First of all, kudos on the effort!
HOWEVER - My concern? This is just another variation of Engineers, improving ship performance at the expense of adding in even more paper scissors stone outcomes?
Personally? Rather than offering more and more perfomance perks, I'd prefer to see performance nerfs. ie: If you have a huge ship like an Anaconda, if you don't have an Elite crew on board, then things are nerfed (Isn't that more measured and realistic?). Only when you have all positions filled, and all crew working really well, will the ship have 100% performance. Until then areas of it are working below 100%.
No more performance bar raising. Now more magic side effects. Just a subtle outcome. If you choose to fly a bigger ship with no crew, then you save CRs, but you will have a (minor) penalty in various areas of your ship.
There could even be subtle things such as if you put a crew member in a fighter, then them no longer being in position X means position X has a subtle drop in performance?
This is very good, you did a great job fleshing out the mechanics, i would LOVE to see this in the game.
The problem is that FDEV want to shoehorn multiplayer into the play session, they are avoiding anything that would make the game
deeper and feel more rich. That being said, I hope FDEV will be honest to us an tell us what they what with the game, that way we could decide to hang on or leave it all together.
lovely concept would love it and even spend money in the store to get items for my crew.
Those are great, here are a couple I came up with a while ago.
As a trader, there are two crew members that I would like to have on my ship.
The first is a Cargo Master.
He is responsible for supervising the loading of the ship and is an expert at squeezing stuff in where no one though though would be possible.
His (or her) presence on the ship would increase the carrying capacity of the ship beyond the capacity of the racks. The percentage would depend on his rating. Ideally he would also gain experience on particular ship classes (if he gained rank on a T-9 then he would be even more effective at loading T-9s').
The second is a Master Negotiator.
The Master Negotiator is skilled at just that. She can always negotiate the best price for fuel, in the markets, and sometimes the shipyard. Of course, her ability is influenced by how many times she has visited a particular market, and how well regarded her employer is.
As she gains rank when employed by a particular Commander, her ability to negotiate his needs and expectations also improves.
These crew members can make having a crew on-board useful for traders; who, otherwise, tend to fly alone.
Great ideas!
I for one would have Camille and Freya on my ship!
I like teh ideas of levelling up NPC's so skills become more useful, but i also like how some will need to return to a specific location, or have regular shore leave or they stop working as effectively. I do like the idea of achilles robots being teh default units, so players who dont enjoy thsi type of management can opt out without missing too much.
Tyhe ability to manage these functions during longer cruises will make SC journeys less tedious if you have to twerk NPC settings and plan routes accordingly.
NPC crew is clearly needed, and I can't see why we should not have them, I'm pretty sure it won't change the balancing of the game, as this will mostly be a mini game played by most single players. CG and PVP would not be affected either as this is ship to ship combat and the engineers already made this an uneven challenge.
You're gonna twerk the NPC's?
I have played since launch and I still love the game but sometimes the self motivation is a drain, missions are ok but it can all feel like background fluff, I don't always read what the mission givers say I just look at the price and check that it doesn't involve hatch breaker limpets!
Having crew could offer more things to be engaged with and also offer ways to make us listen to what they say a little more.