Post by Ragnanaught on Jul 27, 2018 17:15:49 GMT -5
I find dealing with the morale of my crew to be one of the harder parts of the game. I'm assuming this is by design, but one thing is bothering me a bit.
Just before I finish a mission and get the money to pay wages, crew morale hits a low. I get it, we've been cruising for a long time, I haven't paid the wages yet, maybe we had some disheartening encounters.
But if I was a crew dog and I knew my cap'n was strapped for cash and on this next landing the cap'n would have enough cash, I'd stick around to get paid. Not leave instantly without my paycheck just because I'm grumpy.
I believe quelling a mutiny slightly improves morale again - if that's true, the combination of these things would mean that players would meta-game. They'd wait for a mutiny, quell it, and only then land on the planet, to avoid their crew leaving upon landfall.
A possible solution might be to give the player the option to instantly pay the due wages after landfall to prevent crew leaving - potentially with a slight add-on cost to reward paying on time; in the same vein you might ask your crew to hold on for another week, with dire consequences if you don't pay up by then (additional morale decrease should be bad enough). Another angle might be to allow for minor ship-wide morale-improving abilities for e.g. Quartermaster, as opposed to only abilities that will stop a single crew from leaving. Yet another possibility would be to nerf the morale dropoff slightly to make crew get grumpy later, but that's a game design decision.
Just before I finish a mission and get the money to pay wages, crew morale hits a low. I get it, we've been cruising for a long time, I haven't paid the wages yet, maybe we had some disheartening encounters.
But if I was a crew dog and I knew my cap'n was strapped for cash and on this next landing the cap'n would have enough cash, I'd stick around to get paid. Not leave instantly without my paycheck just because I'm grumpy.
I believe quelling a mutiny slightly improves morale again - if that's true, the combination of these things would mean that players would meta-game. They'd wait for a mutiny, quell it, and only then land on the planet, to avoid their crew leaving upon landfall.
A possible solution might be to give the player the option to instantly pay the due wages after landfall to prevent crew leaving - potentially with a slight add-on cost to reward paying on time; in the same vein you might ask your crew to hold on for another week, with dire consequences if you don't pay up by then (additional morale decrease should be bad enough). Another angle might be to allow for minor ship-wide morale-improving abilities for e.g. Quartermaster, as opposed to only abilities that will stop a single crew from leaving. Yet another possibility would be to nerf the morale dropoff slightly to make crew get grumpy later, but that's a game design decision.
