Unless multicrew is ultimately a mandatory chore thing (pun intended), the same as for ED will (already has?) emerge: why MC a ship when you can group with multiple ships and so being far more effective and secure assets (cargo, minerals...) by splitting them between ships?
It's the same design problem that has occurred in all multicrew as far back as I can remember (which, granted, is only the Bf1942 / Planetside 1 era). As such, since the people at CI¬G have no experience to speak of when it comes to game design and are too lost up their own orifices to be able to find their way to the internet and do some research, they're clueless about these decades-old facts.
Any
N-crewed ship that isn't also
N times more lethal and survivable than a one-man ship is inherently worthless because you're getting less bang for your manpower buck and also waste a ton of player on being that worthless.
Any
N-crewed ship that isn't also
less lethal and survivable than a one-man ship if the crew isn't present is also inherently overpowered because instead of filling it up with
N crew, you could just bring
N of them, single-crewed and reap the benefit of having that beefier ship.
You can't really make ship survivability a function of the number of crew (even with some kind of nonsensical engineer gameplay where one player keeps the ship working) in any sensible way without creating even larger balancing issues, so the only way to resolve that inherent design conflict is to make all multicrew ship incapable of offensive combat if not crewed. The pilot has no weapons; the first crewman has a big honking gun to make up for that; and not being able to split your fire or minimise the loss when a player dies is just the cost you pay for flying multicrew. If there's any notion of combat-repairs making any difference (they really won't — combat that lets that happen is too boring, so you do post-combat repairs when all crew slots can chip in anyway), then the same offensive-to-defensive scaling needs to happen to every weapon position. That makes for an even larger balancing nightmare, so the best option is to just dump that horrible idea from the start.
But here's a problem, doubly so when you decide to make P2W a core part of the gameplay like CI¬G has: who on earth will get a ship that leaves the pilot — the guy who bought the damn thing — completely ineffectual in combat? Even with some romantic notion of having teammates to fill the position, those won't be available all the time, and even when available, they will have their own things they want to do rather than make the pilot's money be worth anything. You also can't just fill the slots with AI crewmates because then we're back on square one: it's now a 1-crew ship (with AI) so there's no reason to multicrew it — any extra players are better spent on flying a extra ships. The only way to design a multicrew ship that has any semblance of balance and value in the game is to make sure it has no semblance of balance and value to the person buying the ship.
Goodie.
Nothing against team play. It can be cool. I'm just wondering how what is being discussed for SC will work in reality and how it will mesh with things like NPC crew and long travel times, etc.
It won't. CRobber has been to busy dreaming up totally-not-the-Millennium-Falcon-honest-guv' scenes that will be replayed in-game somehow, that he never bothered to figure out that “somehow” and the actual game design requirements and caveats to make that happen.
The guy coming to blow you to bits for bleeps and giggles doesn't care about the tension of you not finding your hydrospanner to repair the tachyon multicoupling so he's not going to give you the narrative pause in the action needed for that drama to play out. That only happens in scripted movies.
))
