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Another great idea for Big Ships.
hasukurobi
Member Posts: 1,421 Arc User
This idea is not all that new but I want to put a slight spin on it. To sum it up: Make Crew Matter.
Right now Crew are meaningless. They help you to recover hull HP when you have active crew but that lasts all of a few seconds in most combat. This is even more insulting for huge ships with thousands of crew. Their crew gets wiped out from the first couple torp hits or the first warp core breech that their lumbering ship cannot get away from but survives.
So first thing is first... Crew should become incapacitated (because they supposedly are not killed) via a numerical value NOT a percentile. The same Torp hit should not lose a Defiant 5 crewmen when it loses a Bortasqu' 500. That would be to say that the Bortsaqu' has a lot more crew but crammed into the same area that the Defiant had so as to arrive at immense population density which is absolutely absurd.
If we make this change alone the big ships would get more use out of having big crew numbers as each scratch would not utterly annihilate their ENTIRE crew. If the Devs feel working with numbers would be hard due to how few crew some ships have then perhaps you need to scale up the number of Crew. A Nimitz Class carrier here on earth supports around 5,000+ active crew including its flight teams. That is the same size roughly as a Constiution. Something like an Odyssey should be boasting several TIMES that much crew and the behemoths that are carriers could easily have crew in the Tens of Thousands.
Next I would recommend having your many crew help in other ways. Faster recovery from subsystem damage, faster power rerouting, faster non-tactical team enhanced shield distribution (when you hit the button, this would not interact with Tactical Team's ability in any way so as not to make it better than it currently is which would be crazy), and last but not least a TINY boost to cool down speeds per every 50 crewmen. This last boost should be very small but still just enough to make it ever so mildly worth caring about.
Right now Crew are meaningless. They help you to recover hull HP when you have active crew but that lasts all of a few seconds in most combat. This is even more insulting for huge ships with thousands of crew. Their crew gets wiped out from the first couple torp hits or the first warp core breech that their lumbering ship cannot get away from but survives.
So first thing is first... Crew should become incapacitated (because they supposedly are not killed) via a numerical value NOT a percentile. The same Torp hit should not lose a Defiant 5 crewmen when it loses a Bortasqu' 500. That would be to say that the Bortsaqu' has a lot more crew but crammed into the same area that the Defiant had so as to arrive at immense population density which is absolutely absurd.
If we make this change alone the big ships would get more use out of having big crew numbers as each scratch would not utterly annihilate their ENTIRE crew. If the Devs feel working with numbers would be hard due to how few crew some ships have then perhaps you need to scale up the number of Crew. A Nimitz Class carrier here on earth supports around 5,000+ active crew including its flight teams. That is the same size roughly as a Constiution. Something like an Odyssey should be boasting several TIMES that much crew and the behemoths that are carriers could easily have crew in the Tens of Thousands.
Next I would recommend having your many crew help in other ways. Faster recovery from subsystem damage, faster power rerouting, faster non-tactical team enhanced shield distribution (when you hit the button, this would not interact with Tactical Team's ability in any way so as not to make it better than it currently is which would be crazy), and last but not least a TINY boost to cool down speeds per every 50 crewmen. This last boost should be very small but still just enough to make it ever so mildly worth caring about.
Post edited by hasukurobi on
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...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
Adding to your idea, I think that certain crew numbers should reduce the cooldown for Sci Team, Eng Team and Tac Team abilities. (These cooldowns should NEVER affect the minimum global cooldown, however.)
Or have a counselor doff that adds "crew morale"
and have the bonus be a flat rate bonus when you have that doff on active duty.
I support this idea.
It's a bit ridiculous. Be in PvE or PvP. At the absolute least, they need to change the 10% and 20% to just 1% and 2% for kill or disable. That alone would go a long way to making it a lot less ridiculous in just how much crew can be lost.
On top of that, Theta radiation should have it's amount of crew death be lowered significantly. It's rather ridiculous how fast it can wipe out an entire crew.
Then actual crew recovery, should be possibly sped up, possibly. With the major reduction of crew loss, then it might not be so bad even if you do gain back crew slowly. If it was considered an issue still, then maybe buff up Biofunction Monitors.
And the Nurse DOFF is nice, but it's only a bandaid fix, and it takes up a more useful DOFF slot.
Once all that is done, then I feel that crew can be altered in other ways to be worthwhile.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Also, i think i heard this on some podcast from Geko, the initial implementation of crew was intended to be more complex then it is now, allowing you to allocate crew to subsystems of some sort, probably in the way you allocate the power levels now, but this seems got ditched along the way... lazy bones.
What in the world makes people think they can tinker with crew?
A Kumari should, even if they activate Tac Team before the boarders arrive, suffer some problems. Even when prepared for trouble, there's not enough people to be
An Atrox, barring something insane like a dozen Spheres in an Infected Elite all deciding to send visitors over at once...shouldn't need to use Tac Team at all.
You forget, though, or clearly haven't ever watched Star Trek; repelling hostile boarders seems to be a lost art in the 25th century. Every time a ship/station/facility is invaded/boarded by enemies, they waltz right into the bridge, if not beam directly there, and say "Mine!" virtually uncontested.
This makes me chuckle at how true it is.
Granted, my Tactical Captain is rather skilled at ground combat, you'd think he'd just Kirk drop-kick any boarders through the view screen if they made it to the bridge.
Cruisers lose crew just too dang fast, ive seen my ship in PVP and after an alpha from a BOP the crew simply vanishes.
Absolutely great idea, there's just one problem though...
Cryptic don't give two hoots about cruisers...they only care about escorts in this game.
Can't isn't quite correct. The developer in question was just saying it would be an major project.
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/sh...d.php?t=651291
Right. Which in practical terms means it's not going to happen.
I feel tinkering with the crew mechanic would be an even trickier thing to do.
I'm all for coming up with ideas to help cruisers be more integral to the gameplay experience. But I think crew is just something that should remain the way it is. Since launch it's never quite panned out the way it was supposed to. And the game has evolved so far beyond it, mechanically. And the development team is a lot of fresh faces not familiar with these old, klunky mechanics.
Also, I maintain that what a player wants out of the concept of crew is represented in BOFFs and DOFFs quite effectively as is.
Eventually I believe they will do the overhaul of the BOFF skill system as it's severely limiting parts of the game (I don't believe they will touch it this year though). I completely agree that messing with the crew system is a waste of time and an generally bad idea. Personally I'd completely dump the crew mechanic and just use it as flavor text.
That is only if Cryptic needs to raise them in order to deal with the numeric damage scale used to kill them off as opposed to the current nonsensical percentile scale. If they do not have any problem assigning very low numbers to how many crew die per hit of things to make it fit the current scale then there is no need to increase the number of crew.
^True but only for Klingons... Most Federation crewmen are unarmed and untrained to handle invaders as we have seen time and again. Klingon crews on the other hand are all born warriors who would PREFER to throw down face to face.
Why? There is hardly anything associated with the Crew mechanic. You do not assign crew or even deal with them. The only things that effect them are things that kill them or protect them. Currently they are more like a shield facing than anything remotely close to being like a BOFF.
It is not represented by BOFFs and DOFFs because the big ships do not have more of these and smaller ships less of them. (And before you ask... No I do not WANT more BOFFs for big ships... That would be a headache) It was obviously meant as one of the defining features of these behemoths that their size lent them to huge crews and that this was one of their perks but at present it fails to help in any way whatsoever.
You're comparing apples and oranges. BOFF ability tweaking not happening stems from the fact that there are piles of systems in place to randomly generate boffs with random starting abilities.
To do what the OP is suggesting would be a tweak to a specific shared weapon modifier (projectile crew killoff) and the addition of a single modifier in a handful of cooldown formulae. Not a wholesale rewrite of the BOFF replicator coding.
Is it not amazing? It is more amazing that on your Dread you might lose 500+ crew to an attack that on a little escort would have only killed off 5 crew despite the fact that your ship is undoubtedly better armored and more of your crew would be in a different location whereas on the small escort they are crammed in like sardines.
There's combat. There's consoles. There's old code that the new devs haven't worked on. It's pretty much the same type of thing that always leads to the same old statement:
"We'd have to go into every map" or "We'd have to tweak all of X"
It's something that could break the game further. And all for what? Your solution doesn't add enough to the game for me to be confident enough that the tinkering is worth the risk.
Like I said, I'm all for working on the cruiser gameplay experience. But I think crew mechanics are a waste of effort. And ideas should focus on something new. Not something old. Something new not only avoids any issues with old code breaking the game, but lets the developers add their own mark on the game, something that most creators have more gusto for doing.
You misunderstand. This isn't about more. This is about what people expect a crew to do in a Star Trek sense. You watch the shows and you come away from the whole idea of commanding a ship by thinking what you do is what you saw Kirk or Picard do. Which is mostly give orders and help save the day. BOFFs are who you give orders to. You tell your tactical officer to fire your beams ... AT WILL! You tell your science officer to lock on that tractor beam. You call security and have them beam down two more redshirts to your away mission. So on and so forth. That's how people perceive what a captain does in Star Trek. And BOFFs pull that off.
Which leaves DOFFs. What they do is far more what people expect from a captain of a starship. They go on assignments. You are in control of your ship and it's crew. You have your duty roster. You manage it. You assign people to stations. You assign people to tasks.
So what a crew represents in Star Trek is adroitly handled by BOFFs and DOFFs. You give orders. You manage special tasks. You manage the roster. You are in control of who is on your crew and what they are doing. Be it in a pitched space battle bellowing for a full spread of photon torpedoes, on an away mission asking for a medical tricorder for your injured engineer, or simply assigning your on-ship diplomat to meet foreign dignitaries and give them a tour of your ship.
The crew mechanic doesn't do any of that. Is klunky, has never worked, and doesn't do much to represent how crews functioned in Star Trek. You could rename it Inspiration, or Ship Morale, and it would not change a thing about its mechanics or how it represents Star Trek in the game.
It's not needed. It's a risky thing to tamper with. And I think that the solution to helping steer the game away from "MOAR DEEPS, MOAR DEEPS, OK STOP DEEPS" isn't crew. It's something new. Something to help cruisers function better in the game's environment and also FEEL more like Star Trek. Crew mechanic won't cut it.
I'm just going off of what is usually said about these kinds of requests. If not BOFF abilities, then exploration revamp. If not that, then diplomacy. If not X, then Y.
There's itemization involved as multiple consoles deal with crew mechanics. And we've already been through the agonizing process of what happens when they tinker with consoles.
1) You need to read the quote about BOFFs from the Devs my friend. They said they did not want to change them because to do so would require that they change the random generation of starter abilities they have, the systems that work off them which these days would likely include DOFFs, Captain Training, Rarity of BOFF, and the way in which Skills and BOFF slots on any given ship work.
Crew are nowhere near as complex as BOFFs. Even with the complexity of BOFFs the Dev said they COULD change them it would just be a real nightmare of working the code. As for the Crew they have made more drastic changes than fixing the Crew just by implementing DOFFs among other things.
As for breaking the Code... How little faith you have in the Devs. I am sure they are happy to hear that you believe them so incompetent. Implementing any "New" change would have just as much probability of causing serious complications with other code as just altering an old mechanic already established. Honestly, it would likely have MORE chance of causing unforeseen issues because they would be having to add in new code over the old codes which can always have odd interactions.
2) Firstly, we rarely see DOFFs doing things in Star Trek. It is mostly the BOFFs who go on away missions or who the Captain orders to do things. You surely do not frequently see DOFFs running out in... Shuttles? Or some such to go carry out missions away from your ship. So they do not really serve as a good example of a particularly Trek-like Crew because they do too much.
However we DO see a lot of the Crew scrambling here and there "Damage Teams" etc to fix the ship. Obviously all those crewmen are REQUIRED for a ship to function properly and the bigger and more capable the vessel the more crew you need. There are numerous references to the fact that big ships need larger crews to sustain their peak performance.
What I am trying to drill through to you is that BOFFs especially do not behave like the Crews from Star Trek and they should not as they are BOFFs not just average crewmen. DOFFs are slightly more like normal Crewmen but if we simply go with them as the mechanic then the fact that bigger vessels have such greater capacity for Crewmen does not help anything. My suggestion would not be helping the DPS of the ship much it would be helping its Tank more which is what Cruisers are MEANT for and would help further put distance between them and Escorts as the true Battle Fortresses Vs. Glass Cannons.
3) Again... Give the Devs a bit more credit. They can handle dealing with TWO consoles (yeah just two effect Crew directly... One kills them and one Protects them...). I mean they could all but REMOVE the one that protects them because you know what? NO ONE uses it. Why? Because currently there is absolutely NO point in keeping your crew alive. Which is why I want to change that.
It's almost the exact same reason given for not revamping the exploration system. It's really similar to the explanation given for not fixing the text boxes break cloaking issue. It requires going in and doing changes to lots of little things.
I've not seen any evidence to support your assertion. You certainly don't have the experience with the code. If it were so easy to fix ... why's it remained unfixed for so long?
Just going by the track record. How long before I log onto a new patch on Tribble and my BOFF stations are empty every time I zone?
You know for someone who just got done telling me to go re-read stuff, it'd have been nice for yuo to read what I had said. Ah well. I give up. I tried to make my point, but you seem married to the idea of trying to fix cruisers through the crew mechanic, which is a waste of time and resources.
Hey now! Don't go getting all crazy up in here. Remember hasukurobi assured us it's just two things the devs need to tweak to fix crew. No other systems or mechanics are touched. And besides, we all know how easy it is for the devs to work on saucer sep mechanics and graphics! (See Galaxy X saucer sep threads for reference).
Kinetic damage and exotic/energy damage.
In the latter case, I can see how losing crew as a percentage works.
Your Defiant has half its hull bathhed in nasty radiation...lose 50% crew.
Your Atrox has half its hull bathed in nasty radiation.....lose 50% crew.
The problem is kinetic damage.
Torpedo hits your port side on a Defiant, then that whole section goes. Let's say 10 crew.
Same torp hits an Atrox, well it doesn't suddently grow and take out several sections at once.
Now, I can appreciate that tinkering with the code may be problematic.
Therefore, I suggest adding a mechanic.
For every 50 crew on the complement, a ship gains an innate 1% kinetic resistance.
Thus, a ship with 50 crew has 1% kinetic resistance before consoles, but a ship with 2000 crew has 40% kinetic resistance.
This means that big ships could soak up kinetic damage much more easily than small ships,without having to modify existing code.
This has been asked for since F2P fubar'd the crew mechanic.
It hasn't been addressed. Mainly because it doesn't affect escorts and thats all Cryptic gives a rodent's sphincter about.
Common sense? Check.
Needed? Check.
Overdue? Check.
Chances of it happening? 0. Its the Cryptic Way.
Firstly, your first example still does not make sense. How is the same amount of radiation going to kill 50% of the Defiant crew and also 50% of the Atrox crew even though it would have to cover WAY more than 50% MORE volume in order to irradiate said crew? It would be breaking laws of physics to accomplish the task. Something large enough to effect 50% of a Defiant would barely touch an Atrox which could house a few Defiants in one bay. Meanwhile a field big enough to enshroud 50% of an Atrox would cover a Defiant many times over.
Your idea has merit but I fear it could be a bit too powerful in the end. I do not really want to get too overly excessive with the boost.
Sounds a bit more like they just never quite got around to doing it. Not so much that there is a problem with their code as they had that on their to-do list but other things kept getting bumped ahead of it and it never got done. Now with Cruisers needing help more than ever it may be a good time to finally nail it down.
Yes, I know, but still, it would give some game benefit for a Atrox having like 50x the crew of a Kumari besides a marginally faster hull repair rate.
Semi OT, but you could with a properly developed manual shield distribution system, eliminate the Tactical Teams Shield Distribution effect entirely.
You could even make the Tactical Team an offensive power, which beams Assault Teams over to the enemy vessel to shoot their crew and counteract the proposed benefits/advantages of Crew.
The same with Boarding Party, but with BP having a slower activation (shuttles must reach destination), they could have a much greater effect than Tactical Teams.