Standardize max crew sizes

[mawootad]

Max crew sizes being highly variable really cuts into the number of ships that you might want to fly in the endgame. Currently, there are only a handful of ships that reach the max of 7/42 crew, and because you can't switch from a higher crew capacity ship to a lower crew capacity ship without firing a bunch of your crew having any 7/42 ship running at maximum efficiency locks you out of access to the smaller ship. So basically if you want to have both a Sword Battlecruiser and a Pallas Freighter your options are either that you lose all of your exp on 6 crew every time you switch to the freighter or that you permanently give up 60+ dice worth of stats on your battlecruiser. This generally feels awful, so I would highly suggest standardizing crew sizes across at least the heavier weight classes so that they all have interchangeable max crew counts. I'd suggest something like

8000+: 7/42

7000: 7/36

6000: 6/36

5000: 5/30

3400: 5/24

2400: 4/24

If you want to go further you could additionally compress the numbers here into just 4 groups -- 4/24, 5/30, 6/36, 7/42 -- and design ship crew counts around a group of ship weights that pilots can freely and easily switch between at different stages in the game. This would allow a player to pick a particular class of ships to run (small, medium, large, ultra-large) and play around that, although the reduced range of crew counts might make balancing certain hulls difficult.

Obviously not every ship needs to have its crew capacity exactly based on its mass as some ships are designed for tasks that are more crew hungry than others, but I would at a minimum suggest bumping the Pallas and probably Aegis freighters to 7/42 crew so that you can actually fly a dedicated freighter/explorer/salvager alongside larger combat ship classes without being forced to jury-rig a warhammer or sword for the task.

[Cory Trese]

Thanks for the suggestion. I am sorry that you find the ship variety to feel awful.

We will keep working to improve, but I do not foresee us trying to standardize crew numbers, just too damaging to the design and existing players.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on crew sizes and ship design.

We will take them into account for future games like Star Traders: Frontiers 2.

[fallen]

mawootad - thanks for the interesting feedback! From the saved games of players we receive every day, I can vouch for the fact that many players are not flying 7/42 ships into the end game. Certainly, some upgrade to the largest, but we see 5/24 ships quite often.

[sparda4]

fallen

Tell me those 5/24 crews are not hard difficulty saves. Because i cannot possibly imagine how they would face Jyeeta or even terrox for that matter 40+ years in.

Also so i add my viewpoint

Maybe a 6/36 setup ship would be nice just a thought.

[mawootad]

Nov 30, 2019 9:36:09 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Thanks for the suggestion. I am sorry that you find the ship variety to feel awful.

We will keep working to improve, but I do not foresee us trying to standardize crew numbers, just too damaging to the design and existing players.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on crew sizes and ship design.

We will take them into account for future games like Star Traders: Frontiers 2.

I think you misunderstand, I don't think the ship variety is awful; the selection of viable ships isn't as big as it looks solely from the size of the ship list, but it's good enough and when ship stats are so generic some ships are just going to be better than others when it comes to the common roles you want in a ship (eg a large slot fits the same modifications regardless of whether it's 2400 mass or 9000 mass or whether it's a freighter or a battlecruiser). What I do find pretty miserable is being unable to swap between ships without having to either underutilize one of the hulls or fire crew solely so that they fit on the ship. It wouldn't be such an issue if there were more ships for a given crew setup, but there are zero freighters in the 7/42 bracket (the best option for a utility ship in that bracket is the warhammer which feels real weird), 6/42 has literally only one ship, 6/36 has really poor carrier options, etc. I think by compressing the brackets and considering what roles a ship might want to fill to make each crew bracket more complete you could easily offer more flexibility in terms of ability to swap and customize multiple ships and increase the effective amount of ship variety without all that much extra design work.

[fallen]

Thanks for the feedback! We'll keep working to improve but do not plan to rewrite the officer/crew support in the existing ships.

[Cory Trese]

Nov 30, 2019 16:04:11 GMT -5 sparda4 said:

fallen

Tell me those 5/24 crews are not hard difficulty saves. Because i cannot possibly imagine how they would face Jyeeta or even terrox for that matter 40+ years in.

Also so i add my viewpoint

Maybe a 6/36 setup ship would be nice just a thought.

Absolutely they are! Just because your particular playstyle doesn't suit a 5/24 Crew doesn't mean that other players don't run it on Impossible!

6/36 is a very common setup -- I run it all the time it gives you access to almost every 6000, 7000, and 8000 Mass build.

I think one misstep here to assume that most players are running the biggest barracks they can all the time.

[cerseisadvocate]

Like the OP I would welcome some of the crew sizes to be reviewed. The problem is that you can't "store" crewmembers so if your primary ship in the endgame is 7/42 you do not want to use anything else as a secondary ship. The most annoying example for me is the Pallas Freighter which for some reason is 7/36 I would like to use it as a secondary ship for trading but as it is I have to refit A Warhammer for this job, which feels wrong.
I find it particularly frustrating that these crew limits often seem to be pretty arbitrary in case of the Pallas it is hard to accept why this ship would not be able to fit the 6 more crew members I would need.
I am aware that the crew limits are part of the balancing and in some cases shape the identity of a ship in my humble opinion the best solution would be to use a standartisation alike the OP suggests and only deviate from it when the identity of the ship depends on a unconventional crew setup.

[Cory Trese]

I am sorry that you feel like it is frustrating.

We will keep this feedback in mind. Perhaps crew number standardization will be a feature of a future game.

Thanks again for playing and providing input. We will keep iterating and trying to improve Star Traders: Frontiers.

[MTKnife]

I think something like the outpost stretch goals from the Kickstarter would be a more viable solution, but I'm not sure how you do that without a second Kickstarter.

[Cory Trese]

Dec 2, 2019 13:51:23 GMT -5 MTKnife said:

I think something like the outpost stretch goals from the Kickstarter would be a more viable solution, but I'm not sure how you do that without a second Kickstarter.

Star Traders: Frontiers II

[cerseisadvocate]

Dec 2, 2019 14:20:09 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Dec 2, 2019 13:51:23 GMT -5 MTKnife said:

I think something like the outpost stretch goals from the Kickstarter would be a more viable solution, but I'm not sure how you do that without a second Kickstarter.

Star Traders: Frontiers II

Sequel CONFIRMED!!!
Give us the ETA NOW!

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just kidding

[Cory Trese]

I mean sequel confirmed ever since wee didn't get to make the full game due to our tiny budget.

Next time we will use the entire design