Brainstorm This Crew: Stations, bonuses, specialties, experience & expense.

[GaeasSon]

Herr_Phil gives me an idea... I don't necessarily think it's a good idea, but what the heck it might be amusing... A "RedShirt dispenser". If these poor guys are so expendable, I bet the Trade Guild will have figured out a way to stuff them into a vending machine. Maybe you can buy them canned, or cloned in cryo-sleep.

A better, or at least less silly way to think of it might be "Virtual Enlisted Crew" so the game doesn't have to track and render every crewman assigned to your ship.

• The game will spawn them as scenery. As you walk your corridors, your enlisted crew will walk by on random tasks. When they are out of sight they become virtual again.
• The game will spawn them in response to a boarding attempt. Number of virtual enlisted crew divided by internal volume of your ship will determine how many crew are mustered for defense. Virtual crewmen killed in the line of duty, decrements your ships supply of them by 1.
• The player can promote virtual enlisted crew, making them level one officers.. at that point they become fully-fledged NPCs, they are persistent, and they begin to gain experience.
• Optionally, there might be some mechanism to auto-promote one of your virtual crew when one of your officers is killed.

 

[alterintel]

Herr_Phil gives me an idea... I don't necessarily think it's a good idea, but what the heck it might be amusing... A "RedShirt dispenser". If these poor guys are so expendable, I bet the Trade Guild will have figured out a way to stuff them into a vending machine. Maybe you can buy them canned, or cloned in cryo-sleep.

A better, or at least less silly way to think of it might be "Virtual Enlisted Crew" so the game doesn't have to track and render every crewman assigned to your ship.

• The game will spawn them as scenery. As you walk your corridors, your enlisted crew will walk by on random tasks. When they are out of sight they become virtual again.
• The game will spawn them in response to a boarding attempt. Number of virtual enlisted crew divided by internal volume of your ship will determine how many crew are mustered for defense. Virtual crewmen killed in the line of duty, decrements your ships supply of them by 1.
• The player can promote virtual enlisted crew, making them level one officers.. at that point they become fully-fledged NPCs, they are persistent, and they begin to gain experience.
• Optionally, there might be some mechanism to auto-promote one of your virtual crew when one of your officers is killed.

Ha ha, you said "RedShirt dispenser". What an awesome idea. I love it.
I'm not sure disposable people are a good way to go. What about disposable droids?
Maybe just have droids that you activate when the ship is attacked?
Maybe you could take a team of droids with you when you board a ship?

 

[Ithirahad]

Redshirt dispenser... This should be a thing. Not in default vanilla, but this should literally be a thing.

 

[FatCobra]

Redshirt dispenser... This should be a thing. Not in default vanilla, but this should literally be a thing.

Absolutely, we should also add explosive decompression to space them. On the bright sounds we don't have to hear them scream in space

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Disposable anti-personnel drones? (Hehehehehe... how about some re-skinned mechanized four-legged NOPEs?)

 

[GaeasSon]

mechanized four-legged NOPE

Non-Organic Personnel Exterminators?

 

[Rixxan]

No
Other
Pleasant
Executions?

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Non-Organic Personnel Exterminators?

You Sir, deserve a medal.

 

[herr_phil]

Well that escalated quickly. Now I'll be credited with killing more redshirts than Kirk ever did.

Anyway....I digest.

I've been tweaking my designs to include interior spaces to accommodate this update. One thing worth discussing is to how to handle the crew moving from where you get them (at stations I'd imagine? Mail order catalog?) to where you want them on your ship. We all know how tricky it can be for a player to get around some of our ships, so how are our new crewies?

My idea would be to have them float towards their goal and if they get blocked then they instantly warp to their destination.

Now if you take them off-ship (I imagine you'll have a little personnel menu that you can click a box to set them to their station) and if you want them to follow, the behavior is the same. They float alongside you but the moment that they get too far away from you (a timer could be placed here) then they warp to you. From the menu you could even select things like rules of engagement (shoot the spiders first, sacrifice yourself for your captain, touch the alien egg first) that apply both to ship combat and person to person combat.

Someday we may see it like the movies where they get space boarded and they basically have to fight off the boarders at the cost of losing battle efficiency. Flash gordon anyone? Hehe.

 

[PizzaPress]

*looks at page number*
Anyway, a lot of the buffs seem to be artificial "use the crew now, dangit!". Even if I want to use crew, that's just going to make me annoyed with them anyway.

I'd rather they do things, than have the existing systems require them. I.E. repairs, comms, translation, creature trainers, weapons-computer manning, manning ships, fighting on planets/stations/ships(squad command?), scanners, and turrets.

Spoiler: Turrets

(though I'd prefer PD to work better with AI, makes more sense and works better with the tiny PD turrets. Perhaps smaller turrets would have more accuracy, and only larger turrets would benefit from NPCs? And I'm not sure if it should just improve accuracy, have ups and downs, or improve something other than accuracy.)

Spoiler: Robot/Alien crew

Perhaps there could be robots as a crew alternative, that consolidate the many resources needed into a simple credits(sentient robots, after all) and mesh/alloy sink, but cost more to hire and a little more to upkeep(but same or less amount of storage needed for resources, and perhaps less facilities needed.)

Robots and aliens could do the same things, depending on species/model. Perhaps you could customize your crew.
(like a character build screen, in the hiring phase.)

(when I think robot, I'm thinking the high end will be either Reploid or human-with-obvious-robot-parts levels of human-like. However, we could have other kinds of robots too, like the little exocomps from TNG or the Mouse Droids from SW(Death Star droid)).

Crew types(both robot and human/alien) could range in size, intelligence, and capabilities. Less they can do, less facilities/resources needed.

 

[Ithirahad]

Weapons computers, turrets, manning ships, and fighting on planets and ships will all be functions of crew... The other stuff is just incentive for people to have crews beyond just a few weapons officers and security personnel.

 

[Rixxan]

Am I the only one who wants crew so I can shove them out an airlock and see them die?

 

[GaeasSon]

Am I the only one who wants crew so I can shove them out an airlock and see them die?

...Probably not. But it still doesn't say anything good about your state of mind.

 

[Rixxan]

...Probably not. But it still doesn't say anything good about your state of mind.

Yeah...

Oh Well, It's worth it!

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Yeah...

Oh Well, It's worth it!

You should play FTL, Rixxan. You CAN open the airlocks and vent the atmosphere on the ship there. (it's recommended to reserve this feature for boarders, tho)

 

[Rixxan]

Trust me, all my ships have a self-destruct sequence.

 

[Krougal]

OK... guys, I think we kinda need to hold our horses here.

Morals? Needs? Food, drink, empathy, cooking?

Let's not turn Starmade into The Sims: Space, OK? I see here more complicated systems invented for NPCs than the rest of the game combined.

Keep it simple. It should be one feature of the game, among the many, not the center of it. Seriously, between mining runs, construction sprees, battles and forum flaming (Like I said, let's keep it real, folks) how much time do you think y'all will realistically spend on catering to the needs of your Tamagochi-like NPC crew? Besides, they are supposed to help you, not the other way around.
NPCs are supposed to be assets. Useful assets, as now they are nothing but paper weights.
.

Quoted for emphasis cause I couldn't say it better myself.

I like most of what's suggested, if it's reigned in a bit. Not a fan of skills and experience, for some of the same reasons I'm against them for the player, but also because it gets to be too much of a gamey hassle leveling up npcs. Rather just have fixed bonuses. While there should be some sense of pain and loss on loosing crew it shouldn't dominate the game.

+1 for Redshirt dispensers!!!

Like Panpiper suggested, I think they should add some blocks for basic needs, because people already are substituting for them constantly (beds, head, galley). If I never have to see another thruster stove or cannon barrel sink again I'll be all too happy. Chairs are another big need. Captains chair should replace the core.

Blocks for pathing are definitly way over the top. While I'd like to see npcs wander around or patrol or whatever, if it becomes too much hassle or too much system load, then having them just be at stations is good enough.

 

[nightrune]

I love the idea of bonuses but I don't think it should be large. One of the best ways to do this and help support boarding are to allow npc repair based on design assigned to a ship. The materials they use should be in the cargo hold. That way you have to balance extra parts vs loot. This might also play into food stores for crew. They just take food from the cargo location. This helps elminate a lot of the micromanagement, and if you need power back, move more people to engineering. I'm mainly basing it off the ideas I loved in FTL.

One thing I think should happen with scanners though. Is that scanners should only be able to scan the interior and give crew count if its manned.

 

[djthekiller]

imma gonn add my 2 cents:
if we do add this we will need to have randomized movement for the npc's and random names backrounds and the like
also need to add food and oxygen to ships because its just a little unrealistic atm because of this

 

[kiraen]

You might want to check out this post:
http://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-development-direction.21615/

Immediately relevant sections include...

NPC Characteristics
NPCs will have their own names, experience, health, morale, loyalty, and energy; along with more things to come. Each NPC may also have particular attributes that make them more viable in one role or another. The level of certain characteristics will influence other ones, or result in different responses from the NPC, this is explained a bit more below.