Option to "Upgrade" (untrained) Crewmen to profession (after training/time)

[Noctunus]

I think all of you know the struggle finding a sufficient number of Mechanics/Engineers for big ships. In the meantime while flying from station to station hiring every mechanic you find you most likely try to bypass the shortage by assigning a huge amount of Crewmen to the positions - which are superfluous as soon as you get the desired number of professionals.

 

My suggestion is - why not have the option to "upgrade" the Crewmen who have worked in a specific field for some time to the profession?

 

For balancing reasons:

• this could also mean that the difference of the hiring cost is being charged while upgrading
  
• the number of crewmen which gather experience to have the "upgrade" option could be limited to the amount of LVL3 professionals in the field (maybe also a fraction - e.g. only 1/10th of the LVL3 mechanics are "training" the crewmen)
  
• the upgraded crewmen could start at LVL0 and need the same time 1->2 takes to reach level 1 (just to illustrate that they're some sort of freshmen)
  
• LVL3 professionals could be assigned as "trainer" training 1 crewmen at a time [edit: loosing or reducing their workpower]
  

 

This would solve some of the problems finding a sufficient amount of professionals for really big ships and add some more depth to the crew system.

 

What do you think?

[wm46]

Well my first thought upon reading this was "crewmen have levels?". The point that I didn't even know that the specialized crew from stations provided any kind of benefit is a sign of a UI problem that must be worked out before you even get to upgrading crew. That could be as simple as including a hover text on the bars in the crew menu (but that doesn't help if you never hover those bars), or maybe explicitly stating in the crew shop that those crew are better in some way. I don't know, I suck at thinking about UI design.

 

Having an XP for each individual crew member is an immense strain on memory though. Right now, keeping track of the amount of engineers on your ship is as easy as having one 32-bit number for all of the ship's engineers. If all of them need to keep track of their XP level, you can maybe store the number as only 8-bit and have them level up once the XP number reaches 255. But then, large ships can have over a thousand engineers, and now you're talking 8kb of memory for just one part of crew on a ship.

 

A solution to that could just be to have a general "Profession XP" for each job on the ship, possibly also divided between the levels of profession. Applying XP would not be done to an individual, but to the group itself, so that if you were to apply 100 engineering XP to the level 0 engineers, 10 of them would be promoted to level 1.

 

Either way, I think this is maybe a little bit out there for now. This is a pretty large scale change that only adds to the theme of a minor part of the game. Factions and weapons that are currently being developed should probably come before this is considered.

[Noctunus]

Well my first thought upon reading this was "crewmen have levels?". The point that I didn't even know that the specialized crew from stations provided any kind of benefit is a sign of a UI problem that must be worked out before you even get to upgrading crew. That could be as simple as including a hover text on the bars in the crew menu (but that doesn't help if you never hover those bars), or maybe explicitly stating in the crew shop that those crew are better in some way. I don't know, I suck at thinking about UI design.

The UI design is another point. This isn't very well designed for a huge amount of crewmen as the scale is dependent on the crew capacity and as we need a insane amount of engineers with only a few other specialists like gunners/miners or the leading positions like sergeant everything gets a bit unusable here.

I fully agree that the UI should be altered/redesigned  to have a better feeling about the levels of the specialists.

 

Having an XP for each individual crew member is an immense strain on memory though. Right now, keeping track of the amount of engineers on your ship is as easy as having one 32-bit number for all of the ship's engineers. If all of them need to keep track of their XP level, you can maybe store the number as only 8-bit and have them level up once the XP number reaches 255. But then, large ships can have over a thousand engineers, and now you're talking 8kb of memory for just one part of crew on a ship.

In fact we must have an individual crew representation right now as the specialists you hire are Level 1 and promote automatically over time (on an individual basis). Even in the script documentation you can find a representation for a single crewmen: http://stonelegion.com/Avorion/Documentation/CrewMan.html

So the option to "upgrade" crewmen is (for my feeling) just "a small addition" to the possibilities which are already there.

 

A solution to that could just be to have a general "Profession XP" for each job on the ship, possibly also divided between the levels of profession. Applying XP would not be done to an individual, but to the group itself, so that if you were to apply 100 engineering XP to the level 0 engineers, 10 of them would be promoted to level 1.

I know what you mean but for me it doesn't feel "right" to just "apply" some sort of "Profession XP" to crewmen. We already have a profession progression system which is working quite well (but is not as obvious as needed to be intuitive to everyone).

 

Either way, I think this is maybe a little bit out there for now. This is a pretty large scale change that only adds to the theme of a minor part of the game. Factions and weapons that are currently being developed should probably come before this is considered.

Sure there are many many points which are on a much higher priority level as this suggestion but that alone doesn't make it bad. I just wanted to know what you think of this feature in general (and maybe hope that the dev could leave a statement if this does fit into the bigger concept)

 

 

So - any other thoughts?

[LordMaddog]

They DO level automatically over time all the way to lvl3 witch about 1.75 productivity. No training needed.

[Noctunus]

They DO level automatically over time all the way to lvl3 witch about 1.75 productivity. No training needed.

Not the "untrained Crewmen" you can hire and assign to the professions. The whole suggestion is meant to Upgrade the "untrained Crewmen" to the profession they have worked in for some time. Sorry for the confusion.