Bridge Crew

[Sematary (OP)]

A lot of old threads just showed up in my updated topics list and I saw one that I really want to bring up again but this time make my argument for them a bit less bitchy than it looks reading it over a year later.

I would like to see a Star Trek-esque bridge crew that could go with your ship, generally with more junior officer ranks. Right now its Captain so and so and his however many faceless nameless crewmen. I would like to see Captain so and so, First Officer such and such, Science Officer blah, Security Chief blargh, Medical Officer whatshername, Weapons Officer muscles mcmuscleton, and so forth. Just a couple of officers that would be assigned to the crew to give more depth to the roleplaying on a ship. Erik suggested in the last post that it could even lead to new stats like "Command, Engineering, Science, Medical, etc." Now to be clear I don't want to simulate how any real navy does it which would quickly lead to thousands of junior officers, I just think it would be a lot of fun to add a few more officers per ship, or at least have the option to. I know my fiction writing would be the better for it.

[Vandermeer]

I also suggested this a while ago, and it was probably an idea throughout the years with many people. Doing this would also solve the problem with too many lower ranks having nothing to do, since you usually don't have a 3:1 ratio over consistently larger growing ships. (like 27 fighters per 9 frigates on 3 cruisers on one carrier)

However, Aurora is also quite inefficient in how it handles data listing it seems, as in a game with mere 500 low ranking officers you already notice some serious lag on every loadup of the officer window. (a related problem also causes the slow down of the colony menu when you have many ground units + commanders listed)
A game where every ship that is not a fighter needs 3+ officers to function would further explode those numbers. This topic is for me the greatest immersion addition wish I have, but I would still not tolerate it if the game in consequence suffers too much from overflowing officer tracking calculations, and the listing problems.

[swarm_sadist]

I remember arguing against this a long time ago. My opinion has changed somewhat, probably because I have seen other games do it well.

Perhaps instead of having it so every ship requires multiple different Bridge Officers, instead have only the Task Force Leader (as in an actual task force, not auroras task force system, which is a fleet system) have a Bridge Crew based on what ships are in the group and what the task force is actually doing.

A task force patrolling a border might have a lot of combat bridge officers (Training, Initiative, Fighter, etc) while a task force of colony ships and terraformers might have more civilian orientated bridge officers (Survey, Terraforming, Logistics). That way you don't require massive amounts of officers for each ship, only what is needed of the task force itself.

Or you could have a CO, XO, and three to four Bridge Officer Stations (a component) ala ST:O. Just my two cents.

[linkxsc]

Personally, I could like a mix of them. Make it not a requirement for ships to have multiple commanders. but if you wished, you could put a few (perhaps up to 5 max?) on a particular ship, and maybe rely on each member's highest skills feeding the ship.

Yeah microing this on small massed ships would be annoying, but for large ships (that may have a task bridge anyways)
Initiative and crew training are self explanatory, and the ship jsut uses whatever 1 is highest.
A commander added to the crew with high communications bonus, perhaps they give a "less trained" ship a bonus to order response time (assuming they aren't fully task force trained)
Diplomacy boosts the amount of time the ship can be on operations before "morale" issues set in.
Espionage and Intelligence give bonuses to interrogating captured enemies, and perhaps give a bonus to discover more info about targets based on sensor contacts and such.
And the list could go on.
Be 1 of those little things that you don't generally NEED to mirco, but if you wished to, you could to give a minor edge.
Or perhaps it could just give a little more opportunity to RP at a more ship based level than on a national level.

[DFDelta]

Link additional officers to ship equipment.

A ship without a bridge (fighters, light attack craft, roleplay shuttles and small craft) only need a CO.
A bridge always requires an additional XO.
Jump engines require an astrogation officer.
Ships above a certain PPV need a tactical officer.

Other criteria could be hangar size, total sensors, damage control or total engineering spaces.


That way fighters need only one officer, a DD might need one or two extra and a full size BB needs a full complement of 6 or 7 officers total.

[Thundercraft]

However, Aurora is also quite inefficient in how it handles data listing it seems, as in a game with mere 500 low ranking officers you already notice some serious lag on every loadup of the officer window. (a related problem also causes the slow down of the colony menu when you have many ground units + commanders listed)
A game where every ship that is not a fighter needs 3+ officers to function would further explode those numbers...

That does sound like a problem. And I agree that it would not be worth the extra lag.

On the other hand, I suppose if this was made an option that was off by default, then those who are willing to put up with such lag could deal with it while the rest of us pass on it.

Alternatively, perhaps someone could suggest this in the Pulsar 4X area? The aim of Pulsar is to have an "up to date fan sequel" to Aurora, right? I would imagine that it would not suffer the same lag issues.