Multi-Crew features suggestions

[ashtaraa]

Relevant reddit topic I made recently:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/42hi1n/brainstorming_thread_multicrew/

These are my ideas that can be seen in the comments in the thread:

Weapons
(1) Aside from turret control, have two new missile categories, that can be controlled remotely and manually (think Redeemer from Unreal Tournament). The two variants would be (a) heavy warhead, low ammo, slow speed, easily defeated by point defence and easily outmanouvered by smart CMDRs, however, massive damage if you land the hit; and (b) smaller missile, manouverable, plenty of ammo at the cost of lower damage. The HUD for missile guidance could look similar to SRV turret HUD, but this is a technical detail easily figured out.
(2) Manual Reloads - some kind of mini-game to increase the reload speeds, with the risk of jamming the weapon if done poorly.

Engineering
(1) Manual limpet control - probs very situational, but could be more useful for hatch breakers or in for colletors in a dense asteroid field. HUD for collectors could have the blue rectangula cargo scoop screen (again, details).
(2) Refuelling mini-game - for transferring fuel to other ships when you don't have limpets. There could be some "aim-this-wiggly-thing-correctly" (similar to interdictions, but easier and with changed visuals) to attach some tube (the way fighter planes do nowadays) to tranfer fuel. It wouldn't be 100% efficient to not reduce the meaning of fuel transfer limpets, and the efficiency could depend on how well you succeeded at the minigame (e.g. 75% efficiency at perfect alignment, and then progresivelly less and less, with only, say 15% in worst case). This would reward skill, would allow more interaction without having to be specifically equipped for it and would be an extra activity to do.
(3) Power management 2.0 - huge potential here. More detailed power allocation is a commonly suggested thing, but I'm also thinking this - have the module menu as a part of the "power management" tab, and let engineers overcharge certain modules, with the risk of increased heat and eventually module damage (and after that even hull damage) if overcharged for too long. E.g. 4 pips to WEP, 2 pips SYS would allow to add another pip to Rail gun for overcharge. Now we have WEP with 4 pips, SYS with 1 pip, with the sixth pip in Rail gun, and there are maybe 5 safe seconds before the negative side of overcharge starts occuring. Similarly, 4 SYS pips would allow shield/life support/etc overcharge, 4 ENG woul allow thruster/FSD overcharge and so on. Power management would be an active task, depending on situation, with optimal setup constantly changing.

 

[ashtaraa]

I would like to revive this thread with the new Horizons roadmap out.

There's a lot of cool ideas in the original thread, but I would like to hear some of the suggestions from the forum dwellers. How would you ensure that we won't have to merely split currently available features among 4 people?

 

[Father Christmas]

I'd like to see your ideas implemented. I worry for multiplayer crews... They have the potential to be amazing, but a two player wing in two separate ships is a powerful and effective force. If those CMDRs choose to crew a single ship, I'd like to see significant bonuses. For example add a few mini games which would allow a copilot to greatly improve functions such as weapons power, FSD range, etc. I want to be able to call out to "Scotty" to give the engines more power! I also don't want my mates to fly with me on my corvette once, decide it's not as fun, or worse, not half so powerful as if they just joined my corvette in a couple of vultures. Find clever ways to make a multi-player crew really worth it. Turret control is good. And I think it'll really add to the firepower you can put down range in ships that suffer from maneuverability issues. But I want a co-pilot to also be useful while traveling, exploring, trading, or even racing.

 

[DocLooshkin]

Hello, Ashtaraa.

There's a bunch of stuff I'd like, most of it requiring probably too much dev time for too little benefit, sadly.

• Ideally, I'd like to see a shipboard station covering the ship's scientific and sensory capabilities. What we could do would depend entirely on how much time the devs want to put in - and how much interest there might be for this from players and devs, I'm not actually sure. I can see wider potential player-interest in using this for scanning planets for PoIs, carrying out scan-the-enemy-base missions and in player- or mission-driven journalism activities.

• Medical, Xenobiological and Botanical modules and Roles seem like possibilities. I've no great interest in these (I'm a bounty-hunter, not a doctor), but who wouldn't want the chance to bring back a live alien or grow their own crop of onionhead?


• One thing I'd definitely like would be to unpack the pips themselves, for the Engineering Role. Right now, they're a single, generic unit of power - but thinking logically, we should really have two seperate distributor controls: one for units of electricity and one for units of mass, both produced by the power plant. For the sake of clarity and playability, I'll assume a single, not-entirely-plausible, generic type of mass - a plasma that can be flipped for heating or cooling purposes by the ship. It could be made more complicated than that, but I suspect it wouldn't be any more fun to use, so I won't explore it.

For balancing purposes, changes made to the power-to-mass ratios might need to have a delay, as with the SCBs. They could be made controllable on a per-device, per-category or per-ship basis, as the devs look to balance it out.

• The weapons would require mainly power to fire and mainly coolant to keep from overheating. By changing the power-to-mass ratio, Commanders could increase firing rates and beam strengths at the expense of cooling - and vice versa, naturally.

• The engines would need power and reaction mass for both normal propulsion and boost, but as a gameplay contrivance, boost could be said to need much more power. Changing the ratio, Commanders could trade normal acceleration and turning for boost speed and vice versa.

• The shield is where this system might have the most impact, depending on FD's choices. Right now, it's a near-omnipotent magic bubble with a 13-amp fuse, but adding mass to the equation could be an interesting game-changer. At it's most basic, the shield would use it's mass to absorb the energy from energy weapon hits and discharge stored energy from the mass to deflect projectiles. The obvious trade would be the one for the other.


Going further, though - and going a little bit off-topic...

Elite: Dangerous has a slightly quirky element to it's design, in my frequently-amazing opinion: it calls for a dogfight-style of combat, complete with tricky maneouvres, jousts, chases, etc, but has an omnidirectional shield system best suited to simple circle-strafe combat at optimal firing ranges. While that shield premise may be traditional, the two elements don't really support each other - and to some extent, much of the game's design seems warped around this tension. I feel a large part of the most persistent arguments about ED all seem to ultimately lean back upon this conceptual conflict.

While very developer-intensive, improving the shield design would resolve many issues, as well as provide for much stronger defensive gameplay and Defense Roles within multiplayer ships. I must be wordy and prescriptive, since I can think of no better way of conveying the idea well, but I'll stick it in a spoiler box, so it doesn't swamp the thread.

Thank you for an interesting and inspiring question, Ashteraa.


Tl;dr - Variable geometry shield systems, with complex, controllable properties.

Spoiler

Current shields are a rigid, weightless, near-impenetrable bubble, virtually-unpowered and quickly collapsing in toto under fire, barring intervention. I would have a weighty, treacly, variable-geometry system instead, gradually using up fuel whenever it's doing any serious work, with attackers having to burn holes through it, rather than bringing the whole thing down - and only collapsing entirely when there is too much heat and damage in the hull to allow it to reform.

• The new plasma shield would be subject to inertia, so it deforms and changes characteristics under acceleration and braking. Depending on the implementation, flying towards or away from an opponent might confer advantages and disadvantages against different weapon types.

• Fuel consumption would be a thing. Unless it's a Sidewinder trying to very slowly bring down a T-9, it shouldn't affect a single combat, but it should have an impact on long engagements in CZs, for example. Getting out while you can would be important.

• In an attack situation, Commanders (and crews, where applicable) would need to learn how to 'paint' weapons fire onto a single point of shield failure and how to parlay different attack types into drilling through or bringing down shields.

• In defense, skilled Commanders could use these systems to stave off damage and defeat for far longer than is currently the case, potentially outlasting all but the most powerful or determined opponents. The focus would be on replenishing damaged shields and turning points of excess temperature and hull damage away from their opponents.

• Indirect fire weapons would acquire much more prominence than at present. Weapons that have been nerfed, such as missiles, could be unnerfed to some degree - the effectiveness of an attack would now depend as much on the defenders skill, rather than just the attack stats. Weapons that have not been implemented because of balance concerns could become an option again.

• Skilled combatants would learn shipbuilding and fight skills that both keep the enemy under continuous fire and keep that fire focussed on particular points, whilst simultaneously turning away their own points of weakness. It would need substantial balancing, but the end result should be a much more balletic, almost martial arts style of combat, rather than the current style, which I find frequently has as much in common with medieval jousting as with aerial dogfights.

• Both temporary tactical retreats and full withdrawals would be much more entertaining, with proper gameplay, as escaping Commanders try to put their shields back together. Hopefully, there'd be far less usage of the submit-and-boost-jump soft exploit.


Regarding the internals, I would have a multi-layer design, offering different capabilities and more diverse visuals. I would reposit a ships hull plate as being a smart, 34th-century ceramic, rather than the dumb metal plate it is now. I would give it some basic, limited self-healing capability, because - regardless of anything else - no ship design in ED can ever make much sense without it. Excessive heat and damage to the hull would affect shield production and control, until it cools and/or heals over.

• The inner Core shield-layer would be a dense, almost gel-like layer designed to absorb collisions and give aerodynamic and hydrodynamic shapes to our ships in the appropriate environments, as well as regulating fuel scoop intake. All atmosphere-capable ships should have this to some degree, even if no dedicated shield module is installed. The middle Convectory layer would be wider and more diffuse, focussed on absorbing energy from weapons fire and diffusing heat away from the radiators and damaged areas of the hull. The outer Kinetic layer would look like an electrical shell, much as we have now. It would be focussed on deflecting projectiles, by storing up energy and rapidly dumping it into them at the point of impact.

• The various layer densities, volumes and replenishment ratios of all of these could be available to increase or decrease, within a range determined by the ships Shield Generator and other modules. There should be an additional ratio of energy absorption to diffusion, for heat management purposes.

• Rather than magically letting lasers and bullets through, all fire coming in and all activities involving energy going out would consume power and mass. If the shields are set to too high a mass-density, with too little power to control it, outgoing weapons fire and thruster exhaust could experience latency issues, or - if overridden - could burn the shields, costing mass and power to reform, as well as reducing the outgoing firepower.

• As an option, much of the existing defense modules could have a 'lite' equivalent built into all shields, with the full modules offering enhanced capabilities. For example, basic thermal transduction is built into this idea already, so the Heat Sink could double that capability for a short period. A simple chaff-like flare could be created inside a plasma shield quite easily, drawing fire away from the most-damaged areas of the shields and hull, while the full Chaff module would draw fire entirely away from the ship. And so forth.

• Shield Boosters would increase power, affecting the speeds at which a hole 'heals' over and can react to outgoing energy. Shield Cell Banks would increase the speed at which lost mass can be replenished. I would add a Hull Repair Booster, designed to increase the hull's self-healing capability.

• Given that we now already have some material fabrication capabilities in our ships by default, I would also incorporate some limited AFMU functionality into all our ships. Have the standalone AFMUs become battlefield AFMUs, able to repair modules only just quickly enough for a blood-pressure-raisingly tense repair mid-fight. BAFMU's a better name, anyway.

That's all I can think of for the moment. I'm aware this is terribly overwritten, but I can find no more economical way to clearly articulate the idea - and I've been trying to figure out how since last August!
If you've actually read this far, I thank you sincerely for your time.

 

[ashtaraa]

I'd like to see your ideas implemented. I worry for multiplayer crews... They have the potential to be amazing, but a two player wing in two separate ships is a powerful and effective force. If those CMDRs choose to crew a single ship, I'd like to see significant bonuses. For example add a few mini games which would allow a copilot to greatly improve functions such as weapons power, FSD range, etc. I want to be able to call out to "Scotty" to give the engines more power! I also don't want my mates to fly with me on my corvette once, decide it's not as fun, or worse, not half so powerful as if they just joined my corvette in a couple of vultures. Find clever ways to make a multi-player crew really worth it. Turret control is good. And I think it'll really add to the firepower you can put down range in ships that suffer from maneuverability issues. But I want a co-pilot to also be useful while traveling, exploring, trading, or even racing.

Indeed. Although, as mucha as I'm worried multicrew would be just splitting the existing features among more people (which are perfectly manageable at the moment, since the flight sim part of the game is pretty straightforwards), I'm also afraid that having somebody sit in the copilot seat and being pretty will mean +100% weapon power, +100% shield power, +100% engine power, because a crew of 2 must be of equal strength to a wing of 2.

Clearly this is not a trivial problem to solve, and I have faith in FDev not dissapointing, but just in case, let's throw some ideas at them