Crew Damage in Ship Combat

[resistor]

I got a question. If I have a large number of crew, would that reduce the odds of any particular crewman dying in ship combat because incoming damage is being distributed across more people? Or does damage to crew scale with the target's number of crew, causing damage to be potentially more lethal?

[fallen]

Depending on what components are hit (based on component size, type such as bridge, weapon compartment), more crew will get hit with the damage. There isn't a direct scale for "number of crew" to "crew hit" but the factors that cause more crew to be injured are more likely to occur more often on larger ships.

[contributor]

This is something I've been wondering about as well. So hypothetically...

Say my weapons compartment gets hit. Does the game just assign a certain number of crew damage points to that area and distribute it across however many gunners I have? If that is the way it works, packing in some extra gunners, if I have room for them, would distribute the damage across more crew, possibly keeping more of them alive?

[fallen]

No, there is nothing you can do to distribute the damage across more crew and reduce the damage to an individual crew member.

The crew damage is accumulated as "how many crew are hit" and "how much damage to each hit crew?"

So, if 5 are hit for 40, then 5 crew members take 20-40 Dmg. There is nothing you can do (like add Gunners) that would spread that 20-40 Dmg over more crew members.

[Cory Trese]

But at the same time, if you have 40 Crew and 5 will be hit with 50 and then 5 will be hit with 50 ... the odds of 1 crew taking 100 damage is much lower than if you have 20 Crew.

Larger crews do, in some ways, insulate you from crew loss -- but not within a single round of damage being applied. It impacts the total damage per crew per combat tho.

[contributor]

Thanks fallen. It still might be worth it have "fluff" crew though, because that increases the chances that one of them is one of the 5 rather one of your key officers, but it's getting min-maxy on details.

[contributor]

Hah, we were replying at the same time along the same lines.

Time to upgrade the barracks and start a new recruitment drive!

[fallen]

That is true -- more bodies reduces the likelihood of repeat hits on the same crew over different turns. Also, insulation for the officers.