging with the isk sink .
If you want crew that you don’t have to pay the monthly contract price for, I suggest using CreoDron drone crew members. They’ll be expensive and wont gain experience, but you wouldn’t have to worry about your contract term expiring.
Lastly, basic crew needs to be cheap, as to not affect new players negatively. If you pair it with a system like pi, that’s going to increase the price since player interaction is required to move them to a market location. Perhaps you could have an officer training structure on planets that’s part of pi. People wanting to hire those officers could then travel to the planet’s Custom Office to pick them up.
Anywhere people can exist, should have a market for basic crew and officers (though the officer market should be a bit more sophisticated than the normal market since each officer would be a unique in game item. Each trait and unique identifier should have a filter id attached to it so people can easily find what they’re looking for.) Planets, stations, custom’s offices, player structures, should all be viable locations.
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An easy way to prevent power creep, would be to equalize current ship capabilities with veteran crew levels. (L0 basic crew = cadet, L1 = officer, L2 = veteran, L3 = elite.) Lower levels of crew competency than veteran would just apply a ship debuff to the part of the ship that crew member is modifying.
Finally, the Elite level would give a small buff to current ship capability (somewhere in the 1 - 5% range.)
What is the skill hardwiring was actually crewman skills .
true, however i was thinking it would simply be there just to show that they’re involved in being part of your ship, its not meant to be “they’re now physically bonded to the ship and have been mulched to make the hull mwahahahaha!” but to show that your ship is in fact crewed
we haven’t interacted with crews yet, why should we start now, having crew is a good thing and i agree could help with certain aspects of immersion but if i have to stop mid battle to micro manage my crew i think this will cause some issues with the PVP demographic of the game.
the game isn’t set up to have automatic payments, this is only available for paying bills in game, all other aspects of transfering ISK have to be done manually including via to prevent some kind of issue.
even if it was linked into the Bill system, just think you then have to start paying the crews for ALL your ships which are stored because like you said “they’re living breathing people in the universe”
this i agree with
or just a crew training facility.
as I mentioned in my previous post, if you only allow its production in empire space and allow alpha state players to extract crew from planets, you then can have people farm it. while equally strengthening trade routes from high & low sec to null sec.
I agree with the principle of your idea, but i’m not prepared to micromanage a crew, especially when i have multiple ships and all crews need to be paid, just slap them onto production BPO’s to basically show once the ship is made its crewed.
although tbf when a ship dies, i do think it should drop the bodies of its crew. a bit grim, but it then shows that people are dying on these ships. each time they go pop.
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The idea of loot sharing is to simulate the sailing age practice of Prize Money (in simple form). That would be lower initial contract price, and a commander with good loot/loss ratio attracts better, cheaper crews.
Every station where you have a ship has a crew quarters, only the active ship is crewed, excess crew goes to crew quarters.
example you dock your battleship and switch to destroyer, your destroyer is maxed crewed the excess going to crew quarters, Then you fly away switch to shuttle, return to station activate frigate and access crew quarters to man the ship.
Crews are a commodity you own/rent, transportable the same as militants or exotic dancers.
1 month contract would be like a soldier of fortune, would be more expensive expecting to make a lot of money over the short haul, 6 month contract would be less expensive looking for a commander that makes a lot of loot with minimal loss.
I like the idea of a BPO to recruit crew, and a facility to train them (PI preferred temperate, maybe barren or ice, not gas lava or plasma)
You can auto-pay Corp Rent so it couldn’t be that hard to auto-pay crew.
Maybe a new market category for officers and crew. Where you list your trained crews (in groups maybe minimum 10) with a contract price. To start CCP would need to seed the Market everywhere or fit existing assembled ships with minimum experience crews 3 month contract at 0 isk, then perhaps at military schools a small amount of crew would be generated similar to asteroid replenishment but at a much slower rate not to exceed a set amount.
The 3 month free crew allows time to acquire and train crew.
Each crew generated or trained would have a risk/reward factor, random for NPC generated crews. player crews would be trained in risk reward, higher risk more expensive longer train.
Crew efficiency by race to match faction preferences. Your training facilities could major in faction training with more than 1 allowed per planet. Manning a laser ship with rail-gun crew would have it’s drawbacks.
One thing not mentioned in this thread so far is that incorporating this feature would raise the risk costs for suicide gankers.
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I like the idea of crewmembers being like modules… you get them, train them, they end up giving plus/minus modifiers to specific ships they are stationed on.
Or, maybe they can transfer across ships?
Expand the idea to fill role in stations, or PI colonies, etc
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Yeah, this should be avoided absolutely. I think the key here is to have officers automatically gain skills / traits based on the activities they’re involved in. (Gunnery officers will gain gunnery skills, navigation officers will gain navigation skills, engineering officers will gain skills related to defensive modules, utility officers will gain skills based on utility modules, ect. I also really like the idea of an officer that will increase the range of dscan or auto ping it if you’ve been involved in using it.)
That’s not exactly a difficult system to create. Any programmer with their salt could do it easily. As for the game design aspect of it so you don’t run your wallet dry if you quit playing the game: make a portion of the wallet have a partition for auto pay that the player manually sets. Basically it would be a payroll account.
Yes, you would. So either you pay them, or you let them go after the contract is up. But this is also why crew should be cheap. A single isk is something like 1 million planetary credits, so it’s a lot of money. Basic crew seeded by the system would be something like 1-10 isk for a 1 month contract. Officer contracts would be much more in demand and would be subject to market forces, so those could get expensive.
I want to make the distinction of basic crew and officers, in part because of the micro managing aspect of the game. Ships have a lot of crew when ships get larger, and it’s not necessary to have them all give bonuses to the ship. Basic crew would make up most of the crew compliment, and you’d basically be treating them like ammo charges.
Basic crew = non-unique game objects. Officers = unique game objects.
As for the officers, it wont be that much different from a ship fitting. Their icons should have a color coded background so players can see at a glance what type of officer it is. And you could still use a basic crew unit in an officer slot. It wouldn’t get you any bonuses, but when the ship accrued xp, it would turn that basic crew member into an officer of the appropriate type.
So it would be perfectly legit to have your payroll account be set to zero, and just let your experienced crew go out to the market and just keep training new crew from basic crew.
Yeah, I just have to disagree with this. If we’re going to do it this way, then we shouldn’t have crew be a game mechanic at all. All your proposal does is add to the the manufacturing cost with no system in place for added immersion.
+1. And survivors too. But survivors suggests we should also have crew bays, because many people wont bother rescuing cheap crew that take up cargo space. Although, that would be a fun dynamic to add to mission running: turning in enemy crew for an additional LP reward.
Yeah, I understood the reference and I’m not opposed to it, but I don’t think it should be the only option. Especially considering the various types of activities people can engage in; crew on a hauling or mining ship wont be getting loot.
I personally think officers should have a bunch of traits that are applied to them and this is one of those things: a payment preference. When players look at the officer marketplace, they would be able to filter out the results that don’t fit their desired playstyle.
This idea is pretty good. Though, I think it might be good to have the ability to save crew loadouts so you can quickly access the correct crew for specific ships. (Crew bonused toward guns isn’t going to do any good for a missile ship.)
Here’s where we have to make a distinction between officers and basic crew again. Basic crew are objects just like militia or exotic dancers, like you mentioned in your post. They are all the same and have no unique traits to speak of. At most, you could differentiate them between the crew sub categories (gunnery, engineering, electronics operator, navigation, ect,) but I think that’s a better thing to do when you get to the first officer level.
Once you get to the officer level, the crew start having unique bonuses attached to the item object, so they’re no longer easily categorized by our current market infrastructure. Which means, we need a new marketplace for officers that has the ability to filter out every trait an officer can pick up.
I think it would be cool to pay a small amount of plex, maybe 5-10, if you’re an alpha (free for omegas) to be able to run the officer through the character customization.
Officers would also have a random-ish retirement date if they survive long enough, so eventually CCP could use retired officers as in game npc’s that actually have history with the player base. How cool would it be for an officer involved in fw, end up being some prominent figure in the lore? Or even a mission agent.
Overall, I think crew that players can actually interact with will add a new level of immersion to the game. In general, I think it has great potential for added game play where some of the new systems for EVE Online and satellite games intersect.
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And while I don’t hate the concept, you have to remember who you’re dealing with. Say it is posable for CCP to pull this off and actually do think it’s a good idea. (a little harder than kill marks) It would still take CCP 2 yrs to implement and then do a bad job of a good idea.
But then I still say the ship would have to be in space, untethered. That way it takes the risk of getting popped. Autopilot is fine since you still take the risk. Also, if you sell the ship, it loses whatever bonuses it had otherwise you have a farming issue.
And now we have the clincher…
Null would simply set up farmlands for their players whether or not to sell or just use them.
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development takes time, yup.
I think you’re misunderstanding the concept (unless you’re specifically talking about Drogon’s version.) Ship xp wouldn’t directly change the ship stats, but would rather be applied to crew officers (which effectively behave like passive ship modules.) The ship itself wouldn’t retain any metadata integer values related to xp.
So in other words, it would put pilots in space which other players could interact with?
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