My idea is simple introduce crew compliment on ships

[Rail_J_kar]

@Molpadia_Devaux

How about you pay your crew?

I mentioned that in the post.

@Rail_J_kar

6. 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.)

@Rail_J_kar

8. 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.)

@Molpadia_Devaux

Crew pay, experience levels 1-5, hiring costs scale appropriately.

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.)

@Molpadia_Devaux

Crew gains experience interacting with environment.

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.

@Molpadia_Devaux

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)

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.

@ResonanceOfWar

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.

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.