Read by Schine Multiple Crew Jobs - AND RTS IDEAS

[jorn818]

Crews are quite expensive, yet they are quite useless atm
Miner Crew:
would love to see some miner crew that look for nearby ores, or mine out whatever you select

Heal Crew: would have a healing beam and shoot at nearby broken hulls, although I rather have a cool looking droid for that, maybe a cube on wheels with a laser on its head and one eye on the side of the cube or something.

Build Crew: Lets say I make a turret or I want a fleet, Id give these guys blueprints and they would make as much as they possibly can.

Factory Crew: will process any materials, will only work when they stand next to a factory module



RTS:

Since these are forms of RTS I propose the following block: The Crew Block
The Crew Block is a block where all the recources the crew needs or gathers can be placed
However any chest that is linked to a crew block can also be used for the same purpose
so lets say ill have some miners and I dont want them to go all the way up to put their stuff in the crew block
than I can place a chest there and link it to the crew block and theyll store it in there (kinda like an enderchest) This way anyone from the build crew can use all gathered blocks to make the ship orders.







Note: all this is very endgame stuff, so thats why I think for every new crew member you need to pay 100.000.

 

[kiraen]

https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-development-direction.21615/

 

[Captain_Stripes]

I know that crews and NPCs having experience and such are all coming eventually, as the post above links to. But I do think it would be nice to discuss this topic, its a coming feature but what would we like to see. I came up with my own ideas following the same track that Op has going for us. I thought it would be nice to recruit crew members of a specific type and assign them to task forces, crews, and many more. For example.

Officer NPC: grants additional crew experience to other crew members sharing a duty space or within a task force, same when assigned to task forces (Task forces are mentioned later in the post). Their experience buff increases as their own experience is increased.

Engineer NPC: Increases efficiency in a duty space, buffs to recharge or reload speeds for example. Assignable to task forces (and probably represent the common worker bee in a task force) increasing the task force efficiency for jobs as mineral refinement, shipyard worker, ect. Efficiency increases with experience increase.

Soldier NPC: Acts as the security force of a ship, station also acts as your basic infantry and marine. So this guy wouldn't grant any buff to a ships system but his job is protect. So if the ship gets boarded or if your boarding another ship these are the go to guys. And to make them a littler more than the typical npc I would suggest a slight buff to their personal weapons damage and maybe to their health as well. Combat effectiveness is increased with experience increase.

Pilot NPC: Basically the only NPC that can pilot a ship, a lot of people are wanting more fleet options in starmade so your gonna want quite of few of these guys. When experience is increased they add an additional buff to ship thrust (without power drain) as an added incentive to having pilots. Use these guys in a task force to form a squadron of fighters, bombers. Or form a strike force comprising of frigates and destroyers. Just remember all these guys do is fly.

Dave NPC: our vanilla friendly guy. Morale is an intended feature for NPCs and I think this is where the Dave NPC can become useful. The Dave NPC will be a morale booster, use him for whatever odd jobs you want, cook, doctor, janitor, they're the basic civilian. But the civilian will be a reminder to Soldiers, Officers, Pilots and Engineers that the future of civilian lives are bright thanks to their hard work. Dave can even gain experience, morale boost is increased with experience increase.

Task forces, are a group of NPCs working on a common job. The task force represent the umbrella that binds multiple duty stations together for a common goal. Each task force should feature a task force leader. You can assign any task force member to be a leader, but id suggest officers. Ill explain why task force leaders are important later. But you can have a task force do any job that you desire and every member of that force will work on that job.

Some examples:

A factory task force, will most likely consist of engineers and maybe an officer. The factory task force will have every member work on your factories producing materials for you without the need of doing it yourself. Assign an engineer to a factory duty station, he will work at that factory gathering the materials it needs for production, set a parameter for production (so something like make x number of this material or make until it fills a cargo space) Because of the Engineers' buff it will increase the production speed of the factory. Assign multiples of these duty space workers to form the task force. Assign an officer to the task force to increase the engineers' experience, Make sure to assign a few extra Engineers to allow work shifts, so no one gets exhausted. A refinement task force would look similar. Or even a shipyard task force, give them a work order of x number of fighters and bombers, they'll gather mats and build it for you.

A military task force should look similar to the structure you would see in an army. Assign soldiers to task force, give the task force an officer and make him the task force leader, this will form something that represents a squad. Now assign that task force leader to a task force filled with leaders like him, with these leaders assigned into an over arching task force this forms a platoon. The squad task force is a branch off of another task force. You can use this technique to organize your command structure and your task forces. Assign these platoon leaders to a ship and the squads must go with them. Members of task forces must return to duty where the task force leader is stationed, this could maybe cut it down to where you wont have to reassign the task of every individual npc.

Some additional thoughts, be allowed to assign ranks to crew members and have each npc type have its own skin. (I think these are intended features anyways.)

But these are just some thoughts I came up with on the spot here so discussion is much welcomed. And I would like to see if something that represents this kind of idea is brought into the game.

 

[kiraen]

My bad.
You want this link instead.
https://starmadedock.net/threads/crew-stations-bonuses-specialties-experience-expense.20376/
(9 pages of brainstorming goodness)

 

[Captain_Stripes]

Nice, I dont know how that one slipped under my radar. But cool, thanks.

 

[MacThule]

I really don't see a role for factory NPCs the way crafting currently exists, because it only takes moments to flip production on/off as is. I'm pretty sure that giving orders to an AI crew members to maintain certain levels of specific components, or however AI-bots might control production, will take longer than producing them directly. I can't imagine an AI factory crew somehow knowing WHAT I NEED in terms of manufacturing. AI bots managing production would require more management, not less. It would probably result in additional waste through overproduction and regular shortages and frequent, frustrating micro-management. Current system is simplicity - spend 5-10 minutes every once in a while to ensure stocks of your most-used components are at good levels. I also think shipyards are as straightforward as can be and would only become more complicated and SLOWER to use by adding NPCs as another layer to them.

The primary roles I see for AI bots / NPCs serving players is in automated ship repair, medical, mining, and guards/marines/soldiers.

 

[Wolverines527]

Heres another npc type the cargo npc type

Main job is to drive the cargo ships to a designated drop off point as it levels up it gets better at cargo management and route planning and will use jump gates if they can fit through

 

[Wolverines527]

This helps with resource grinding and gives you more time to build and battle me personally i like managing this kind of thing in games it makes you the all powerful leader and allows you yo command your fleets in your own specially built flagship to attack your enemy