- Joined
- Jul 4, 2013
- Messages
- 425
- Reaction score
- 273
Longwinded post, so tl;dr up front:
Crew should be TOS redshirts for repairs, boarding, and defense from boarding. You should want interiors so that the crew can get around to defend and repair the ship.
So, there's a lot of things crew could do, but I've thought a lot about it and I have some ideas on them having rather narrow roles. First off, game design-wise there are two principles that I think should be followed for crew:
2 is good, they'd have mobility turrets do not.
3 would just be boarding, which is certainly something StarMade should have. Other types of away missions really wouldn't make sense.
4 is also good, as mobility would give them an edge over set blocks in that they could go around the ship, rather than having some radius. Sure, a repair block could be shipwide, but then it's too unrestricted. Crew allow for logical restriction by needing things accessible, and can be blown up.
5 is something a block could do.
One common idea people toss around is crew as a percentage buff to chambers or alongside chambers. I think this is wrong because a block could do the same thing; there's nothing special about mobility that'd affect this, so you might as well make a block that requires whatever resource crew need to do it. It'd also not make sense for crew to just sit there somewhere doing nothing all day.
Plus, it wouldn't be interesting as far as needing interiors, other than very forced "you must have X living spaces" style systems.
Crew going around actually repairing naturally requires some interior corridors or voids, which would do a lot at even a very simple level of crew just wandering about.
Crew should be TOS redshirts for repairs, boarding, and defense from boarding. You should want interiors so that the crew can get around to defend and repair the ship.
So, there's a lot of things crew could do, but I've thought a lot about it and I have some ideas on them having rather narrow roles. First off, game design-wise there are two principles that I think should be followed for crew:
- Crew should not do anything a block could do. Things blocks can do should be handled by blocks because they're the core of the game. Crew add nothing gameplay-wise if they're doing what a block could do.
- Crew should be desirable to have, but not required. If crew are undesirable, they add nothing gameplay-wise. If crew are required, they harm getting your ship up and running.
- Make ship control decisions the computer cannot (diplomacy etc. included here)
- Secure the ship against intrusion
- Carry out tasks off-ship (fighting ground battles included here)
- Repair the ship
- Create things the ship currently doesn't have (ship modifications, new tech, etc.)
2 is good, they'd have mobility turrets do not.
3 would just be boarding, which is certainly something StarMade should have. Other types of away missions really wouldn't make sense.
4 is also good, as mobility would give them an edge over set blocks in that they could go around the ship, rather than having some radius. Sure, a repair block could be shipwide, but then it's too unrestricted. Crew allow for logical restriction by needing things accessible, and can be blown up.
5 is something a block could do.
One common idea people toss around is crew as a percentage buff to chambers or alongside chambers. I think this is wrong because a block could do the same thing; there's nothing special about mobility that'd affect this, so you might as well make a block that requires whatever resource crew need to do it. It'd also not make sense for crew to just sit there somewhere doing nothing all day.
Plus, it wouldn't be interesting as far as needing interiors, other than very forced "you must have X living spaces" style systems.
Crew going around actually repairing naturally requires some interior corridors or voids, which would do a lot at even a very simple level of crew just wandering about.