Horizons NPC crew who die when your ship dies

[Whiskey Galore]

I can't understand this. If the pilot does not die (i.e. you) then why must your NPC fighter pilot die? Surely you both get lifepods? It makes no sense at all. I thought this was not the case then found out to my horror it was. It makes using NPC crew totally pointless, especially in PvP combat.
All that time training up a fighter crew was a total waste of my time.
I will from now on refuse to take a ship with crew into the game. Time to throw away that aspect of solo and open play completely. I'll use the slot for a shield bank instead.
NPC fighter crew...R.I.P.
Powerplay...R.I.P.
CQC...R.I.P.
Mining...R.I.P.
Trading...R.I.P.
Smuggling...R.I.P.
Oh. And about PvP and open...R.I.P. Incendiary frag cannons. So overpowered they take all the skill out of that aspect of play.
And while I'm fuming away...put incendiary frag on a fed ship, any one, and that's PvE play sorted. Boring as SH@T....R.I.P. PvE
Going to dump all my ships other than python and assault ship. The rest are pointless, including the asp explorer.
To fix the game multicannon and frag must not be able to take down shields. Not at all!!!

 

[ranix]

dude your copilot teleports in from nowhere in multicrew

 

[Devantejah]

dude your copilot teleports in from nowhere in multicrew

To be fair, you are just a hologram while in multicrew.

Whereas NPC crew not getting an escape pod as well is rather silly.

 

[Siobhan]

To be fair, you are just a hologram while in multicrew.

Whereas NPC crew not getting an escape pod as well is rather silly.

Even sillier than you think...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4wNxpTB227vLXhUZE5ZSGZMTzg/view?usp=drivesdk

 

[lokvette]

I do wonder just how many threads about this its going to take before FD either change it, (yeah right) or have one of the many CM do thier job and post a never going to change it is what it is post.

 

[mossfoot]

Honestly it just takes a change in phrasing to fix this.

Co-Pilots don't die, they leave your service.

Why? Because the longer you have them, the better they get, but you don't pay them as much as if you'd hired them at that new level. In the long run, they earn about half as much sticking with you.

Therefore they can earn MORE if they're leave you and get hired by someone else. But they can't leave normally, you have to fire them.

Ship destruction is their service termination clause. They eject, just like you, but are now free to seek more lucrative employment with someone not quite so careless.

Taking the lore idea further, the reason you don't see Master or higher on offer is that they are nod enough to apply for full Pilots Federation standing and leave NPC-Dom forever

Of course, I play with Pilot Ejection rules (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=107694), so just for fun I do that with my copilot as well, just to see if they survived for story purposes.

 

[kpmop]

Honestly it just takes a change in phrasing to fix this.

Co-Pilots don't die, they leave your service.

...

Yeah that fixes everything(!) - well, apart from the frustration of losing an NPC pilot you've spent time training up to be half-way useful.

To be fair though, you can hire higher level NPCs, so just skip the training up from harmless and go straight for an expert/master, and if they die just hire another one.

...
Taking the lore idea further, the reason you don't see Master or higher on offer is that they are nod enough to apply for full Pilots Federation standing and leave NPC-Dom forever
...

Didn't know that - thought maybe you could only hire up-to your combat rank... Maybe that would mitigate the problem?

 

[mossfoot]

Yeah that fixes everything(!) - well, apart from the frustration of losing an NPC pilot you've spent time training up to be half-way useful.

To be fair though, you can hire higher level NPCs, so just skip the training up from harmless and go straight for an expert/master, and if they die just hire another one.



Didn't know that - thought maybe you could only hire up-to your combat rank... Maybe that would mitigate the problem?

Yeah, currently you can only every hire directly to expert.

i get the frustration but this game already has so little in the way of consequence that have no desire for this to be changed. Not without some kind of trade off.

For RP purposes it would be nice if upon destruction the NPC reentered the pilot pool at their current level, with the option of hiring them out again straight away at full pay instead of their reduced pay. You know, for those who get attached to their buddies .

 

[4gui4]

I had one pilot and returned.

It's not exactly my game and I don't like figthers too, next legs ?
(the other game is kking out the legs btw)

[alien]

 

[kpmop]

...
i get the frustration but this game already has so little in the way of consequence that have no desire for this to be changed. Not without some kind of trade off.
...

Yeah I can see your point. Maybe it could be done with a little more finesse - maybe give the NPCs a happiness rating like passengers, so if you repeatedly get blown up they'll get fed up with you and quit, but if you, say increase their profit share or wages then maybe they'd hang around a little longer.

...You know, for those who get attached to their buddies .

 

[mossfoot]

Yeah I can see your point. Maybe it could be done with a little more finesse - maybe give the NPCs a happiness rating like passengers, so if you repeatedly get blown up they'll get fed up with you and quit, but if you, say increase their profit share or wages then maybe they'd hang around a little longer.

Nice idea! I'm all for more dynamic NPC interaction!

 

[Cpt Shadow Wolfe]

Lost my first crew after training her to Elite, which was ok, she was ugly anyway, and I think I started her from the higher rank which means at Elite you had to pay a lot higher. So when I went shopping for a new crew to replace her, I only checked the lowest one, and I searched multiple stations over a week before I located one that is fairly attractive, and now she is trained up to Elite, but only have to pay her 9% or 10%, can't remember, but its still less then the other Elite that I trained up. This one has made enough from me to buy her own Python and outfit it, and most the time she been cooling her heels at some station while I went exploring in a DBX, my 5 week trip to Sag A and back netted a cool 279 mil scan pay, Ole Farah was on a 5 week vacation for that, a vacation that paid her around 27.9 mil, wish I could take a vacation like that.....

 

[Whiskey Galore]

Your crew can't die like you. He/she gets podded. It's money he/she gets for the work. And he/she gets a huge amount of it. We cannot mod our fighters. The only way we can is training our crew up to elite.
Anyway. I got tired of all this stupidity. It's a single player game anyway. The open stuff is like CQC. It'll dwindle down to just PvP and nothing else. It's already heading that way now. In fact it's becoming the new CQC. The way it was meant to be from the beginning. I reset my account and as soon as I've got my engineering back I'm going to use open as a PvP CQC. Kill anything I can basically. Stone cold dead. If you're a new player in open you deserved to get fried. You should not be there in your easy meat quick kill ship. Go back to PvE solo mode.