Change Log for 6.00 discussion

[Person012345]

Not that I'm complaining, per se, no-one is going to force me to build them, it just seems odd to me.

[Steve Walmsley]

Doesn't this change mostly negate the entire crew morale change? Now you just take one extra ship around per sector with fleet and you don't have to worry about it.

Yes, I am a little concerned about that. However, this is going to be a very large and slow ship (120,000 tons plus). They are intended to visit bases and PDCs in out of the way places. It is still much cheaper to create a small colony as a base. For units deployed at jump points, they would be very much in harm's way. Interested to hear other opinions.

Steve

[metalax]

I like the idea as it allows PDC's and deep-space stations to operate effectively.

One potential way of limiting it, have each recreation module only able to handle a certain number of crew, while an actual colony has no such limitation.

Also please add a "conduct shoreleave" order that will keep a taskgroup at the colony until all ships have completed shoreleave, and a "conduct shoreleave and overhaul" order that will keep them at a colony until both shoreleave and overhauls are completed for all ships in the taskgroup.

[sublight]

Casino barges and other portable R&R facilities that assist crewmen in spending their pay far from home sounds pretty logical. Further, at 2,000+ BP each these luxuries are too expensive to deploy everywhere. I don't see these ships cheapening the morale rules. Except for those players who build and deploy fleets of dreadnoughts each more expensive than the recreation ship would be.

What does seem odd is that a tiny population of 10,000 is potentially able to service entire fleets with crew by the thousand. Perhaps if colonies had crew size limits similar to maintenance facilities? Perhaps only crews of 100-200 per 10,000 citizens could benefit? This would have minimal effect on resting at planetary colonies but would require bigger capital ships to be supported by larger/multiple recreation vessels to avoid taking planetary leave.

Edit: Looks like metalax beat me to the crew size limitation suggestion.

[Nathan_]

Yes, I am a little concerned about that. However, this is going to be a very large and slow ship (120,000 tons plus). They are intended to visit bases and PDCs in out of the way places. It is still much cheaper to create a small colony as a base. For units deployed at jump points, they would be very much in harm's way. Interested to hear other opinions.

Steve

A 50k Hab station with engines and its own colony bays is around 300,000-350,000 tons, and probably costs a similar amount. So this probably doesn't change much.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Perhaps only crews of 100-200 per 10,000 citizens could benefit? This would have minimal effect on resting at planetary colonies but would require bigger capital ships to be supported by larger/multiple recreation vessels to avoid taking planetary leave.

think of it as a traveling carnival, heh.  that ratio would be a little crazy  when the whole population is dedicated to entertainment and support thereof.

[PTTG]

Gargantuain Whore Ships will now be the backbone of any aggressive force.

[OAM47]

Yes, I am a little concerned about that. However, this is going to be a very large and slow ship (120,000 tons plus). They are intended to visit bases and PDCs in out of the way places. It is still much cheaper to create a small colony as a base. For units deployed at jump points, they would be very much in harm's way. Interested to hear other opinions.

Steve

Another way to negate it would be that the R&R ships have some kind of supply they have to use to perform their task.  That might be over complicating things though....

[UnLimiTeD]

Really like the basic idea.
Now we just need oversized commercial Hangars and we can create nice space stations.
Yes, i know, they still make no practical sense.

[Bremen]

I still kind of prefer the idea for just an "indefinite" option when determining deployment time. That way you could have some ships designed for permanent deployment, but you'd probably want to keep deployment times low for ships where performance was an issue, like warships.

Alternately, what about making shore leave function by system rather than requiring a ship to be in orbit? It makes sense to me that you could shuttle crews back from the fuel harvesting station at Jupiter. Or perhaps a "Shuttle Bay" component that counts as civilian but lets a ship conduct shore leave a range, for those PDCs and immobile stations.

[draanyk]

I've noticed that a lot of the threads relating to the new shore leave mechanism seem to be about reducing the micro-management. I'm not certain what the intent was in adding the mechanism, but it seems like it's disrupted some play styles, and impacted other mechanics such as asteroid mining, sorium harvesting, and jump gate defence. Perhaps one way to deal with this is to add a game start-up option similar to the one for jump gates on every wormhole, "Automate shore leave", which removes penalties for not conducting shore leave. In this way, players who want to manage shore leave can do so, and those who don't feel the need don't have to. This should focus the suggestions on how to use the mechanism, instead of how to avoid the mechanism.

[Steve Walmsley]

I still kind of prefer the idea for just an "indefinite" option when determining deployment time. That way you could have some ships designed for permanent deployment, but you'd probably want to keep deployment times low for ships where performance was an issue, like warships.

Alternately, what about making shore leave function by system rather than requiring a ship to be in orbit? It makes sense to me that you could shuttle crews back from the fuel harvesting station at Jupiter. Or perhaps a "Shuttle Bay" component that counts as civilian but lets a ship conduct shore leave a range, for those PDCs and immobile stations.

You can create bases with deployment times of 10 or 20 years fairly easily, which is heading towards indefinite.

I have considered allowing ships with some form of personnel shuttles to rewind the shore leave clock by shuttling crew to an in-system population. I think would be the most realistic option. I just having't found a mechanic I like yet. I don't really want to get into tracking crew off the ship so it would have to be done in some form of abstract. Also, you could end up tracking a lot of shuttles, which would slow down the game. The Shuttle Bay component (without tracking actual shuttles) is possible but how do I tie that in with existing boat bays and hangar decks? I also need to consider that larger ships would need a larger shuttle bay.

One option might be to have a small craft with spare berths that could be designated as "Shore Leave Shuttle" in default orders. This shuttle would go to the ship in a system with the greatest need for shore leave, pick up some of the crew and transport them to a nearby colony for perhaps two weeks then return to the ship. On its return, the shore leave time would be rewound by 20 weeks / percentage of crew on shore leave. The shuttle could be carried by the ship, or based at the colony. This wouldn't be too bad for micromanagement as the shuttle(s) would take care of itself. The downside would be a few more ships flying around. There would also have to be a restriction on the % of crew allowed off the ship. Perhaps 10-20%. However, I have to be careful not to get the point where the deployment time for a ship design is no longer an issue. Otherwise I am adding a lot of management for no game play gain.

Steve

[HaliRyan]

I would vote for a simple option personally (though I realize this isn't a democracy). Maybe a specific crew-transport module you could put on a ship, and when that ship is docked in another ship's boat bay it rewinds the crew clock as long there's a suitable population in the system for shore leave? Sort of a compromise between the two extremes.

[Conscript Gary]

I would also suggest tying any automated crew shuttling to the danger level of a system. You'll be a bit less keen to take an unarmed shuttle to a nearby colony when ravenous aliens cut through a colony ship bound to that same planet not three days prior

[Jorgen_CAB]

In my opinion it really seem dangerous to leave ships in the field without sufficient crew and would not be anything a navy would do. You would rather take the ship to a port for some maintenance and crew RnR at the same time. I would rather see some new mechanic for tour duty for crews on ships, thus making the training level of a race much more important. For each training level crew would service longer periods on the ships and thus you keep the high grade of the crew for longer before it starts to degrade because of crew rotations.

I'm not sure how long you expect non officer crew to serve on a ship but anything from 12-36 months would probably be OK. Perhaps tie it in with the training level of a race. A higher training level means that crew service longer tours. You should of course expect that about 20-25% of the crew are career officers so it would only be part of the ship that is replaced.

The only reason that I see for this new module are for large space stations and on isolated planets without a population where you like to build up a naval outpost or maintenance facility. I could see that you could use it to give some shore leave to a large battle group stationed somewhere,  but after 9-18 months ships will start to get maintenance failures anyway so you need to get them back for overhauls anyway. I rarely run my ships past half their maintenance cycles. Most regular ships of my design have maintenance for about 2.5-3.5 years and deployment times of 9-18 months. When a task group hit its limit for deployment I usually withdraw them and start an overhaul. Once the shore leave is done I abandon the overhaul and send them on a new mission, I can usually do this for an extended period of time before the ships need to perform some serious overhaul.

In any way, I don't see how I would bother much by placing a shuttle bay for shore leave on my ships. To be frank I already assumed that almost every ship of at least a few thousand tonnes had some form of small bay for docking personnel on and of. I also imagine that there are hundreds if not thousands of smaller shuttles going about in a system regularly to transfer officials, administrators, officers and the like all the time.