I've seen a fair number of people wanting boarding craft or boarding torpedos as weapons for ships. Without an actual crew representation however, these weapons really wouldn't work. With this suggestion I'm hoping to add crew as a fairly unobtrusive new aspect to ship combat, giving players new toys to play with as well as another handle to balance ship combat with. While of course balance testing would be required, I've done my best to try and come up with balanced numbers, so critique on things being too strong or weak is welcome.
Crew would be displayed as a third circle for ships, inside the hull circle. Crew does not regenerate except when repairing at a FRIENDLY starbase (not an occupied one). Like how damage to hull causes a ship to lose fire rate (down to 50% at 0% hull), damage to crew will also cause a decrease in fire rate, however the formula is 0.25log(x)+1. This means that light amounts of crew damage will cause very little fire loss rate, but extreme crew damage will be crippling(90% crew = 98% fire rate, 50% crew = 93% fire rate, 30% crew = 87% fire rate, 10% crew = 75% fire rate, 5% crew = 67% fire rate, 1% crew = 50% fire rate, 0% crew = 0% fire rate). Remember that this is additive with the damage from hull, so being at 30% hull and 10% crew would lead to 100% -35% -25% = 40% fire rate. Both together would also be multiplicative with other modifiers, so even if you have +20% fire ratefrom other modifiers, at 0% crew the ship is dead in the water. Crew health also changes disengagement chance, with it linearly scaling down to 0% at 0% crew. This means that a light amount of crew damage, while not having a major effect on fire rate, will have a noticeable effect on disengagement chance. The base disengagement chance for all ships would have to be scaled up by around 25% to balance this.
All weapons in game will have a new statistic: crew damage. This will be a percentage value, and any hit on the hull of a ship will also deal that percent of its damage to the crew (it still does full damage to the hull). For basic weapons like lasers and kinetics, this will be around 25%. Specialty weapons, like plasma, auto canons, particle launchers and artillery deal 10%. Disruptors and other fully penetrating weapons deal 100% crew damage, while missiles deal 50% crew damage. Strike craft and PD deal 10%. There would be two new weapons added, boarding torpedos and boarding craft, going in the guided slot and hanger slot respectively. To avoid the current overcrowding of the engineering tree, boarding torpedos would be added by a physics tech [Inertial dampening fields] that requires armored torpedos, and boarding craft would be added by a society tech [Boarding stratagems] requiring improved strike craft. Both weapons would ignore shields, with torpedos ignoring 50% of armor and craft 100% of armor. While they would deal minimal damage (around 10 per tick), they deal a lot of crew damage, in the +200% to +300% range. For boarding craft and boarding torpedos, Damage to crew would be modified by combat modifier of the crew on the attacking vessel.
For a ship, the base amount of crew is determined by the hull size. I'm going to go with just the base values of 300/800/1800/3000 as that's what I calculated the weapon damage for. Numbers could be abstracted to just a percentage, so that the age-old tradition of never stating *exactly* how many people are in a pop/army/ship holds. There are two modifiers to this value: the durability modifier and the combat modifier. Durability is just a flat increase in the effective "health" of the crew, so +100% durability would mean that crew takes half damage. Combat modifier only comes into play when fending off boarders or launching boarders. The modifier of the defender is subtracted from the modifier of the attacker, and the result applied to the damage dealt. These two modifier would come from several places: many of the techs which increase army damage and health would do the same for ships crew, and the species of crew (selected during ship design from all the species with military service enabled. Non Battle thrall slaves would be unable to be ship crew.) would give some bonuses for traits (lithoid, robust, communal, fertile, nerve stapled, and void dweller giving extra durability, while strong, very strong, and resilient give extra combat). There would also be a utility component which would increase the total amount of crew on a ship, similar to the crystal hull plating in that's it's generally only worth it if your opponent is running crew damaging weapons, or if you plan on going on a long and protracted campaign (as crew needs a friendly starbase to regenerate).
Ideally, the amount of war exhaustion gained from a ship being lost would depend on who was crewing it. Residents would have ~half ware exhaustion value, while slaves would have none. This would make the creation of a dedicated soldier caste for your empire actually be useful. Droids or Synths could be used to crew ships even while in servitude. Sapient combat computers would unlock a new "fully autonomous" crew type which has no crew and so takes no penalties from loss of crew... but boarding can still cripple them so it's a give and take.
Overall, this suggestion would add a few new weapon types, make protracted campaigns in enemy space be more dangerous (as cumulative crew damage would add up, primarily affecting disengagement), and add a little bit of extra flavor.
Crew would be displayed as a third circle for ships, inside the hull circle. Crew does not regenerate except when repairing at a FRIENDLY starbase (not an occupied one). Like how damage to hull causes a ship to lose fire rate (down to 50% at 0% hull), damage to crew will also cause a decrease in fire rate, however the formula is 0.25log(x)+1. This means that light amounts of crew damage will cause very little fire loss rate, but extreme crew damage will be crippling(90% crew = 98% fire rate, 50% crew = 93% fire rate, 30% crew = 87% fire rate, 10% crew = 75% fire rate, 5% crew = 67% fire rate, 1% crew = 50% fire rate, 0% crew = 0% fire rate). Remember that this is additive with the damage from hull, so being at 30% hull and 10% crew would lead to 100% -35% -25% = 40% fire rate. Both together would also be multiplicative with other modifiers, so even if you have +20% fire ratefrom other modifiers, at 0% crew the ship is dead in the water. Crew health also changes disengagement chance, with it linearly scaling down to 0% at 0% crew. This means that a light amount of crew damage, while not having a major effect on fire rate, will have a noticeable effect on disengagement chance. The base disengagement chance for all ships would have to be scaled up by around 25% to balance this.
All weapons in game will have a new statistic: crew damage. This will be a percentage value, and any hit on the hull of a ship will also deal that percent of its damage to the crew (it still does full damage to the hull). For basic weapons like lasers and kinetics, this will be around 25%. Specialty weapons, like plasma, auto canons, particle launchers and artillery deal 10%. Disruptors and other fully penetrating weapons deal 100% crew damage, while missiles deal 50% crew damage. Strike craft and PD deal 10%. There would be two new weapons added, boarding torpedos and boarding craft, going in the guided slot and hanger slot respectively. To avoid the current overcrowding of the engineering tree, boarding torpedos would be added by a physics tech [Inertial dampening fields] that requires armored torpedos, and boarding craft would be added by a society tech [Boarding stratagems] requiring improved strike craft. Both weapons would ignore shields, with torpedos ignoring 50% of armor and craft 100% of armor. While they would deal minimal damage (around 10 per tick), they deal a lot of crew damage, in the +200% to +300% range. For boarding craft and boarding torpedos, Damage to crew would be modified by combat modifier of the crew on the attacking vessel.
For a ship, the base amount of crew is determined by the hull size. I'm going to go with just the base values of 300/800/1800/3000 as that's what I calculated the weapon damage for. Numbers could be abstracted to just a percentage, so that the age-old tradition of never stating *exactly* how many people are in a pop/army/ship holds. There are two modifiers to this value: the durability modifier and the combat modifier. Durability is just a flat increase in the effective "health" of the crew, so +100% durability would mean that crew takes half damage. Combat modifier only comes into play when fending off boarders or launching boarders. The modifier of the defender is subtracted from the modifier of the attacker, and the result applied to the damage dealt. These two modifier would come from several places: many of the techs which increase army damage and health would do the same for ships crew, and the species of crew (selected during ship design from all the species with military service enabled. Non Battle thrall slaves would be unable to be ship crew.) would give some bonuses for traits (lithoid, robust, communal, fertile, nerve stapled, and void dweller giving extra durability, while strong, very strong, and resilient give extra combat). There would also be a utility component which would increase the total amount of crew on a ship, similar to the crystal hull plating in that's it's generally only worth it if your opponent is running crew damaging weapons, or if you plan on going on a long and protracted campaign (as crew needs a friendly starbase to regenerate).
Ideally, the amount of war exhaustion gained from a ship being lost would depend on who was crewing it. Residents would have ~half ware exhaustion value, while slaves would have none. This would make the creation of a dedicated soldier caste for your empire actually be useful. Droids or Synths could be used to crew ships even while in servitude. Sapient combat computers would unlock a new "fully autonomous" crew type which has no crew and so takes no penalties from loss of crew... but boarding can still cripple them so it's a give and take.
Overall, this suggestion would add a few new weapon types, make protracted campaigns in enemy space be more dangerous (as cumulative crew damage would add up, primarily affecting disengagement), and add a little bit of extra flavor.
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