Crew Availability: Daylight & Depth

Suggestions
1

The Concern:

As it stands, I have never once I had to worry about running out of crew for my vessels. The basic 2 Military Academy start pumps out a minimum of three thousand crew members a year when set to its highest quality and there is nowhere that I have found to see my available crew pool. As I understand it, when a ship is set to Conscript, it doesn’t pull from the trained crew pool at all and all other ships pull from said pool until it is empty and then fill the rest of the bunks with conscripted crew.

Daylighting the Mechanic:

On the strategic side, a clear understanding of how large the trained crew pool(s) is combined with the option to deactivate automatic conscription would be excellent. On the operational side a tab per ship (maybe next to Damage Control?) that shows the current effects of the crew level and training in terms of time to take certain actions would go a long way towards increasing the player’s understanding (and provide a host of modifiers a place to live in the DB) Say, for example, that it takes a Grade 5% crew 24 hours to operate the cargo shuttles to get troops to the surface, (all fake numbers here) and with training it took a Grade 50% crew 8 hours to do so. Or a Grade 10% crew takes 1 minute to find and fix a target within fire control while a Grade 80% can do so in 15 seconds. Being able to see the difference makes the difference.

Depth 1: Modern Mothballing

I know that the concept of mothballing has been discussed before (most recently here). It often centers around maintenance requirements and MSP usage. All of which is mechanically interesting but also does have an existing workaround via SM. In the 21st century a lot of navies are dealing with recruitment issues and expenses related to maintaining larger crewed vessels. This article in fact explicitly cites the size of the crew complement as a primary reason to mothball a vessel. From the same source, a strong comparison to Aurora arrives. It doesn’t make much sense for your navy to maintain an active complement of drop bay transports during a long period of peace. However, should an event occur (either RP based like independence on a distant world or a new NPR/spoiler) you’ll want access to those drop bay transports much sooner than it’d take to build them in a commercial shipyard. Likewise, a main battle fleet eats up a ton of crew that would see more action while assigned to patrol fleets if you aren’t actively at war. If you are playing as basically any empire that is more than a military with a state attached to it (à la Voltaire on Prussia), justifying keeping those large vessels fully crewed is an odd decision.

Depth 2: Unmanned Vessels

With the rise of unmanned systems within modern warfare in the terrestrial sphere it seems reasonable certain types of empires would seek to solve their crew issues in a similar manner. A maximum tonnage for unmanned vessels tech would also be good for crew conscious empires.

Remotely Controlled Tonnage RP Cost
75t 4,000 RP
150t 8,000 RP
300t 15,000 RP
500t 30,000 RP
750t 50,000 RP
1,000t 125,000 RP
2,500t 250,000 RP
5,000t 500,000 RP

Here, a checkbox like Conscript in the Ship Designer is envisioned which removes all crew quarters as long as the vessel is below a certain tonnage as dictated by the current tech level.

Alternatively, it could be handled through component design sort of like a ship’s computer.

Depth 3: Control Systems

One of my favorite ship design considerations comes from MegaTraveller in which rules exist for the amount of space needed within the ship to actually control it! Everything from “Basic Mechanical” at WW1 level technology to “Holographic Linked Computer Panels.” In that system you can put ships together on paper where should you lack the modern enough control panel, the size of the control panel is larger than the vessel. Imagine a mechanical Jump calculating computer! Having a tech tree parallel to (or instead of) the HS reduction by crew that reduces the amount of crew required based on a component level bridge design would be another way to add both mechanical depth as well as role playing potential to Aurora. Implications for control system requirements and boarding are interesting but beyond the scope here.

Concluding Thoughts

The access that admirals and governments have had to trained crew has been a strategic concern for centuries. Aurora does model this concern with its Military Academies producing a limited size pool of Junior Officers and Enlisted Spacemen. However, the impact of exceeding the size of the crew pool is currently an unusually silent mechanic out of the view of the player.

I also recognize that the options I have provided above to add further strategic depth to this mechanic can be easily sidelined by certain playstyles and types of empires. I am sure that a globally united militaristic empire would happily turn to conscription without blinking an eye to ensure that the ships are filled.

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The size of your current crew pool:

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Why does the number change when you change quality then? Do they instantly retrain? I understood that number to always been similar to the graduation rate for Officers.

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They instantly retrain.
It’s an awkward abstraction, kind of a hand wave of “you decided a long time ago to change the training level.”

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I do appreciate that abstraction. I don’t know if it’s a tuning thing then since I’ve never run out of crew in any campaign even when I don’t focus mil academy (deeply suboptimal I know). I still think the clarity as to what exactly a higher grade crew does in game is needed.

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I have found that using a higher crew grade runs down the crew number pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, using a higher training level is nearly useless because crews gain grade points so quickly, and I don’t believe the crew grade impacts the fleet training level at all, which is the hard one to train up (and requires excessive micromanagement and resource consumption to do so). The crew mechanics in general are not very interesting and could stand for a rework after 3.0 releases.

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I want to agree with and highlight your point here.

The problem I see, is that crew availability is a human problem. If you can come up with a way to make crew not a human problem, then many modern navies around the world would love to speak with you.

That being said, there indeed does not exist any mechanics in aurora to represent government structure, social norms, culture, patriotism etc. You have to use your own imagination. Therefore, to introduce a crew mechanic, would be difficult to do without invalidating certain types of governments and RP scenarios. Especially for trained crew, and not conscripts, since I assume trained crew are all volunteers, or are otherwise coerced into highly skilled positions in a different way than conscription.

Maybe it can be done. But it might required a concurrent expansion of govenment/race modelling. Or you’d need a clever way to make it believable/accurate while preserving the open-endedness of how different races govern themselves.

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It seems to me that there are two types of people here - those who build thousands of warships, and those who build dozens of high-tech cruisers and conquer the galaxy with them. For the latter, the available crew is not a limitation.

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I try to be the third type and build thousands of high-tech warships to conquer the galaxy. :grin:

I still don’t have problems with crew.

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10

Steve has already mentioned somewhere that he would like the crew to be an obligatory part of the ship (or something like that, I may remember incorrectly).

But on expendable ships like tiny probes to distract the enemy and check the firing range of STO, I would like not to appoint a crew, but to put an iron dummy.

I think the biggest problem for ships without crew will be ship maintenance - if some component breaks, you need a crew (human or mechanical) to repair it. Therefore, most of these drones will only be fighters with box launchers.

I have already suggested some compromise attempt - to add the ability to prohibit lifepods launch and simply consider the crew to be robots. It might not be the best idea, but it’s probably pretty easy to implement.

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The crew vs un-manned question comes down to in-game effects. The Precursor ships are ‘AI-controlled’ but function exactly the same as the ships with crew.

I don’t have any objections in principle to the concept of un-manned ships, but there needs to be some meaningful in-game distinctions compared to manned ships, without one choice being optimal.

In regard to point 3 by the OP, the Control Rating for ships was inspired by MegaTraveller, but I never got around to adding penalties for losing all the control systems.

One option is to have both unmanned and ‘no control system’ ships have penalties to response times, similar to those suffered by inexperienced crews but with greater effect.

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12

How meaningful is the inability to pick up survivors from a survey vessel and interrogate them?

I think this would not be the most optimal solution for warships, because we would like to rescue the surviving officers with good skills.

Basically, it would just save you the trouble of rescuing survivors in distant systems (optional) or from suicide scouting probes. Those where rescue is impossible or the presence of the crew is not really required.

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The Apache pilots that recently went down in the Persian Gulf were rescued by a drone and there are examples in Ukraine of medevac by ground drones.

I think unmanned has to be related to some form of control limitation, which is why we have currently have both manned aircraft and drones.

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Currently in RL, I think we still have manned combat aircraft just because senior officers do not trust computers and do like pilots as an idea of their youth.

The thing is, it’s not that Aurora players differ much in this respect from these senior officers. The idea of AI fighting for us is frightening, and not without a reason, there is a risk (small, but non-zero) of loosing control completely, while with manned aircraft it’s always a local/partial loosing control risk only. Probably, this risk is going to be lowered to neglectful with the computer technologies (AI training including) maturing, yet it may be a long way.

I’d suggest to do it this way:

Advantages:

  1. Lesser volume.
  2. Instant reaction.

Disadvantages:

  1. Lowered, zeroed or even negative Protection value (maybe an additional Racial parameter “trust automation”?)
  2. Higher cost and maint value.
  3. Needs high research investments.
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I really use that only for RP. The rationale is that a Klingon Warrior will be ready at young age due to the social environment and while less capable, it widens the pool so could be a level 5. In contrast, Starfleet would enlist only people 16yo or older, with 18 being the standard age anyway. It would take them another 4 years to graduate or 8 to 10 for more specialized positions. This reduces the pool but creates generally more skilled personnel so perhaps a level 1.

One could argue that bugs, due to high volume of reproduction, would also stay as level 5.

Yet again, pure RP for me as it stands, however, it does have the potential to become a relevant factor if properly reviewed.

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Unmanned is not the same as uncrewed though. Those drones are controlled by a team, granted one that is not in danger, but still requires manpower, both in operation as well as upkeep.

I believe we should be requiring more crew on military ships, and specifically more officers.

1 Automatic Officer

1 Bridge Officer

1 Weapons Officer if ship has any offensive weapons

1 Engineering Officer if ship has engines

1 Defensive Officer if it has shields or PD

These would be all “automatic” boolean triggers, with either the Auto or Bridge officer being one level higher. The existing modules which push up the rank would then be added on top.

This would “shift” the overall structure to require O-4 and under really though.

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I knew there was MegaTraveller (in particular) somewhere in Aurora’s design DNA! Love ya Steve.

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I thought crew grade improved to-hit chance?

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I like having crew as part of the ship and that iron dummy note is exactly what I foresee most ‘uncrewed’ vessels in my game acting as and what I tried to convey with the RP expense of the Remotely Controlled Tonnage.

Something in the awkward middle space between missile and full vessel, like a space version of Sea Hunter (see pic below)

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Crew Grade does improve quite a few aspects of our vessels. My comment under daylighting is that it is difficult to see those improvements in game outside of (and sometimes during) combat. Hence a tab showing the current modifiers that our crew’s grade is applying to the vessel.

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