Multiplayer 3 people enough?

[GammaPerfect]

Is 3 people enough to play the game and have fun?

[Dragon]

Yes, although the analogy 'The more the merrier' applies. Public games will help fill that void.

[obvious]

Yes. I recommend the following setup:
1st person is captain and doubles as pilot. Do not add Pilot bot, it is annoying.
2nd person is engineer
3rd person is science. both those roles are vital and the bots are not as good as players.
Use a bot for Weapon Specialist. Keep in mind: it will only fire at what you target, so keep space-bar or alt-key pressed and click the enemy name in the upper right corner to target enemies manually. Use Z-key commands to give additional orders.
Set your game settings to "private" and(!) use a password in order to keep random people from joining in.

Alternatively you can leave the game open for public and fill the remaining 2 slots with random players whenever you play. That works very well for many crews and i also had many enjoyable games helping out on such ships. The community is nice and you will find really cool people to play with. I recommend keeping your game steam protected though. Eventhough trolls are very rare, they can potentially happen. When you kick someone from your game and it is steam protected, then the person is on your steam ban list and unable to ever join your game again unless you clear them from the list.

[El Chico Gordo]

I'd even say 3-4 players is best. We usually play 1) Captain 2) Pilot then Weapons/Science since nobody of us likes the engineer job.

It is true, the weapons job can be done by a bot. Engineering feels more like a chore to me so we leave it to a bot. If we have noone for science we add a bot and let the captain do additional scans or com officer.

So don't worry, 3 players is perfectly fine so you have a bot or 2 for doing the chores.

[mcsproot]

I agree partially with obvious. 3 players is a good minimum. Have a Captain that does piloting, a Scientist player and an Engineering player. Weapons can be done by a bot as they will man the main turret.