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The mess, that is crew capacity!
shadowwraith77
Member Posts: 6,395 Arc User
Ok, for the longest time we have dealt with crew capacity on our starships and, this system has tried to bring some sense of RPG theme likeness to the game but, here is where it is a complete mess below!
1: When engaged in combat, your active healing capacity drops to pretty much nothing so, wth are these crew members doing exactly, besides dying or, being injured during this time?
2: The only skill from what I can tell, that they effect is tactical team + active hull healing regeneration rate but, not really anything else! So, why would they have any effect on tactical team but, not anything else? I mean wouldn't any team require them?
3: During combat, where they pretty much becomes useless, we have to rely on healing skills alone! Ok so, they don't actually engage in repairing the ship during combat, why not?
4: While most vessels, seem to carry a somewhat proper amount of them listed, the mess here is that they out of combat healing effects from them are pretty staggering, when comparing large vessels vs small vessels!
5: Smaller vessels regenerate crew faster than larger ones, this seems odd to me IMO, as how are they somehow regenerating quicker on smaller vessels, than larger ones? Is the smaller vessels, just somehow magically more efficient at inducing medical aid to them vs larger vessels? Also, how is it dead crew somehow magically reappear? Are we now replicating crew members?
6: Noticing some newer vessels being put into play, that carry small crew numbers, similar to escorts, while effectively dwarfing some of the ships they match crew wise! This can be somewhat believable but, does seem pretty odd at the same time!
7: Kinetic/radiation/etc. style weapons, seemingly the only thing that kills/injures crew capacity! So, what energy weapon that kill ships as well, has no effect on them how?
There is quite a bit more but, I am going to open this up for discussion and, have others add to the list of quirks about crew capacity and, its so called RPG like feel!
1: When engaged in combat, your active healing capacity drops to pretty much nothing so, wth are these crew members doing exactly, besides dying or, being injured during this time?
2: The only skill from what I can tell, that they effect is tactical team + active hull healing regeneration rate but, not really anything else! So, why would they have any effect on tactical team but, not anything else? I mean wouldn't any team require them?
3: During combat, where they pretty much becomes useless, we have to rely on healing skills alone! Ok so, they don't actually engage in repairing the ship during combat, why not?
4: While most vessels, seem to carry a somewhat proper amount of them listed, the mess here is that they out of combat healing effects from them are pretty staggering, when comparing large vessels vs small vessels!
5: Smaller vessels regenerate crew faster than larger ones, this seems odd to me IMO, as how are they somehow regenerating quicker on smaller vessels, than larger ones? Is the smaller vessels, just somehow magically more efficient at inducing medical aid to them vs larger vessels? Also, how is it dead crew somehow magically reappear? Are we now replicating crew members?
6: Noticing some newer vessels being put into play, that carry small crew numbers, similar to escorts, while effectively dwarfing some of the ships they match crew wise! This can be somewhat believable but, does seem pretty odd at the same time!
7: Kinetic/radiation/etc. style weapons, seemingly the only thing that kills/injures crew capacity! So, what energy weapon that kill ships as well, has no effect on them how?
There is quite a bit more but, I am going to open this up for discussion and, have others add to the list of quirks about crew capacity and, its so called RPG like feel!
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My KDF BOP, for example, the crew come back faster than they can die, and my hull regens better from crew than it does from hazard emitters. (ok, not quite, but its still a hefty regen).
On the other end of the spectrum, we have my carrier.... the crew are pretty much always 100% dead, it takes 1/2 an hour to get them back in sector space! After 10 seconds of combat they are all dead and will stay that way forever ... i have no hull healing, etc. But my hull is 3 times bigger than the hull of the BOP....
That's just it though, your BOP has the same ineffective hull healing from your tiny crew when in combat, that the lumbering carrier has, which is pretty much null till you disengage from red alert (aka combat).
So, balance in this perspective is just that and, not actually for say balanced when in active combat!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
also crew and duty officers... if my ship has a crew of 50... why do i have 100 or more duty officers?
hp or hull regen should be fixed... like in most mmos i play...
if they like they can convert the crew to something like bonus hull regen/resists/repairs... which goes down as you are in red alert. regens back at a slow rate when out of combat. but dont call it a crew...
no, the bop will regen decently in combat. Because it will have 100% alive crew all the time. The carrier will have 1% alive crew all the time. Its based off % alive crew, apparently, not actual # of crew. Or it seems to be. I dunno the numbers, all I know is my raider can be knocked to 1/2 hull and heal up without me doing anything, but the big ships, if they are cut to 1/2, need my attention to heal.
the higher your crew the longer it takes for your crew to drop to zero. but yes it takes longer for it to regen back.
but even at 0% your still regening arent you?
not really. Higher crew is a penalty.
its calculus. These are made up numbers but it is how it WORKS:
the crew bucket drains at 10% of your crew per hit.
it refills at a rate of 10 actual crew members per second.
if you have 2000 crew and get shot. You lose 10%, 200 dead crew.
You get 10 back. you get 10 back. you now have lost 180 crew...
or the escort: you have 50 crew.
you get shot and lose 5. you get 10 back. ....
At 0 your hull would take an hour to regen.
and again, healing seems to be % of alive crew, not total number of corpses.
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
low crew numbers prevent some pets/abilities from being used. e.g., no crew, can't use boarding party or the Aquarius console for the Oddy.
Also, taking a hit from a torpedo and manually redistributing shields to the appropriate side just before impact reduces the amount of crew you lose. i don't think this works with tac team.
Example: Theta Vent Radiation.
Expected: -20% or -20 crew per second, whichever is Less
Reported: -20% or -20 crew per second, whichever is More
So when a carrier with 2000 crew hits a vent cloud, its entire crew goes dead in 5 seconds, because 20% crew > 20 crew.
20% crew = 400 crew dead per second.
The correct calculation should be 20 crew dead per second, not 400, as the tooltip says ("Whichever is Less").
This applies to everything that damages crew. All torpedoes included. A few torpedo salvos are enough to completely wipe crew from any ship.
That said, it's quite tough to keep crew alive to account for hull healing with bugs like this.
STO Screenshot Archive
It's a been awhile since I used it but doesn't crew level affect boarding party? No crew means no boarding partys being launched. They may have changed this since I last used it.
Yes but, I never use this skill along with any attachment vessels either but, you would be correct!
Please feel free to throw that in as an EDIT, to my previously shown list!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=13649191&postcount=104
Here are some excerpts:
As was pointed out, the biggest issue is not how crew affects things, it's actually the crew loss part. Every weapon that nukes crew does it in percentages. That makes crew a liability. Especially since crew regens at a set rate as opposed to percentage.
Easiest fix would simply be that you make it so all crew loss is a set value as opposed to a percent. That would remove half the problems that larger crew ships are having. The other half would require a complete overhaul of some of the base systems in the game (which is needed anyways), but would take too long.
I think ship crew numbers should stay the same where they work e.g. 800/1000 for a cruiser etc. Needs a look where the crew number doesn't really match with the vessel size though :S
But of that number, let's say 800. You should be able to have your doffs, lets say 300 as a player average maybe, acting as 300 out of that 800. So white doffs means better hull healing. Purple doffs are exceptional hull healers, plus increase off powers etc.
More doffs (like all 800) at different rarities (you select the ones to use if you have more than crew number) = better starship performance = more money spent on doffs = more profit cryptic
when they die/injured, they really do go to sickbay, can't do doff missions for a while. you could isolate some form acting in combat (like crafters) so you always have them for R n D or missions.
I also think that abandon ship, if successfully used, should let you respawn with all your remaining alive/injured (not dead) crew rather than waiting for them to regenerate. (It might already do this but if it does I don't think it's really working).
Love to get your thoughts. I just really like the idea of these doffs becoming meaningful to your ship and expanding your "crew" from doffs to senior doffs/ beta/gamma shift doffs etc.
Being able to customise their looks/names would be icing on the cake.
First rule of STO, don't talk about things that don't really need fixing.
When your ship is bombarded by energy and torpedo weapons, it's not a good time to go outside in EV-suits and replace hull-panels.
It might be intended to represent how many patients each medic (doctor or nurse) would have to treat on the different ships:
shuttle: 5 crew, 1 doctor or nurse - worst case: 5 patients per medic
escort/raider: 50 crew, 1 doctor, 1 nurse - worst case: 25 patients per medic
Voyager: 150 crew, 1 doctor, 2 nurses - worst case: 50 patients per medic
Assuming similar injuries and similar medical ability, the medic on the shuttle will finish their work 5 times faster than the escort simply because they only got 1/5 of the workload.
Does anyone who plays the game well ever bother with consoles, skills, DOFFs, or modifiers on gear that reduces damage to crew or brings them back faster? Is there any build ANYWHERE where someone takes into consideration crew at all, beyond the "I can't use boarding parties if the entire crew is dead" issue?
I'm asking because in all the time I've played the game, whether playing before LoR came out, or taking a break and coming back when DR was a month old, I can't recall anyone ever extolling the virtues of biofunction monitors or talking about ways of optimizing crew loss from torpedoes. In fact, I don't even know if NPC ships have crew. I wouldn't know if crew damaging attacks make one iota of difference in PvE.
I can't even tell you if having more alive crew makes a difference with hull healing in combat because in combat, if you have any kind of significant damage, you are spamming hull and shield heals. And as far as I can tell, 99% of hull heals don't care about crew anyway. Hazard emitters don't. Auxiliary to Structural Integrity doesn't seem to care. I don't even think Engineering team cares. In fact, whether driving an Atrox with a dead crew or a B'rel retrofit with a 100% live crew, I don't see any differences in healing performance that aren't covered by skill differences.
Have I missed anything? Or is crew really just a bar you can empty and fill that only has benefits outside of combat? If that's true, why have it at all? And if crew is so useless in the game, why have a BOFF skill that interacts with it by killing crew when you turn it on?
Instead you get a respawn timer. It happens.
Wait, are you telling me that the system is completely broken, and that crew has no effect? Or are you telling me that the system does have some effect, but I just can't see it in combat?
And it does seem like the original design meant for crew to make a difference (why have absolute crew numbers in the first place unless 2000 man ships were meant to perform some operations differently than 20 man ships), but while other mechanics have been changed over the years, I can't think of any changes to the crew system since release. It seems weird to me that the system has been carried over (with a new BOFF skill that impacts it being released just recently) for so long without any changes. It could have been removed a long time ago.
Hell, I'd be intrigued by a system where dead crew impacted DOFF abilities in space combat. If DOFFs were less effective if 50% of the crew was dead, that would make those emergency force field consoles and biofunction monitor consoles worth something.
I can't be the only person who finds it odd that Starfleet has such a callous disregard for the lives of crew in 2409 and 2410. Picard, Kirk, Janeway, and Sisko never liked losing crew, even if Red Shirts dying is a trope of the series. As for my Klingon captain, it sort of loses its shock value to execute crew members if I lose 2000 crew every time I go into battle for more than 30 seconds. Even Klingons aren't that wasteful of crew lives.
It shows some hull regeneration rate of I think 145% at full crew capacity and, not engaged in combat!
Now, once I am engaged in combat and, suffered absolutely no crew loss, my regeneration rate drops to 17%.
So, granted crew aren't jumping outside during combat to do repairs but, at 17% that would equate to them doing almost nothing inside the ship as well!
So, again all they are doing is pretty much a whole lot of dying and/or being injured, while mainly effecting certain skills and crafts, all the while relying on the ship to do what?
Repair itself? Emergency shields to patch holes as they happen? Crew members to take themselves to sickbay? The list can go on questioning wth are they even really good for!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
I'm saying the crew has an effect, but the crew are almost all dead instantly and for the duration of combat, so you don't see the effect they SHOULD have based on the designs dictated at the time they were introduced. The crew effect on many other things including hull regen works. The problem is the crew are always dead so it nerfs other parts that the crew influence.
I'm saying that if you've never seen the full "normal, intended" impact of a full crew during combat, you are only ever used to having no crew and having almost no combat hull healing. That is your "normal" now, and that is the only perspective you know right now. Just becauise you survive with this handicap doesn't mean you should have to. It's like somebody was wearing an eyepatch their entire life, then as an adult tried to understand how seeing from both eyes would be. Their entire POV is shaped by their experience up to that point, even though it was an artificial handicap.
So you basically said what I said. -.-
I believe crew loss is actually working as intended, though the tooltip is confusing. Whether the way it works is good design is another matter. Archoncryptic explained how crew loss works a long time ago:
His description matches the way crew loss works in the game. Virusdancer mentioned before that the tooltip seemed wrong:
The tooltip actually makes sense if you think in terms of negative crew gain instead of positive crew loss.
-0.2 * 2000 = -400 < -20
But I agree that the tooltip is confusing: few players will interpret it as negative crew gain.
See my explanation below.
There's no rule that says I can't...
I think the negative sign in the tooltip only refers to point that crew is "being damaged", an not that the number itself is negative (since damage is a subtraction, and damage number is represented as a positive number), but that the dev is taking the number literally as negative, confusing his understanding. I do think that the tooltip is fine, but the math in the power is implemented wrong. Because, a crew of 3500 being wiped in 5 seconds doesn't seem right at all.
STO Screenshot Archive
Archoncryptic was actually talking about positive numbers.
His description matches what happens in the game, so I don't think he was confused about how the mechanic works. It's the tooltip that contains negative numbers. (Or at least it did. I can no longer find a reference to crew loss on my quantum torpedo launcher. Bug?)
I think whoever wrote the tooltip meant the negative numbers literally. It may even be a generic template with variables that are filled in later.
Lesser of X or Y% Z
Whoever wrote the tooltip doesn't know what X, Y, and Z are. The code fills in X, Y, and Z, and in this case, X and Y just happen to be negative.
OK, I just tested this. My quantum torps are still injuring crew, so the fact that the tooltip no longer mentions crew loss is definitely a bug.
regen should probably happen at 1% every 2 seconds.
so yeah a ship with 50 crew will regen 1 crew member every 4 seconds. since 1% of 50 is .5
cause regen at a fixed number unfairly impacts ships with large crews... if dmg is what ever is higher... a % of a high crew ship will always be higher than a fixed number when taking dmg.
The regen rate, is in reference to how quickly your hull hp repairs at, not just related to crew capacity replenishes!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!