I thought I had done that... adding experience change would have the same type of impact as maintenance needs of ships but in a different way. Will I have the ships stay out on a long mission or not, the longer ships stay out on a mission the more experience you loose at the end of their mission as they need to replace more crew.
Okay. I think that would be NOT FUN. In fact, I think it would be
annoying. It would be counter to my fiction and my desires.
It would have the same type of impact as maintenance have, the same type of restriction but it would be important in a different way... it would also "fix" the issue of once a ship is trained to 100% fleet training it will not stay there indefinitely as long as it looses its crew.
This is not a problem I've EVER had. It's not a problem I've seen anyone else complain about. If you think it's a problem, I suggest you stop training your Task Forces up to 100%. I don't think I've ever had ship reach that point. You are asking to restrict everyone's game to stop you from exploiting one part of the rules.
If it is tied to an optional feature like maintenance I don't see why it could not be added.
Because then you've ruined
my maintenance.
Now, if it was an entirely separate feature with an on/off checkbox and the default setting was 'OFF' then it would be easy enough to ignore. In that case, the only 'cost' to me is the programming time Steve spends on it in place of something that makes the game better for me.
You would have to manage deployment of fleets as well as choose how to design them and choose how long a service length your crew usually have in your empire. Crew is a finite resource and you need to manage it carefully.
No it isn't. My crew are pressed landlubbers from a thousand different ports and every time a ship touches down some percentage of them desert and (a hopefully greater number) are kidnapped and forced to join the navy. . . because I'm playing Age of Sail in space.
What I am NOT playing is an orderly turnover of one-quarter of my crew every six months.
It would make leaders more important in therms of training skills etc... leaders still come and go... why should not the crew do the same.
You can imagine your crew as immortal all you want, your leaders and officers still have human lifespans so I don't get why you could not imagine this anyway. You also could turn it of in the same way you can turn maintenance off.
I don't know that Officers
should be more important. . . I already find them epicly important. And whether my crew comes and goes, or are chained to their stations like slave galley rowers, is for my fiction to decide. I disagree that crew experience should fluctuate on a schedule -- that dictates that my empire's training methods can't allow five veteran beings to compensate for one newbie.
It flies in the face of 'Lucky' Jack Aubry or Honor Harrington whipping their crew into crack shape, or already-whipped crew finagling ways to join their old captain.
If such a system gets added, I certainly will turn it off. The problem is that I was told the same thing years ago about up-or-out realistic promotions. . . and that system was bugged and never got fixed. Literally every single conventional start I have ever played has included ~80% of my officer corps being deemed excess to requirements and let go because I can't create jobs for them fast enough. Sure, there are workarounds (dozens of excess teams, SM re-run officer creation, hammering the 'Add Officer' button) but it's still super annoying.
I really don't see how this would be any different than manage maintenance with overhauls or minerals for building materials and so on. It also would require MUCH less micromanagement than maintenance and overhauls but add some interesting resource management into the picture.
Resorce management, yes. Interesting? I disagree. It seems like I just get to watch my crew training go slowly up, then abruptly down every X months.
Actually, I'm not seeing the 'management' part. My only real choices seem to be how much of my crew gets replaced and when. And who decides the 'when' part? You seem to be suggesting "only at colonies with pools of available crew" but that's not how officers work -- they can be sent anywhere, instantly. Sure, many (most?) of us use actual ships to move them around as cargo, but Aurora's Auto-Assign teleports them across the universe. . . even on & off the command deck of our 22-year deep space explorers a dozens systems out from anywhere friendly. Is crew rotation going to work the same way?
So now I should exploit the solution to the exploit by setting my crew rotation to 5 days, so that the constant flux is small enough to be ignored. . . or maybe set it to fifty years, so that it doesn't happen before the ship gets scrapped. Or maybe five hundred years, because my fiction includes ships a century or two old. Certainly, turning it off would be easier but it might not be possible without breaking something else I care about more.
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What you're requesting would make the daily life of my empire worse (and more annoying) in order to solve a problem that -- to me -- seems self-inflicted. And only 'a problem' for one or two people.
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Maybe I'm misunderstanding the math here, or your idea. It sounds like the HMS Average (crew exp 100) under Captain Okay would train a bit (crew exp 104) in six months, then swap 25% of its experienced crew for average newbs (new net crew exp 103), and repeat. End result is a lower 'max crew exp' when the two curves of 'training rate' and 'turnover rate' meet.
. . .Though note that the empire-wide crew pool is now slowly rising in base experience. If the majority of your crew are being trained by captains, the 'max crew exp' is still going up (though more slowly) since the replacements are no longer 'average' but above average. You've changed the problem from 'exceptional ships' to 'exceptional navy' -- which, granted, may not be a problem.