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New Small Craft Type: Crew Shuttles!


Eurgiga
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Suggestion

Small craft currently come in two flavors: Fighters and Cargo Shuttles. I suggest adding a third type which can transfer crewmembers between ships. If this was coupled with an option to automatically transfer crew between ships with hangarbays (along with some knobs to tweak this behavior) it could do a lot to help when managing large fleets.

 

More than once I've found myself looking back at one of my fleet ships and wondering why its hull is damaged. I'll hop over and find it's in need of command crew (sergeants and whatnot) because it manufactured a couple of fighters or some crew leveled up or whatever and now my engineers are on strike because they're not getting flogged enough I guess. I'll fly my command ship over and shuffle a few of the command crew over, maybe repair the ship if I feel I really need to. If Crew Shuttles were a thing my command ship could've shuttled over the needed crew long ago and I wouldn't be wasting time or resources now.

 

Or there was that one every single time I updated the turret layout on a vessel and had to shuffle gunners, miners, sergeants, etc. around. I'd have given my left wingnut to have my ships shuffle everyone around on their own instead of trudging over and adding six miners here, three gunners there.

 

Crew Shuttles would not remain in the hangarbay of the ship receiving the crew. For simplicity's sake it could simply touch a hangar on the target vessel, transfer the crew and return home. Leaving them in the receiving hangarbay would mean you'd end up with a hangar full of Crew Shuttles every time you built a ship with a hangarbay from a blueprint and would be stuck shuffling them around for ten minutes. The less we have to micromanage shuttles, the better.

 

A few suggestions for the 'knobs' to allow players to define the behavior of this crew transfer:

 

Each vessel could really use Ship-level sliders to set the per centage of each crew type you want that ship to keep, relative to the performance rating of that crew type's associated function. So if we were to set the slider for Engineers to 130%, the ship will not send out an engineer if doing so would drop the ship's Engineering performance below 130%. Crew in excess of the slider per centage are considered excess and can be sent to a fleet ship requesting crew. Include a job-level fill box where players may manually enter a per centage, as well as a ship-level fill box to set all jobs to the per centage entered. These sliders and fill boxes would be handy, for example, if you want to pull all excess crew to a single ship or station with a shipwide value of 10,000, or if you want to empty a vessel by setting it to 0, or for several other uses I won't prattle on about.

 

A few on/off toggles would be very useful as well:

1. A toggle to let us pick between sending the highest level crewman available for the job and sending the lowest level available.

2. A toggle to allow sending untrained crew.

3. A toggle to let us pick between sending untrained crew before or after trained crew.

4. A ship-level toggle to allow/disallow crew sharing with fleet ships.

5. A fleet-level setting with three options: Crew Shuttles On (Ship Level), Crew Shuttles Off, and Crew Shuttles On (Override Ship Level).

 

Finally, an additional consideration:

The mechanics required for Crew Shuttles are quite similar to some of the mechanics one might see with boarding parties, a planned feature. It may be that code created for that system (boarding craft, anyone?) can be cribbed from to make this, if not super time-efficient, at least not so much of an undertaking as to be unfeasible.

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