What happened to FE2's minimum crew requirements?

[dxm55]

For those who've played F:E2, you would probably remember that some ships were multicrewed.

No, not the multicrew mess that we have today, where you invite a friend (who has his own ship) to ride shotgun with you just to play turret pew pew.
Not talking about pilots either. Those hotdogging top guns just sit in the lounge the whole day until you get them onboard and to sit around more, until you launch a fighter.

We're talking about the fluff stuff (yeah you guys like fluff, right? Space legs and all, walking around inside your ship. Fluff.)

So what happen to needing to hire rank and file, clean-the-bilge-yo, crew members to run the ship.
In FE2, some ships needed a crew of 3, 4 or 7 before they could even take off.

The Annie has 3 seats in the cockpit, 2 on either side of you. Wouldn't it be great if you actually had to hire 2 more NPC crew, at a rate of maybe 1000Cr per week, just to take off.
And their avatars would actually sit in those empty seats? (Nah. Forget your pilot. He/she's out back in the galley munching on the snacks you brought onboard... )

It's just fluff, and a money sink. But at least it's pretty fluff and will give your cockpit more life.
After all, many of you here love fluff and role playing. You can actually turn your head to the left/right, wearing your VR headset and make conversation with the avatar sitting there...
Wow. Immersion.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

You mean 'crewed'. Multicrewed is when you need crewed and positions can be filled by MP.
I dont miss 'crewed' - is merely another credit sinkm Multicrew however - there is potential right there in concept.

 

[Sylow]

What did it add in terms of gameplay? For me it boiled down to:

• When you switched to a bigger ship, you went to the board, added a few people to the ship and were good to go.
• When you switched to a smaller ship, you sacked some people.
• You might've had some extra costs, but at least for me they never mattered.

So all in all, additional work to implement this, additional overhead, for no noticeable gain in terms of gameplay. That's not a good investment of developer time. (Even having them watch let's play videos of other games in the same time would be more valuable. )

That's of course, if it's done the FE2 way. The OP also hints towards those crew having actual personality, etc. That would actually add some gameplay. It's not exactly "spaceship flight gameplay", so not the core of the game, but it would add some atmosphere. But by merely being "crew with personality to talk to you", the NPC would grow old (and then annoying) rather quickly.

To keep NPCs alive, some story has to happen. At least that's my experience. In games where story is relevant, well written (read: only a few) NPCs develop with the story and stay interesting. In games without (significant) story, NPCs pale quickly. There's no official story implemented in ED, which means that NPCs would remain quite static.

Thus i think that if this was implemented, the next suggestion would be to have a "mute the annoying and boring NPCs" feature.

 

[dxm55]

Well, for the bigger ships, perhaps the crew would actually MAN THE TURRETS, especially for mining weapons. LOL. Right now, unless you had a buddy multicrew, those things are fixed.

Crews could come with stat boost perhaps? Just like the current pilots you hire.
For eg: It could give you anywhere from a 2% to 10% boost in stats (maybe weapons cooling, or JD recharge, faster turret tracking, whatever... just something that's not game breaking)

Maybe they could even drive your second SRV (for those with the 2 veh-bays), and wing up with you on the surface. Might be useful for surface missions.

And yes, having stupid cockpit banter helps too. When Space legs come in, you could even walk around the cockpit and have conversations with them. Who knows?
Might be helpful in combat, where the crew calls out the position of the bogey you're targeting. eg: "Bogey 10 o'clock high, firing on us"

It could be 33% fluff, 33% atmosphere, and 33% actually useful in some way. We'll save the 1% for annoyance.

 

[Morbad]

I'd don't like the idea of stat boosts, and would love if multi-crew did away with the heavily abstracted extra pips in favor of having more stuff for the crew to do. This could apply to NPCs just as well, with a little work.

As for minimum crew requirements, I think this could be a good way to add operating costs to some ships.

 

[Sysmon]

I remember buying my first Asp in FE2 and getting stuck at the station because no crew was for hire there...

S

 

[Sylow]

Crews could come with stat boost perhaps? Just like the current pilots you hire.
For eg: It could give you anywhere from a 2% to 10% boost in stats (maybe weapons cooling, or JD recharge, faster turret tracking, whatever... just something that's not game breaking)

No good. It would just be yet another level of power creep.And it would be in favour of the bigger ships of course, as those would be the ones with the big crew.

It might be just me, but i think big ships see enough use, they don't need even more boosting, even before seeing that we really don't need yet another layer of power creep. Also, it would completely defeat the idea of "crew for flavour", as it would boil down to yet another layer of meta-game. Stack your ship with the best crew, be done for, don't care for anything else.

I really wouldn't like to move the game even further into that direction.

I'd don't like the idea of stat boosts, and would love if multi-crew did away with the heavily abstracted extra pips in favor of having more stuff for the crew to do. This could apply to NPCs just as well, with a little work.

As for minimum crew requirements, I think this could be a good way to add operating costs to some ships.

I agree, except the adding of operation costs. Unless crew would have to be paid in guardian artifacts, it would not matter. Credits come in easily. (Just as they did in the mentioned FE2. ) If crews took "reasonable" rates, costs would not matter. If they would be paid enough to make a difference, i wouldn't understand why they'd still be here after two months, instead of flying their own gold-plated Anaconda.

The only way out of this would require a complete rework of the games economy. But then it would still be us old guys sitting on piles of cash, which would be huge mountains to climb for any new player. And making things slower for new players and much harder to ever catch up is not what the game needs.

 

[Kissamies]

I only played a bit of the first one, so I don't know about this feature. However, it was recently speculated in this deceptively named thread:

Multi-crew "issues"

Edit 1: Collating the comments into a coherent point. Folk seem happy that crew could become an interactive part of the game and I would propose something along the lines of requiring a number of crew members before they can launch. With that in mind I'd suggest: Small ships Sidey Vulture...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Oh and this person has a good way of selling them the idea:

Extra Holo-me seats.

Can we use some of the Holo-me save slots and put them in different seats on big ships? I would like to create my own characters for different roles of ships. It's lonely on the Beluga bridge. It might even encourage roleplaying commanders and YouTubers to buy more of the outfits from the store.

forums.frontier.co.uk

If they make them customisable, we might go and buy more cosmetics. If I had a hologram waifu on the co-pilot seat, I might buy her some stuff

 

[Arioch]

I’d like to see required crews for larger ships as long as there was associated gameplay (beyond what was outlined in the DDF (no links as it didn’t survive the move)) - even something slightly abstracted like the crew morale system from eg. Sid Meier’s Pirates! In that game if you had enough supplies onboard and were taking enough prize ships / making enough money, then the crew was happy and you would eventually disband and share the loot. Fail to do that and they could abscond or even mutiny, pinching your ship.

In ED, that could give you a compelling reason to get on with earning loadsa filthy lucre even if you’re a late-game player doing a good impression of Smaug the Magnificent, after all, the crew would only be getting a share from your current adventures. There’s also an inbuilt loop, as the crew will eventually disband.

It’d be difficult to incorporate into ED’s real-time nature; can’t have the crew all doing one because you haven’t logged on during your summer hols Interesting to think about though.

 

[Berpol]

My suggestion (too lazy to find the thread) was something like this:

With Space Legs you need to fill your ship with a crew. Your basic crew are either visible non-humanoid robots (for example a table-like robot serving guests) or not visible and integrated (the robot is part of a fixed table). This robot crew is part of the ship or module and does not cost any extra and needs no extra money. They either will not get better or you can get expensive upgrades (or a new engineer?).

Or you can hire a crew, the NPCs in it have an order in which they appear in your ship (like in your Dolphin there only work the first 5 and in your Imperial Cutter all 100). They can get experience in different jobs (navigation allows less fuel for a jump, stewards give you a random bonus when delivering tourists). If your ship is lost you can "buy" them back at the Search and Rescue station (they gathered their escape pods). Or it is part of the rebuy cost.

Another variant would be that most of the crew are just numbers but there are hirable individuals (like the pilots) that have a face and give a bonus (navigator, steward...) and depending on the size of a ship you can only use a certain number of each type (1 navigator, 1 steward per 1st class or luxury cabin...).

 

[Vardaugas]

Crew "seats" could be aligned to one of the pip categories and if you don't fill that seat you lose one maximum pip you could allocate to the relevant system. Means you could fly a ship with less or no crew but you would be penalized by pip management limitations as you can't handle all the systems yourself. Crew costs flat credits per hour while you're using it, being active with the ship they're on, instead of the revenue based payment of SLF pilots.

That would be the basics. Easy to elaborate from there.