Crew experience and types

[William Luard]

Hello!

 

Looking at the upcoming update for the crew system I had some thoughts on how to make crew more than a simple commodity alongside the future food and water (though I have some ideas for those systems as well).

First of all, the simplest addition, would be experience gain for the crew.

A crewmember can gain experience from any action in a battle, and the experience improves their effectiveness at tasks, their survivability, etc.

Perhaps the experience could be stat specific, so that a crewmember that has been loading cannons for weeks or months will be more efficient at that than the shipmate you hired yesterday.

However, the shipmate has been working the masts all the battles both yesterday and today, so even if only slightly, he is better at working the sails than your veteran loader.

This brings me to my second idea, crew types, that allow a captain to hire crew based on what he needs, his economy, and his renown.

Marines is an example of how this could work.

It could be only a matter of starting experience, or it could be a preset permanent for the crew, if one would choose to implement this instead of the crew experience.

The presets could make the crew better at certain tasks, like waging war, or whatever one might need for trading or exploration/travel (and not moving large shipments)

The problem is that given how little you can affect a lot of the processes in the game at this point. Once/if new mechanics are introduced to the game, more unique crew and crew types will be really good for the game I believe, but as it stands now, crewmember experience seems the most approriate addition. 

However, if crewmembers remain a simple commodity that is just a number (the way it seems now) none of these additions will be possible, but I wanted to state them none the less.

 

[Diodo]

If i understood correctly what the devs mean to do, they're considering crew as a renewable resource that you are expected to lose and replace. And while crew experience is always an interesting feature, i think it wont fit easily with this resource thinking.