+1 Rep to you ToCoSo for your great suggestions and all the work it must have taken! Just a few days ago I lost my crew member I brought up from Novice to high rank, because of a slight mistake. This was so annoying!!! This game mechanic has to change - we have escape pods, why not our crew? I want to get my crew back after a ship loss. I don't want to be forced to play Elite "the safe way" out of fear, losing some crew.
NPC crew development concept and ideas thread.
Again, I feel I must emphasise how strongly I feel that any combat related performance improvements crew gives you IMHO risks just creating The Engineers pt2!
For me The Engineers has (needlessly) unbalanced the game. It created a mindless go-to upper tier of performance with little/no thought/consideration required. It also made already somewhat rock-paper-scissor combat into rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock combat.
Now with this crew proposal seeming offering more performance perks, we raise the performance bar yet high, and seemingly add in a few more assets to confuse our now already rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock combat.
I too like the idea of having crew onboard with the premise of them adding to personalisation of the ship. But the premise of them simply being The Engineers pt2 alarms me.
Hence my earlier suggestion that ships maybe that can have crew would be at a disadvantage without them? eg: If you're off exploring/exploring it's up to you whether you take crew with you or not. If you don't you're saving CRs but some aspects of your ships performance may not be as good (eg: less effective shields).
Ultimately I just cannot see combat related performance being improved by crew yet again (on top of The Engineers) being anything other than further messing up combat.
For me the trick would be having crew be an asset, while not needlessy raising the combat performance bar again, and creating even more rock-paper-scissors combat mechanics.
Obviously it's a different type of heat
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Obviously it's a different type of heat
Obviously it's the same kind of heat that cooks your ship when firing weapons.
But my guess is that when in a burning station there is no place to get rid of the heat build up, when scooping there is always a side on your ship that is not facing the star/sun where you can get rid of the heat build up.
Ooooooooooh! Now that's some quality handwavium thinking there! Me likey!
ps: Just had the image in my head of while scooping deploying a large parasol to one side of the ship
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Awesome idea. Maybe also add "quests" to get access to different crew members. Find and convince them to join you. Build reputation.
I don't really have a clear idea how to find them but one suggestion would be if you run missions in their general area, they will notice you. Say within 100 LYs. So doing missions, bounty-hunting etc in different areas unlocks different crew members that are specialized at your activity. If you are pirating, there's a crew member for that in some anarchy-region etc.
How would you notice you are in the right area? Well, you could get mail that some crew member has noticed your actions. Don't spell out their stats or anything, make it a mystery. Maybe percentage counters for different activities that the crew member is impressed with. So you can acquire them in more than one way, doing more than 1 general activity.
I don't really have a clear idea how to find them but one suggestion would be if you run missions in their general area, they will notice you. Say within 100 LYs. So doing missions, bounty-hunting etc in different areas unlocks different crew members that are specialized at your activity. If you are pirating, there's a crew member for that in some anarchy-region etc.
How would you notice you are in the right area? Well, you could get mail that some crew member has noticed your actions. Don't spell out their stats or anything, make it a mystery. Maybe percentage counters for different activities that the crew member is impressed with. So you can acquire them in more than one way, doing more than 1 general activity.
Again, I feel I must emphasise how strongly I feel that any combat related performance improvements crew gives you IMHO risks just creating The Engineers pt2!
For me The Engineers has (needlessly) unbalanced the game. It created a mindless go-to upper tier of performance with little/no thought/consideration required. It also made already somewhat rock-paper-scissor combat into rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock combat.
Now with this crew proposal seeming offering more performance perks, we raise the performance bar yet high, and seemingly add in a few more assets to confuse our now already rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock combat.
I too like the idea of having crew onboard with the premise of them adding to personalisation of the ship. But the premise of them simply being The Engineers pt2 alarms me.
Hence my earlier suggestion that ships maybe that can have crew would be at a disadvantage without them? eg: If you're off exploring/exploring it's up to you whether you take crew with you or not. If you don't you're saving CRs but some aspects of your ships performance may not be as good (eg: less effective shields).
Ultimately I just cannot see combat related performance being improved by crew yet again (on top of The Engineers) being anything other than further messing up combat.
For me the trick would be having crew be an asset, while not needlessy raising the combat performance bar again, and creating even more rock-paper-scissors combat mechanics.
Obviously it's a different type of heat
I agree with the combat, however there are so many other tasks a NPC could do without giving combat a buff.
Helmsman would remove the grind involved in traveling around in the galaxy
Science officer would support with exploration tasks
Engineer would support in maintaining the ship
The other functions would need space feet as far as I can see, but there are definitely room for NPC crew without buffing combat.
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Unless the Science Officer is gonna hold my scan button down when I jump into a system, there's not a lot he can do to support exploration.
NPC crew are only going to be useful if the mechanics change so that Cmdrs can't run the ship themselves. So that means they have to be introduced at the same time as the new mechanics, otherwise they're either pointless (salt a la multicrew) or there's a period when Cmdrs can't actually do stuff (salt of a different flavor). Finally, there are ships with only one seat and players who don't want to have crew so meaningful NPC crew stops people flying WHAT they want to fly, or HOW they want to fly (yet more salt).
Adding NPC crew to a game designed not to need them is a LOT more complicated than just adding an avatar to the cockpit and giving some stats a 10% bonus.
i'm on downloading X Rebirth VR , hoping it's going to be a nice brake from ED
has mixed reviews as it's early access but i'd rather see for myself how good it is
One thing the Science Office can do is to analyze the DSS data and tell me if there is anything of note on the planets surface. This information would encourage me to get out and explore the planets instead of simply cataloging them. As the Science Officer gains skill, he/she would become better at identifying signs of POI's and in communicating, to me, where these can be found, on the planets surface.
In addition, the Science Officer might be able to tell me how much a discovery is worth and to look at planets, from the ADS and tell me which planets are most important to apply the DSS to. Of course, the Science Officer would probably expect a share of the reward for discoveries.
Which would require new mechanics, since POIs are currently generated randomly. They'd need to be generated for the whole body and persisted between sessions.
In addition, if this ability isn't available to the pilot, then it forces people to fly with NPC crew, which rules out single seat ships for exploration.
That probably won't be popular, but FDev might consider it acceptable.