Crew Options for PvP

[sharp granite]

It'd be nice to have a PvP customization option related to crew numbers.

Crew is an important consideration in career so players are likely to design ships that are more crew-optimized than price-optimized. To help players transition from career to pvp, it'd be useful to have an option that takes this into account. Such an option would help create an environment where players can more readily use their previously built ships. For those interested, it would also improve pvp replayability by offering a different way to optimize new ships. Additionally, if certain types of weapons are better suited to smaller crews, this kind of option would reveal that more clearly and help provide more data for balancing such things in career or other gamemodes.

Possible implementations:
Allow users to specify a hard crew limit for individual ships and/or players.This is a simple solution that would accomplish some of the above, but would be limited since it wouldn't work with ships of varying crew sizes
Allow the price-per-crew to be adjusted manually instead of being a static 500 credits - this could either be a single static value, or it could be more dynamic with a starting value and a scaling value that increases the price per crew for each additional crew member similar to crew costs in career mode.This option offers more customization, but would introduce variability to ship prices - it might be worth separating ship prices and crew prices if this route is taken

[warm geyser]

Uh, crew should already cost 500 credits each in any gamemode aside from career. Their cost is automatically included in ship blueprints. Is that not what you're referring to?

[sharp granite]

I'm mostly thinking that it'd be nice to have more options for how much they should cost or how many crew are allowed per ship, as many ships designed for pvp don't really fit well in career and vice versa. I guess I've always discounted the 500 credits since it was so low. I'd love an option to change them to have the same scaling price as career for that reason.

[haughty wadi]

that will just make half the ship cost entirely on crew if costs scale

[sharp granite]

Well, yeah. It'd be the same as career mode. It'd essentially be an option to limit crew numbers. It could be designed in a way to encourage a certain number of crew by having the scaling only start after a specified point, if that's a concern. I'm not overly concerned with how it's implemented - if adjusting the price of crew is undesirable for whatever reason, an option that simply limits the number of crew per ship or per team would be helpful.

[haughty wadi]

why would you want to limit crew in pvp though? generally ships won't just will never be affected by it, or certain archetypes get hit hard and are not usable

[sharp granite]

Crew is the primary limiting factor in career mode rather than price, so many of the ships I've built have been designed with that in mind. Having an option to limit crew would help these kinds of ships to be tested against each other in PvP without needing to also compete against ships that have been designed without that constraint.

[haughty wadi]

in pvp the limiting factor is budget rather than crew

[sharp granite]

Yes, but why can't we have the option for both?

I think it'd be fun to play around with different limitations

[haughty wadi]

the other ray around if you had unlimited budget and say, 150 total limited crew, then you just get railfan alphas costing 6.5 million each with no sustain so that they instantly kill theenemy ship without the need for any crew to refuel anything

with both as limits, low crew usage ships like railfans will be less affected compared to high crew usage ships

it only takes away from the total amount of competative ships you can use

[sharp granite]

That would depend on what kind of price/crew limits people end up using. I agree that there would be many combinations that would be... unreasonable.

That's a big part of why I thought it'd be nice to be able to adjust the price of crew. That way, we could gradually increase the price of larger crews rather than having a hard cutoff. It would allow people to customize how much of a factor they want crew size to be. With a specific limit, it's more likely that a very specific type of ship would be optimal.

[storm turtle]

True but this would also need to be implemented in creative mode in order to allow people to make ships using x increase of crew value

[outer stag]

would make pvp coordination painful

also would make "perfect" cost ships much harder to exist

and wouldn't even fix the career ships suck against pvp ships issue

[haughty wadi]

a ship made to fight players, will be one better than one made to fight ai

[sharp granite]

@outer stag There might be a good standard to use that takes crew into account like this, which would help with the first two points. But I'm not sure how we'd determine what that standard would be without testing.

[outer stag]

it would not scale well

cost scales well for different ships sizes but increasing crew costs doesn't

that would encourage larger ships to be pure alpha strike and armor

[sharp granite]

I think that depends entirely on how it scales

[haughty wadi]

And currently how it scales as gaining '0' over time has suited PvP cosmoteer for many years

[sharp granite]

I'm not saying this should replace that. This would be an additional option

[haughty wadi]

I'm also not saying it replaces it, just that it doesn't need additional baggage

[sharp granite]

I think baggage is an unfair description for it. New PvP features/customization may not be a priority, but this also seems like something that wouldn't take a lot of dev time to implement. If any new PvP features are going to be added, this seems like it'd be worth considering.

[haughty wadi]

It's less a feature and more a limit on PvP ships that isn't exactly very effective as dictating a fundamental aspect of a ship

That fundamental aspect being something as simple as the cost of a ship,
Will in creative it just default to the regular 500, or will it also have a change based on whatever custom crew scaling there is, since apparently it is customisable,
Which also sparks, How at whatever price will PvP ever be at for crew costs, if everyone is just building at different crew prices, no one will be equal

You could snide everyone else in a lobby by sneakily increasing how much The Last crew costs in your PvP lobby, making Everyone's ship Completely obsolete

You could just use a railfan with a total of 100 crew, and watch as you have every crew after cost Extra money scaling upwards at that, meaning Everyone must also comply with their own 100 crew railfans, reducing the variation in ships in pvp

[sharp granite]

If crew price adjustments is a non-starter, I think there are simpler solutions. But otherwise 500 per crew could just be the default, then there could be some extra crew cost displayed according to what the user selects if it's changed. The same customized display could be available in creative, for example.

If people don't want to play with those extra costs, they don't have to? I think if someone tries sneaking in a change without discussing it with people who join, that game probably won't start. When dealing with multiplayer customization, a certain level of collaboration and communication is necessary.

As for what the metagame might be for different settings, I'm not convinced it'd be 100% railfans. But even if that is the case, maybe crew adjustments like these would be better suited alongside other customizations such as a battlefield with more asteroids. Or maybe the extra restrictions would "breed creativity" and result in metagame changes that are completely unexpected? Who knows.

[haughty wadi]

Railfans as one of the most Crew efficient archetypes requiring the little crew to operate, will certainly be better than after 200 crew on a ship, each crew after gain +(500)X cost, just an extra bunk after is 9000 in costs on the crew alone, the next after being far higher after

Also, not All limitations inspire creativity, how would this specifically make ships more creative

[outer stag]

nerf for walls, missiles, good logistics
buff for ul (yay), rails, alpha strike

[haughty wadi]

No change for those, just the morbiters die of too many costs

[outer stag]

walls need a lot of crew

[haughty wadi]

Ik

Things like rails and such don't benefit, just the high crew ships don't function is what I'm saying