Subset Games Forum

The choices in this game are great, but I find them lacking in one aspect, the decision on what to do with your crew members. Especially when it comes to the amount of choices one has when choosing what your crew is supposed to do what. (Bear in mind my judgement might be a bit impaired by not having unlocked many ships)

E.g. with Kestrel A I don't need to have more than 4 or 5 members. The 3 starting ones are good enough to control most of the systems and then I can get Engi dedicated to engineering and get some other crew member in the remaining room or I can have an Engi in the remaining room and either be there or repair. Getting more members is unnecessary unless you want faster repairing or you want to board the enemy ship.

I would like to change that by making more rooms get bonuses from being occupied by crew members and making the big rooms (or at least the current ones) get bonuses from having two members, not just one. I have few suggestions on what bonuses these rooms should give you:

• Door system: the doors are harder to break for enemies and harder for fire to go through them.
• Sensors: controls the ship to open and close the doors automatically to put out the fires and to increase the amount of O2 in a room by sharing it between the rooms.
• Oxygen room: instead of giving the same amount of O2 to each room, it will give more O2 to rooms with crew members with it and less to rooms without any. (This could be made in such a way that the amount of oxygen that is subtracted from rooms without crew gets all added up evenly across the rooms with crew members in it)
• Medbay: if one fully healed member is in there for at least one second, the crew members in neighbouring rooms will get healed too, but only by some portion of the heal rate
• Drone control: constantly heals drones and resurrects them automatically after they are destroyed and can do this for free every few seconds. (this could be accompanied by UI button that would set it to resurrect only if it is for free)
• Cloak: Increases the duration of cloak slightly.

I'm not sure what to suggest when it comes to specialization though, but I thought of there being: none for these rooms (except maybe for Cloak), a general one that would include all the rooms or only for Drone control and Cloak, which would be separate.

What I find good is having all 9 crew and spread them around your vessel to be there when you need to repel boarders or fix subsystems and such. Also if you lose a crew member you have a replacement.

They are also GREAT for boarding enemy vessels.

curithwin wrote:What I find good is having all 9 crew and spread them around your vessel to be there when you need to repel boarders or fix subsystems and such. Also if you lose a crew member you have a replacement.

They are also GREAT for boarding enemy vessels.

That is true, but my point is that with the "extra" crew there isn't much for them to do and there is little choice in what should they do.

Think bigger.

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Purlox wrote:...or you want to board the enemy ship.

Or you want to not get screwed over by boarding. Flying with a skeleton crew is a surefire way for you to get your ass kicked when you get hit by a boarding event and one of those late-game pirates that also sends some of its crew over to board you. Unless you have a really good medbay.

Purlox wrote:The choices in this game are great, but I find them lacking in one aspect, the decision on what to do with your crew members. Especially when it comes to the amount of choices one has when choosing what your crew is supposed to do what. (Bear in mind my judgement might be a bit impaired by not having unlocked many ships)

Given the current system, as curithwin said, spreading them around the ship is a good idea.

Purlox wrote:E.g. with Kestrel A I don't need to have more than 4 or 5 members. The 3 starting ones are good enough to control most of the systems and then I can get Engi dedicated to engineering and get some other crew member in the remaining room or I can have an Engi in the remaining room and either be there or repair. Getting more members is unnecessary unless you want faster repairing or you want to board the enemy ship.

More crew members also are useful when YOU get boarded, and when (not if) a vital crew member dies. They are also vital crew member shields (if a random event randomly kills a crew member, having eight crew member with only four being vital gives you much better odds versus only having the four crew members).

Purlox wrote:I would like to change that by making more rooms get bonuses from being occupied by crew members and making the big rooms (or at least the current ones) get bonuses from having two members, not just one. I have few suggestions on what bonuses these rooms should give you:

I don't think the size of the room should make a difference to the required amount of crew members to get the manned bonus, nor should the importance of the system. Instead, what about an additional bonus by having more crew members manning a station?

For example, if you had one person manning your weapon system, you'd get 100% manned bonus (the full default manning bonus). If you had another crew member join that person, you'd get 150% manned bonus (two people working together can get the station working more effectively than only a single person, even if both people aren't outputting as much work as they could if there were two different weapon systems for each of them to man).

When you have three people working together, the increase would be even less than two, say 180%, and four people would get you to 200%. At those levels, it's less useful to have additional members for the bonus unless you really need the additional output.

Additionally, though, all crew manning a station should gain experience, although the bonus to the room should only take into account the highest level of all possible crew manning the station. This means that if you have two people manning weapons and you lose one to giant alien spiders that you REALLY should have known better than to go poking, you wouldn't be stuck with a red shirt.

Purlox wrote:Door system: the doors are harder to break for enemies and harder for fire to go through them.

This works especially if it is multiplied by the upgraded door systems. It might also be logical to group fire suppression under this system when a crew member is stationed here as opposed to sensors.

Purlox wrote:Sensors: controls the ship to open and close the doors automatically to put out the fires and to increase the amount of O2 in a room by sharing it between the rooms.

There would need to be a fairly good AI to offload this task, as dealing with the airlocks can quickly kill off a crew member. I'd say manning the sensor room should give you intermittent sensors in nebula, as well as a very minor boost to dodge, targeting, shields, etc, when those stations are also manned as the crew is then communicating about things those stations may need to know, offloading a bit of the work and allowing them to be more effective.

Purlox wrote:Oxygen room: instead of giving the same amount of O2 to each room, it will give more O2 to rooms with crew members with it and less to rooms without any. (This could be made in such a way that the amount of oxygen that is subtracted from rooms without crew gets all added up evenly across the rooms with crew members in it)

Life support could then double as a fire suppression room, as well as an additional defense against boarders (cycle the atmosphere out of the room they are in, etc).

Purlox wrote:Medbay: if one fully healed member is in there for at least one second, the crew members in neighbouring rooms will get healed too, but only by some portion of the heal rate

There is already an augmentation that works like this. I'd say a crew member in the medical bay should be able to overheal crew members, up to 125% at master doctor or so.

Purlox wrote:Drone control: constantly heals drones and resurrects them automatically after they are destroyed and can do this for free every few seconds. (this could be accompanied by UI button that would set it to resurrect only if it is for free)

If by free, you mean sans requiring drone parts that would greatly unbalance drones. I'd say that a manned drone control system allows drones to be given orders. For example, you could then place a target cursor to have drones target a specific room on the enemy ship, target a specific room on your ship (repair bots and anti-boarding bots would work well with this). Defense drones would not get a bonus from this, but then again they are already fairly powerful.

There could also be a bonus to the speed/firing rate of the drones, but being able to give orders to your automated weapon system would be a great bonus and worth the crew member. Maybe each crew member is able to add an additional target (D1, D2, D3, D4) so you could have your drones target between targets (randomly), but more importantly you could have your drones on the enemy ship target the enemy engines to keep them from warping away, and then have your repair bot target the shield system instead of the door control system.

Purlox wrote:Cloak: Increases the duration of cloak slightly.

Instead of an increase in cloak duration, what about an increase in cloak regeneration?

Besides these, the special weapon control system should be mannable similar to the primary weapon system.

Most locations are not man-able due to physical limits. How does manning a door control cause physical damage, from fire or invader, to not occur as quickly? Do you talk to the fire through a speaker in the door? "No. Bad fire. Stop hurting this door."

>Point defense room
Less accurate than defense drone, but can shoot drones to temporarily disable them.
>Armory
Better fire extinguishers, or better armor, or better weapons, or maybe oxygen tanks. Uses power.
>Replicator room
Use it to turn excess missiles\fuel\drone parts\scrap into the one you need.
>Reactor room
Can be overcharged for a brief power increase, but can be damaged during it, has 5 points of armor to avoid losing power from random shots.

Different ships having different manned rooms.
For example:
Kestrel with manned door controls that improve the door health.
Stealth with manned sensors that tell you where the enemy guns are aimed.
Zoltan with manned reactor to increase the gain from the buff.
Engi with manned drone room that allows you give targets to lvl2 drones and so on.

Branching upgrades, like i.blast doors upgrading into double layer doors, or emergency shutters that allow to vent specific rooms and reduce oxygen loss from breaches, or sensors three upgrading into +1 damage chance targeting, or EW that can make bombs\missiles miss.