Forums » Suggestions
Cap Ship Crews
I believe the idea of crews for Cap ships were touched on a long while back but never expanded upon. Let us now discuss some ideas:
First of all, in a realistic world, a Trident, Constellation and Teradon would not be operated by just one person. When these become available to guilds and players, the pilot is basically the captain, but so much more would go on behind the scenes. I submit to you that we actually assign NPC crewmembers/teams to the various critical functions of these large scale vessels. Here are some thoughts I've had that can come into play for the player to keep in mind:
- The ability to hire NPC fighter squadrons and keep them on deck and ready to launch in case of issues. (Much like the idea of traders hiring escorts presented not to long ago). Another interesting spin on this would be to hire NPC 'Medic' Squadrons loaded out with Repair guns, giving you an excellent support ship. Additional squads may include mining and trading (to get your goods from ship to station).
- The ability to hire NPC engineers to assist in repairs to ship functions, like Turrets and possibly some finite level of hull repair. If subsystems are implemented on the cap ships, then managing repair priority to those systems will be an interesting job for the player.
- Conversely, if your cap ship is attacked, one would assume that hull breaches and various badness will happen onboard, so crew death could be implemented with obvious consequences.
- Possible implementation of Crew Morale for the NPCs you've hired. Morale would be increased when missions are successfully completed, thereby increasing their efficiency and maybe some level of skill (for Fighter squads specifically). Morale would decrease when crew members die in attacks, and also possibly by the player making bad choices like attacking traders aligned with the NPCs nationality/company ( if players can get Corvus or Unaligned Cap ships+crews, watch out! :P )
When hiring crews, I'd like to see this maybe done only at Nation capitals, Cap ship drydocks or stations specific to your crew needs (eg, mining station for a mining crew, research station for engineers, etc.) I think it would also make sense that this should be tied in with the faction system... if you're Neutral with a particular faction and you try to hire crewmembers, they would either be expensive, or hard to come by, possibly leaving you with a skeleton crew.
All this said, Cap ships would still be pilotable without crews, but wouldn't serve much of a function aside from being a big lumbering cargo ship with a lot of guns.
The floor is open to discussion...
First of all, in a realistic world, a Trident, Constellation and Teradon would not be operated by just one person. When these become available to guilds and players, the pilot is basically the captain, but so much more would go on behind the scenes. I submit to you that we actually assign NPC crewmembers/teams to the various critical functions of these large scale vessels. Here are some thoughts I've had that can come into play for the player to keep in mind:
- The ability to hire NPC fighter squadrons and keep them on deck and ready to launch in case of issues. (Much like the idea of traders hiring escorts presented not to long ago). Another interesting spin on this would be to hire NPC 'Medic' Squadrons loaded out with Repair guns, giving you an excellent support ship. Additional squads may include mining and trading (to get your goods from ship to station).
- The ability to hire NPC engineers to assist in repairs to ship functions, like Turrets and possibly some finite level of hull repair. If subsystems are implemented on the cap ships, then managing repair priority to those systems will be an interesting job for the player.
- Conversely, if your cap ship is attacked, one would assume that hull breaches and various badness will happen onboard, so crew death could be implemented with obvious consequences.
- Possible implementation of Crew Morale for the NPCs you've hired. Morale would be increased when missions are successfully completed, thereby increasing their efficiency and maybe some level of skill (for Fighter squads specifically). Morale would decrease when crew members die in attacks, and also possibly by the player making bad choices like attacking traders aligned with the NPCs nationality/company ( if players can get Corvus or Unaligned Cap ships+crews, watch out! :P )
When hiring crews, I'd like to see this maybe done only at Nation capitals, Cap ship drydocks or stations specific to your crew needs (eg, mining station for a mining crew, research station for engineers, etc.) I think it would also make sense that this should be tied in with the faction system... if you're Neutral with a particular faction and you try to hire crewmembers, they would either be expensive, or hard to come by, possibly leaving you with a skeleton crew.
All this said, Cap ships would still be pilotable without crews, but wouldn't serve much of a function aside from being a big lumbering cargo ship with a lot of guns.
The floor is open to discussion...
At the very least, you should not hire "squads" of NPCs; they should be accounted for 1 at a time.
I have no problem with hiring squads. Anyone would be able to do it, so it wouldn't give just one person an unfair advantage. It would offer a short-term solution to populating the universe, until the player base is a lot bigger, at which NPCs hopefully can be phased out slowly in favor of real people. The deterrent to people just automating everything with hired fleets and not participating is to make hiring expensive. If you don't pay them, they leave. Also, this makes pirating one step closer to worthwhile, if there are a lot of player-controlled cargo convoys to pirate. In addition, this affects roleplay. If you're being pushed out of your profitable trading/mining route, you can hire some pirates or band together with other players (that you pay, probably) to pop each of the hired NPCs (since it's currently pointless to kill a player for something like this, since they'll just come right back).