Whats the minimum number of players needed to have a good experience?

[phlux]

I red that the AI crew that fills up the positions is mediocre. Can any experienced player tell me how many real players i need to have a decent playthrough and maybe which positions the AI can handle the best?
It's not always possible to get enough of my friends together because we all have to work and family etc.
I know it's always at it's best when you have a full crew of players and my impression was that it's not really worth to play is solo so is there a spot in the middle where it's ok to miss some players?

[Dragon]

Generally 3-5 players will get you going just fine. If you can get a few friends in, just leave your game as public and you'll get other players to join. Generally the random players that join will just be normal people trying to enjoy the game, with very little risk of trolls.

[Darksynapse]

I've got like one friend that can routinely play games with me. 3-5 players is a lot of people to try and coordinate with.

[obvious]

regarding routine play? yes. But you just need to coordinate with your friend there, the random players that fill up the other slots can be random people every time you play. All progress is in YOUR host save. So it does not matter if you switch players between or during sessions. And coordination on ship with 5 people works just fine :)

[Jerubius]

Honestly, the solo experience is a lot better than it used to be, even with default AI. Been doing a solo run that's been pretty fun lately.

Ideally though, you probably want a few more. Gunner is a safe role to leave to the AI. The bots do a fine job there. Engineer is decent as a bot, but there's some more complex situations where you'd rather have a player. I think there's some AI tweaks that can improve that though. Scientist, again does fine most of the time, but there's a few situations you would much prefer a real player manning it. Unfortunately, that's not something AI tweaks can handle, as those situations are mostly passing on information to other players, which the AI has limited ability to do. You can, however, have a player just take over their job for critical moments. The pilot bot is mostly fine, but you may prefer to just not have one, and the captain flies the ship instead. You lose out on some skill points, but you can handle that by tweaking the pilot to just man a turret instead of flying the ship. Then captain has to be the host.

So at bear minimum you have the captain doubling as pilot, with a second player playing another role, but prepared to take over the scientist or engineer jobs as needed, with bots for gunner and either scientist or engineer.

If you get up to 3 players, you can just do captain, engineer, and scientist with a gunner bot and pilot filling in for pilot.

That said, someone almost always wants to play gunner, and that makes things a lot tougher if you're understaffed, because the bots don't handle any of the other roles quite as well as the gunner bot does.

Also note that faction plays a role as well. AoG tends to have a lot of non-combat or planetside missions available, as well as stealth options on all their ships, making it much easier to run with a small crew. I've even done solo, no bots pretty successfully with an AoG ship before. WD on the other hand is heavily space combat focused, and you will feel the lack of actual players a lot more as them. CU is much more in the middle.

You also want smaller ships with a small crew, so it's easier to pull double duty if need be. The last thing you want is having to run all the way back to the engine in a Roland because you need to dump fuel cells into recharging programs. The Intrepid, Stargazer and WD Cruiser are all good options for this. Though last I checked the WD Cruiser is also just kind of a weak ship overall.

[phlux]

Thanks for your detailed answer Jerubius. This was exactly what i was looking for.

[Remington]

The game is actually very decent with bots, particularly if you find a good AI package.