EVE General Discussion

I always thought that ships need a crew, despite the fact that we control a ship entirely - we just need a lot of ideas how to make them usefull more than being just aesthetic addition.

Some bonuses are neat but its just a start. I think that info popups with crew portrait saying something like "we are entering Hek system, captain" would be hella awesome if done properly.

And besides, it would be nice to have Sigourney Weaver* as your 1st officer :)

* UFO Enemy Unknown "random" name generator.

My thoughts exactly. I don't care about it for ship performance, but it would be cool to see on a battle report. The recent Fountain war must have cost billions of lives.

Here is what I came up with of the top of my head:

New mechanic: Crew Management

Each ship larger then a shuttle has a crew stat. It depicts the crews strength, condition and level of training in 4 different categories, and has the following effects...

- Level of Training: This stat is actually composed of 4 stats, that combined are expressed in overall skill level: Amateur, standard, professional, expert and elite. The crew skills are:
-- Weapons: This stat represents the ships weapon (or energy transfer/mining module) crews that tend and work the modules that fit in the category. They reload weapons, maintain laser and energy emitters, etc. Training your crew in that skill group will decrease reloading/refitting and cycle time of said modules by 2-10% per skill rank they hold and also reduce damage taken from overheating said modules by 10-50%. In addition, they increase ship specific module bonuses (missile damage, mining yield, etc.) by an additional 1-5%.
-- Electronics: This stat represents the ships electronic operators and techs. Much like weapons crews, they grant a bonus of 2-10% to cycle and reload time and reduce overload damage to "their" modules. They also reduce the CPU need of all modules by 1-5% active on the ship.
-- Engineering: This stat represents the ships engineering crew. They give the same general bonuses to the modules that fall under the category and also reduce the power grid and activation energy needs of all modules fitted to the ship by 1-5%.
-- Navigation: This stat represents the ships navigation officers and engine techs. In addition to the general bonuses they grant to propulsion and navigation modules, they increase the ships speed and agility by 1-5%.

- Crew condition: This general stat represent the crews morale and health/mental and is measured in a percentage of 1-100% that has a direct effect on the effectiveness of the crew bonuses the ship is granted. It slowly degrades over time, the longer the ship is in service without docking, the more often it is hit in combat or stays outside of a station. That stat can be slowly increased by staying docked in a station or fast by spending ISK, effectively "bribing" the crew to keep it together.

- Crew strength: This is a 2 part stat (ie. 100/100) and governs the crews ship bonuses. You can loose crew by taking structure damage (chance of 50% per point to loose one crewmen/women). Crew does not regenerate automatically and has to be purchased (hired) like ammunition and charges. Like loosing morale, replacing or loosing crew directly effects the crew bonuses they grant to the ship they serve on.

Crew training: The training of ones crew is handled by the "crew management" skill, that falls under the "leadership" category. Basically, training your crew works like training your character, over time. The skill, like all others, has 5 ranks reflecting the five levels of crew skill. So, in order to raise your crew to "expert" status, you, yourself have to have skilled the "crew management" skill to rank 4. The actual training of your crew, however, works a bit differently... Since the overall skill level of your crew is a combined stat taking into account all your crews different fields of work, it is very well possible for a crew to be, say rank 4 in "navigation" but rank 1 in all other departments, with you having the management skill on rank 1, but the lower your skill, the longer will it take for your crew to actually reach higher ranks since they are, all in all still amateurs.

I have no exact numbers for crew training times ironed out yet because this is only a quick write up, but they should be low... hours and days rather then weeks.

Yea, that's it: A system like that would be nice groundwork for later stuff to build upon... like crew specific modules (facilities to boost morale, excape pods to save a portion of your experienced crew when ship is destroyed, etc.) or even boarding actions...

Grinding for any sort of exp or skill points has not, and should not, ever be a part of this game.

However, I do see a way to incorporate improving crews over time:
Skill: Reliable Leader x6 (or something)
Improves crew performance by 10% per level
Upon ship destruction, decreases by one level. (Like Tech III)

You can introduce a whole suite of skills like that, improving various aspects of a crew rig's performance.

When you die, you lose SP, representing the loss of crew, or at least a measure of their trust and confidence.

skill points are supposed to be your brain being good at stuff. The entire point of capsuleers is that they take a ship and add magic sparkles all by themselves, to the point where the crew performance has only a minor effect at best.

I think a role-by-ship based SMALL bonus (no more than 5% for an absolutely fully-experienced tip-top crew) accrued with distance flown, damage taken & damage done would be the absolute most it needs.

I've always interpreted Leadership skills as being your capsuleer forming part of a network and being an efficient node in that network, boosting the performance of the other nodes.

You have to remember, the lore has it that a pod pilot is basically turning their own brain into a supercomputer that's extremely good at running a spaceship.

Don't ask me how the social skills work in that model, though.

Honestly, while I like the idea of crew experience, the experience gain element might be a bit messy. If player action is the primary means of getting experienced crew, then we're going to get crew farmers, of all things, who bot the experience-buffing activity. (I mean, think about it this way: "Alright, guys! Alarm clock op at 0500! Timer comes out at 0700. We've got a Titan for everyone to shoot at to get peak crew before the op. Remember -- laser doctrine for fleet ops due to ammo costs."

Idea: have the primary crew source be new types of starbase/station/PI facilities, colonies. Unlike PI which is resource extraction/processing, this is essentially an ant farm, which spits out crew. When spit out, the crewperson has a rating based on the quality of the colony's facilities. For instance, let's say we've got engineers. A cruiser needs 50 crew, but can have up to 100-- but its engineering crew is, say, 20%. Minimum is 1 'engineer officer,' and 9 'technicians.' Technicians can be rated as basic techs, veteran technicians, engineers, or veteran engineers -- depending on proportion, that's a base 0%, 1%, 2%, or 3% advantage to engineering modules.

Crew is slotted in like subsystems on a T3 -- when you assemble, you pull from the cargo bay, and can either opt for maximum or minimum needs.

'Crew fatigue' builds up over time in space, and just serves to reduce the bonus until the ship is docked again-- though we'd need to figure out rates based on WH times-in-space and supercapitals. So maybe that should just be scuttled.

Could we perhaps shangai crew members and force them to crew for us? Maybe even steal them from enemies we've popped?

New Eden is a cold place. It strikes me that this would be in keeping with the buddha nature of the game.

John Scalzi has your answer:
RedShirts.