Possibly you hear this a thousend times before, but it will nice have a crew, and this crew change stats for the ship. (A pilot better manoeuvrability, a gunman better recharge for weapons, etc...)
And of course, with ship damage you maybe lost a part of your crew.

Just that, bye

Actually, that's an original suggestion. We had something about NPC crews impacting how easily a cap ship or station might be captured awhile back, but yours is the first suggestion like this that I can recall.

as far as I can tell, all the player controlled ships are single person ships.
except maybe the behemoths.

This is something I miss in VO - some sort of character building and development. (And no, licenses just don't cut it.)

For example, Serco could make use of all the cyber enhancements, which are mentioned in the story, to marginally enhance some aspect of their gameplay, possibly at the cost of worsening some other aspect. Likewise for other two factions - I'm sure creative minds in this community can think of dozens of ideas for this.

Simply put, I want my character to get better/stronger in time, instead of current token guy who just sits in different ships at different times.

Along the same lines as crew, is something I have been thinking about for a while. Playing Company of Hero’s gave me the idea, and it falls in line with other suggestions out there. The various give death meaning threads for example. It’s called ship veterancy.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/17520
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/978

Allow each ship to upgrade based on total XP earned in it. Players select what aspect of their ship gets the upgrade. This veterancy only applies to a specific ship, and not the character, so eventually, some ships will become much more valuable to the player than others. This runs along the line of crew for capital ships etc.

Things that could awarded for veterancy would be more N power for trust, reduction in energy costs, armor, lighter, top speed, CU’s, etc.

Obviously players would not take their veteran ships into heavy casualty battles like Boarder skirmish, but might use them in general flying. Players may also be interested in developing a specific ship for special events, some with the expectation that they would loose them. Events like Deneb run, and the bus and nation wars.

This would facilitate player customization of ships, giving death meaning, and still allow us to maintain the mad ship destruction we all know and love.

NO UPGRADING!!! leave death the way it is!

Maybe you can "buy" the crew like another part of the ship, and with more licenses and reputation you access to better crew..

Are we playing EVE now?

I'm with mr. bean and Mynt on this; these sort of 'upgrades' detract from the twitched-based combat that makes Vendetta so fun. Ultimately, we're better off without it.

I wouldn't be opposed to an AI turret gunner, however.

Penalizing death may not be the best way to remedy vo's limited gameplay. Better to create actual winning conditions (territorial control/capture) rather than various inconveniences ("uh oh. i lost the upgraded ship that made up for my lack of talent.")

That said, I like the idea of upgrades so long as they have trade offs.

You (the person behind the computer) are the crew.

Just curious, but have any of the detractors to the ship veterancy idea ever played Company of Heros. It's not like the upgrades put them in the realm of impossible to kill, or even that much harder.

They are supposed to be slight edges, like +1000 armor, not massive improvements. It's not supposed to "remedy vo's limited gameplay". It's only supposed to motivate players to be more careful under certain circumstances, simply because more work went into that Vulture with +1000 armor that the 15k in credits it takes to replace it's slightly weaker cousin.

There would be no loss of existing gameplay. People would still buy tons of disposable ships to suicidally charge into the HAC gaus fire. There would just be some motivation where you tried just a little harder to keep from loosing specific ships. Not much different than the hard to acquire ultra lites or widow makers, just a different way to get that type of edge that didn't involve grind.

vIsitor, by that logic, mining, missions, storyline, capital ships, player-owned stations and crafting (list is not exhaustive) would be things we'd be better off without, since they are not twitch-based combat.

But they are not necessarily all mutually exclusive, much like PsyRa said.

I agree that some kind of reward for not dying might be cool. Also, and I'm sure this has come up before, but what about some ways to limit the need for death to be quite so frequent in the game? For example, if xp was granted based on hits scored/damage inflicted as opposed to just how many things you've blown up. The second bit i would suggest i miagine would probably cause the devs massive headaches for the next couple of years, but also what if there was a more "localized" damage model, i.e. starboard thruster at 50%, port wing destroyed, lg port disabled, power cell reduced to 70% efficiency and so forth. This way it would actually matter where you hit someone else's ship, and, perhaps, unless you caused enough overall damage, or a great deal of damage in one place, a regualr ship could acutally be quite difficult to destroy. However, if xp were granted based on the skill required to make a hit, say, greater points for hitting a smaller "target" on the ship, say, power cell vs. exhaust nozzle (i've also been wondering, since the ships are "gravitic" why are there thrust nozzles anyway?).

Probably been suggested before, but at least i didn't start a new thread!

(Sorry for the poor formatting).

I think the idea of a crew is interesting and could be used to add a great deal of value to multi player ships. The crew's "experience" could increase as the number of battles the ship survives goes up, or even kills. Basically each success increases the capability of its AI. As a ship gains experience it might do certain actions more quickly such as reacting to a hostile fighter entering weapons range. An experienced ship might immediately open fire, while a less experienced one would wait until damage was taken.

This could also add benefits to having a fully human crew aboard, since there would be no need to grind for exp. A fully player manned crew would (in most cases) be far more combat effective than an AI crew.

irrevolute: I don't think there's an official explanation as to how the engines work, I always just assumed it was some sort of ion drive. Also VO currently does keep track of what area's of your ship have taken damage, the devs just haven't done anything with that capability yet.

The 'thrusters' are supposedly part of the newtonian propulsion system (however it works... but ion drives make the most sense, I guess), while ordinary propulsion (sub-boost speeds) is done with the gravitic drives. This is what I got out of the engine theory discussions, or rather, what sounded most plausible.

In reply to your earlier response, toshiro, I don't entirely agree. Stuff like crafting, mining, and missions do not necessarily detract from twitch-based combat, but rather run concurrent alongside it. Things like ship experience and crew 'upgrades' are largely combat-exclusive, and serve only to make veteran players inherently better than new pilots.

In the current VO model, new pilots are only worse than other pilots than veterans due to a lack of experience; If one was, hypothetically, better than a veteran pilot, they would have a fighting chance to beat them. This is apparent with the licensee system; your level is not necessarily a measure of skill, but of general experience, and governs what equipment you can have, rather than what you can do with it.

Were you to introduce a variable of experience, then the proverbial learning curve would become that much greater for new players. This is, in my humble opinion, a bad idea. Besides that, experience has already been done to death in EvE, and Vendetta needs to maintain a certain identity that sets it apart from other space MMOs.

Well, the idea of temporary experience is a good one; based on what PsyRa's suggested, it sounds like if your ship gets blown up then all your crew bonuses are gone for good. With the ability to make longterm investments on your ship, death becomes a bigger issue. Or if you're a glass-is-half-full kind of person, more importantly getting that kill becomes a bigger reward. I just think there are much better ways to simulate crews than 20% off discounts to energy consumption or whatever. That sort of thing was innovative back when FF 1 hit the shelves, and when K-mart was doing it's blue light specials. What I like about VO over other games is that it's interactive, so here are *my* ideas for AI'ed ship crews.

- There are all sorts of variables regarding how turrets operate. However, since they have really strong auto-aim, and infinite energy, there's basically one good tactic at any time - spam spam spam. I guess timing has something to do with it, but if there were more options to a turret, it'd be more fun for both the gunner (AI or otherwise) and the Cap'n. You'd obviously want different people for different tasks.

- Next, it'd be the simpliest thing to implement a system of giving "orders" to your gunmen. Perhaps you want them to fire conservatively, or target X type of ships, or maybe all guns fire in synchronized volleys... whatever. Then, personalities could be assigend to yer dudes that would simply modify any predefined statistic, e.g. Gabby Jay gets nervous when your ship reaches critical levels, and fires way more rapidly, the lower your ship's armour goes. (It'd also be cool if any AI's operated with a 0.2 second delay, as most humans do.)

- But gunners should *NOT* be able to magically enhance your turrets statistics simply be sitting at the controls. It would really piss me off if some Gabby could outshoot me simply because he's wearing Bracers of +5 to Critical Hit chance. It's bad enough that computers think instantaneously, and with absolute precision. Perhaps this is strictly my opinion, but it ruins a game when the computer doesn't play by the same rules the players do.

I see what you mean, vIsitor, but this 'crew' thing would only impact ships which can accommodate more than one person. Most current fighting ships do not feature this, with the exceptions of perhaps the Marauder, the Raptor, the Prometheus and the Centaur (judging from general appearance of the ships and their roles), which could be seen as multi-seater craft, but which are still not able to accommodate more than one person.

The Prometheus is a problem here, because he is one of the more important fighter craft in the game, but I would dare to say that the addition of crew able to gather experience (which could be replaced by real people)others would not affect the twitch-style-combat balance to a great extent, perhaps even insignificantly. The Prometheus could be set aside as an exception to these ships, with it being still only able to keep one pilot alive, due to whatever technobabble reason we can come up with.

But, capital ships will (hopefully) change the gameplay of VO away from the 'solo everything' towards more group-oriented gameplay. It is a bad idea to force this, but since you can still get into a <ship of your choice> and find an opponent to duel, I think the twitch-based combat will not go away, but perhaps make some room to coexist with, or maybe form part of other combat types (conflict over resources, over terrain, combat between groups led by dedicated tacticians, which introduces a second level beyond that of the #v# combat).

And this ties in well with the idea of virtual crew members that fill in for human players in the less important roles of a ship than those of perhaps helmsman/pilot and weapons officer. Having them have a 'brain' which can accumulate experience would only make it more interesting to keep your ship intact, which is in my opinion something that is very much needed in this game.

/end rant

I know - let's just not add any features except new ships and weapons, because "it might take away from the twitch-based combat". That way VO can be ultimately different from any other game and can remain as space-quake indefinitely. Let's even drop license requirements and make all ships, weapons and batteries available everywhere, so that we can all enjoy "twitch-based combat" in its purest sense.

Well, eww to that. There should be more to this game than twitch-based combat. The suggested experience feature wouldn't detract from anything - it would make death actually mean something more than few credits wasted on buying a new ship and a minute spent flying back to action.

Plus, there is more to do besides combat (which I'm sick of already in thousands other games).

The "twitch-based combat" is becoming a general excuse to anything, and effectively a way to say "don't change anything but more boom boom, i want a simple game".

If dying has too many negative consequences, fighting will become much less fun. The trick is to balance it so you can still have an awesome 1v1 whenever you want without worrying too much about the opponent's levels, while also having many other ways to fight.