Hiring Crew, wtf.

[+Piiro+]

Seriously, hiring crew is retarded at the moment. I made 60 million in 30 mins, bought a crap ton of ore in 2 hours and I needed 5 hours to get 1500 crew ? Really ? And all this for what I consider an average ship at best. I don't even want to know how long it would take to populate a space station.

Not to mention your ship breaks appart until you can fill all the engineers and you can't move for **** until you get the mechanics.

I also believe there's a bug in the auto assign crew. I had 600 mechanics with 74% andI kept buying hundreds of unskilled workers and losing them over and over. The only thing I was missing was mechanics. So either not having 100% mechanics makes you lose crew or auto assign screws up something. As soon as I removed it I stopped losing crew.

TLDR: My ship exploded, I have the money and ressources to rebuild it but I'm not spending 5 hours finding crew.

[Bucky]

Pretty sure if you leave and reenter a system the stations will have more crew...

[Aurelia]

It is a hassle recruiting thousands of crewmembers from expanding your ship so much. It tends to work out if you build up your ship little by little, and crew it over time, but I feel your pain, especially when you decide to create a second ship and skip the "tiny little fighter" phase, building it straight into a ship that can actually survive your current territory. You do spend the next couple hours doing nothing but racing to collect as many people as you can to fill those slots, and then spend the next several hours replacing crewmembers with professionals.

Originally posted by +Pyro+:

Not to mention your ship breaks appart until you can fill all the engineers and you can't move for **** until you get the mechanics.

You mean it breaks apart until you fill the mechanics, and can't move for crap until you fill the engineers slots, but yeah ^_^

[Blaine]

The trick everyone currently uses to quickly crew up large ships is to buy a ship from an NPC shipyard, transfer the crew you receive when checking the captain/crew checkbox, then delete the ship to reclaim the materials.

There's also a mod that increases the number of crew available to hire from stations further toward the core.

[Aurelia]

Originally posted by Blaine:

The trick everyone currently uses to quickly crew up large ships is to buy a ship from an NPC shipyard, transfer the crew you receive when checking the captain/crew checkbox, then delete the ship to reclaim the materials.

There's also a mod that increases the number of crew available to hire from stations further toward the core.

yes, that is one way, if you're ok with losing minerals and money. There is loss in doing it this way.

[Animark]

One Trick is to stay at a station that has many crew members LOG-OFF and LOG-ON again.
In Singleplayer this refills the crew of every Station! Haven't tried for Multiplayer!

[Elfblood]

As much as I like the crew idea, my main concerns at the moment are:

-you cant even build something big in creative, as your ship is always damaged till you get the mechanics, add a block, need more mechanics, and so on. This makes me go wild...I just want to build in creative to get the "blueprint" for my real game...

-crew doesnt serve any meaningful purpose. Its just a ressource and time killer atm.
If your officers would have some skills or something special you can do with the crew, it would give them a whole new dimension. Different races, or stats or something that is worthwhile to manage, but for now the crew idea feels a bit wasted.

-Own stations...lol. You build a station/mine etc. and you need crew. Take a ship, buy the crew from the very same station and put it back to the station, now it has crew. This part needs some love ;)

[Aurelia]

Originally posted by Elfblood:

-crew doesnt serve any meaningful purpose. Its just a ressource and time killer atm.
If your officers would have some skills or something special you can do with the crew, it would give them a whole new dimension. Different races, or stats or something that is worthwhile to manage, but for now the crew idea feels a bit wasted.

It's purpose is more of a gatekeep than anything else, with the added bonus of increased effectiveness if you have more than required.
It's a necessary evil, because without it, it would mean everyone would be indestructible even on insane difficulty. Such is the struggle of a game that does not limit you in creation.

For creative mode though, the crew function should be disabled, honestly. No point in having them there at all.

[SteelFire]

Originally posted by Luminaire:

Originally posted by Elfblood:

-crew doesnt serve any meaningful purpose. Its just a ressource and time killer atm.
If your officers would have some skills or something special you can do with the crew, it would give them a whole new dimension. Different races, or stats or something that is worthwhile to manage, but for now the crew idea feels a bit wasted.

It's purpose is more of a gatekeep than anything else, with the added bonus of increased effectiveness if you have more than required.
It's a necessary evil, because without it, it would mean everyone would be indestructible even on insane difficulty. Such is the struggle of a game that does not limit you in creation.

For creative mode though, the crew function should be disabled, honestly. No point in having them there at all.

Crew also serves as a gold sink. As things stand now, that's not much an issue, but once players can really start to build their own factions and empires, having gold sinks will be one of the limiting factors.

[Lance Patchwork]

Also if you want to increase the number and availability of crew you can easily go in crewboard.lua and edit it to your heart content, myself i added a couple 0 to some maximum crew that can spawn and made the fighter a tad more easy to find as in not needing to check 10 station to see if they have any.

[Aurelia]

Originally posted by SteelFire:

Originally posted by Luminaire:

It's purpose is more of a gatekeep than anything else, with the added bonus of increased effectiveness if you have more than required.
It's a necessary evil, because without it, it would mean everyone would be indestructible even on insane difficulty. Such is the struggle of a game that does not limit you in creation.

For creative mode though, the crew function should be disabled, honestly. No point in having them there at all.

Crew also serves as a gold sink. As things stand now, that's not much an issue, but once players can really start to build their own factions and empires, having gold sinks will be one of the limiting factors.

That is the gatekeep. Crew supply is unlimited, only taking time, but money to support them is not ;)

[SteelFire]

Originally posted by Luminaire:

Originally posted by SteelFire:

Crew also serves as a gold sink. As things stand now, that's not much an issue, but once players can really start to build their own factions and empires, having gold sinks will be one of the limiting factors.

That is the gatekeep. Crew supply is unlimited, only taking time, but money to support them is not ;)

Ah... my bad, I didn't connect cashflow with your comment about being indestructable... which explains why that part didn't make sense to me at all. I'll blame it on not enough coffee at that point. :)

[Aurelia]

Originally posted by SteelFire:

Originally posted by Luminaire:

That is the gatekeep. Crew supply is unlimited, only taking time, but money to support them is not ;)

Ah... my bad, I didn't connect cashflow with your comment about being indestructable... which explains why that part didn't make sense to me at all. I'll blame it on not enough coffee at that point. :)

Probably more fair to blame it on my inadequate explanation of my point, but good morning!

[+Piiro+]

Originally posted by Bucky:

Pretty sure if you leave and reenter a system the stations will have more crew...

Unfortunatly I play multiplayer and this can't happen unless the server crashes or whatever the timer delay is to refresh stations.

Originally posted by Blaine:

The trick everyone currently uses to quickly crew up large ships is to buy a ship from an NPC shipyard, transfer the crew you receive when checking the captain/crew checkbox, then delete the ship to reclaim the materials.

There's also a mod that increases the number of crew available to hire from stations further toward the core.

This might be the solution I will have to go with. I also looked into the mod where you get more crew the further you get.

Heck I'd even pay 2x-3x-4x the crew price if I could go to a station that acts as an outside recruiter " hiring crew from all over the universe " who will teleport in my sector in 15-30mins.

[mss73055]

Good Sir you just discovered the meaning of this game. It's a simulator of an Indian call center!

[Lord_Greyscale]

Originally posted by +Pyro+:

Unfortunatly I play multiplayer and this can't happen unless the server crashes or whatever the timer delay is to refresh stations.

From what I've read elsewhere, it does work in multiplayer. The problem is multiplayer keeps a sector loaded for about 5 minutes after a player logs out.
(mostly to alleviate accidental dis-connects/client-side crashes.)
So, you simply log out, eat a snack/drink some tea/coffee/beer, and hop back in.

Or, have a pair/triplet of systems to "farm" for crew.


And yes, commisioning a ship for it's crew works miracles in an emergency.

EDIT: whoops! Somehow lost the ] at the end of the quote tag. Fixed it the moment I saw it.