I would love to see a greater focus on the ships crew in the game. By that, I mean a well balanced combination of a crew experience system, officers, maybe a morale system, crew payment and a better (real time?) boarding system. It was one of the first things that struck me as non immersive that crew recruitement is completely irrelevant in this game which is great in many other aspects.
Nonetheless, I understand the fears of some players that the game may become overly complex and at the same time less intuitive or just unbalanced by a bad design of crew management. Well, here are my thoughts on how to make this work (I know some of the aspects have been proposed before):
- the crew in general should have several levels of experience, lets say untrained to trained to exceptional - these levels apply to different aspects of naval action; lets say sailing, gunnery, close combat/boarding, survival/repairs and maybe discipline/morale (high discipline might allow faster changes of crew focus from sailing to gunnery and the like) - no country or port would ever run out of untrained sailors - the total experience of your crew (i.e. 30% untrained, 50% trained, 20% exceptional in sailing) increases based on battle exp and behaviour/activity in battles - additionally, you can recruit officers like sailing master, gunnery master, first mate, doctor... (or can be send to your ship after special missions); these provide extra bonuses... be creative ; officers are rare and distributed randomly across the caribbean
- loosing a big share of your crew in a battle decreases your total crew exp - additional crew can be recruited from captured ships, captured ports or in ports of your country - when your ship receives hits in a battle, the majority of your crew will be injured instead of being killed; hence, they are removed from the active crew in the current battle but will recover until the next battle instance (in real life less than 10% of the crew actually died during sea battles according to statistics of the royal navy) - open world performance of your ship is not affected by your crew (or lack of) - health kits can help your crew to recover (in battle as well as open world)
- as stated before, ports always offer unlimited untrained crew; on top of that they offer a certain percentage of trained (lets say 10%) and exceptional crew (lets say 5%); hence, the increase of total crew exp when you recruit new sailors is limited by those percentages - the bigger a country/the richer a port -> the lower the percentages of experienced crew members that can be recruited (reason: the inhabitants of rich countries have many other and better payed opportunities apart from the hard life on board a ship) - the bigger a country/the richer a port -> the more you have to pay for experienced crew members (same reason as above) - the bigger the ship -> the more you have to pay for experienced crew members (reason: lower expected share of prize from captured ships/ports)
- smaller ships get bigger bonuses from a high crew exp - bigger ships get penalties when not reaching a certain threshold of crew exp (reason: you cannot man a santissima with landlubbers only; setting tons of sails and firing much bigger guns is complex and requires way more skill and discipline compared to a sloop) - countries gain different advantages from the recruited crew: France has better sailors, pirates are better in boarding, americans have better gunners, Norway has amazingly skilled carpenters, Brits are more disciplined, Spain suffers less from penalties of big ships (just some ideas..., balancing is crucial)
This may seem too complex at first. But I believe, as long as it is intuitive and there is transparent in-game information on these aspects this would make the game more immersive, more interesting and giving it depth while not making it "hard work".
What do you think?
Cheers
I would love to see a greater focus on the ships crew in the game. By that, I mean a well balanced combination of a crew experience system, officers, maybe a morale system, crew payment and a better (real time?) boarding system. It was one of the first things that struck me as non immersive that crew recruitement is completely irrelevant in this game which is great in many other aspects. Nonetheless, I understand the fears of some players that the game may become overly complex and at the same time less intuitive or just unbalanced by a bad design of crew management. Well, here are my thoughts on how to make this work (I know some of the aspects have been proposed before): - the crew in general should have several levels of experience, lets say untrained to trained to exceptional - these levels apply to different aspects of naval action; lets say sailing, gunnery, close combat/boarding, survival/repairs and maybe discipline/morale (high discipline might allow faster changes of crew focus from sailing to gunnery and the like) - no country or port would ever run out of untrained sailors - the total experience of your crew (i.e. 30% untrained, 50% trained, 20% exceptional in sailing) increases based on battle exp and behaviour/activity in battles - additionally, you can recruit officers like sailing master, gunnery master, first mate, doctor... (or can be send to your ship after special missions); these provide extra bonuses... be creative ; officers are rare and distributed randomly across the caribbean - loosing a big share of your crew in a battle decreases your total crew exp - additional crew can be recruited from captured ships, captured ports or in ports of your country - when your ship receives hits in a battle, the majority of your crew will be injured instead of being killed; hence, they are removed from the active crew in the current battle but will recover until the next battle instance (in real life less than 10% of the crew actually died during sea battles according to statistics of the royal navy) - open world performance of your ship is not affected by your crew (or lack of) - health kits can help your crew to recover (in battle as well as open world) - as stated before, ports always offer unlimited untrained crew; on top of that they offer a certain percentage of trained (lets say 10%) and exceptional crew (lets say 5%); hence, the increase of total crew exp when you recruit new sailors is limited by those percentages - the bigger a country/the richer a port -> the lower the percentages of experienced crew members that can be recruited (reason: the inhabitants of rich countries have many other and better payed opportunities apart from the hard life on board a ship) - the bigger a country/the richer a port -> the more you have to pay for experienced crew members (same reason as above) - the bigger the ship -> the more you have to pay for experienced crew members (reason: lower expected share of prize from captured ships/ports) - smaller ships get bigger bonuses from a high crew exp - bigger ships get penalties when not reaching a certain threshold of crew exp (reason: you cannot man a santissima with landlubbers only; setting tons of sails and firing much bigger guns is complex and requires way more skill and discipline compared to a sloop) - countries gain different advantages from the recruited crew: France has better sailors, pirates are better in boarding, americans have better gunners, Norway has amazingly skilled carpenters, Brits are more disciplined, Spain suffers less from penalties of big ships (just some ideas..., balancing is crucial) This may seem too complex at first. But I believe, as long as it is intuitive and there is transparent in-game information on these aspects this would make the game more immersive, more interesting and giving it depth while not making it "hard work". What do you think? Cheers