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

[NeonSturm]

But crew is not just for system efficiency.
Requiring crew for up to 50% bonus (growing with ship size) is good for the boarding gameplay too.

If reactors and crew areas had their own volume which can only be filled to a certain %age, ships will have a lot more interior and room placement still is open for optimisation thinking.

 

[cdl3050]

My opinion is based on the fact that I would use crew on my ships even if there were ZERO benefits.

I currently attempt to place interior on my ships for the distant future when crew becomes an option. Even though interior is purely cosmetic at this point, I still build interiors.
Forcing people to build interiors and crew-space when they would rather have a fully automated systems-based ship is simply Mean.
The best compromise is to create a system where the person who puts in extra effort gets rewarded for that extra effort without penalizing personal game-play style. This means that crewed ships should not immediately be better than system-based ships, rather, some amount of time and effort should be required before the crewed ship becomes somewhat better than an equivalent systems-based ship. Only better because extra effort was required.

Just because I want my ships to be crewed does not mean that crewed ships should be the only viable ships. System based ships must also remain competitive.

It is important to maintain balance for all of the people who have very different objectives and play styles.

Don't force your play style on me, rather Give me more Options to choose from.

 

[NeonSturm]

New My opinion is based on the fact that I would use crew on my ships even if there were ZERO benefits.

But what if I don't require crew, just crew-space?

a 20x20x20 box in a 60x60x60 ship taking 1/27 space and can only be used for crew?
and about 1/5 of reactor's total volume only usable by crew?​

Wouldn't that be fair to everyone? You can but you do not must.

And on top of that, we can discuss to give crew bonus on some servers, which want boarding

For PvP ships, you just have to connect these RP-spaces so that an RP builder can upgrade your ship if he wants. Nothing mandatory.
Edit: no, just use teleporters as "turbo-lifts" in StarTrek are used.​