BuzzCutPsycho has very few bad takes. This is a perfect example of a guy that has thought out the long term consequences these choices will make. His solutions would have a favorable impact on the health of the game. It balances mega orgs (100 Hammerheads for 100 players would sweep anything) but it does not limit them if they are able to take 100 players and spread them over 15 Hammerheads. Very powerful, but it should be if you can manage that. It also distances Star Citizen from your average sci-fi engagements. It makes having a command ship, package based comms systems between linked ships of gunners, captains, engineers, etc. It make the game's depth explorable. I like this take. I keep coming back here. Way better than channels that only imagine the immediate potential of punching down at players that cannot fight back. This solution causes critical thinking. If you get jumped by 10 Hammerheads with 150 players while you have 5 in your Hammerhead, you are rightly screwed, but, you can still bloody their nose.
I am glad you feel that way about my channel. I never expect everyone to agree with everything, but I like to believe I have some things to say that others in the SC YT world aren't saying. Not to toot my own horn, but I have exclusively played large-scale PvP MMO games, and my go-to was always to mass the most effective, easiest-to-use class/weapon/item/etc. and get big results. Quantity is a quality of its own. Effective HP is something to seriously consider, and I don’t think others are factoring it in right now. The way to keep mega orgs in check is to challenge them on their organizational skills, to put that to the test, and reward them if they succeed. In my experience, very, very few can actually pull it off. I promise you, if AI-bladed ships are "good enough," I will do everything in my power to spam them and overwhelm my opposition with "good enough" survivability and damage. However, if taking the time and effort to crew and coordinate them is very, very heavily rewarded, I would be more inclined to do that despite it being a much more difficult approach.
You can just get 100 Wardens and completely swamp 15 Hammerheads. These types of arguments are void of reason. It's absolutely no excuse to violate a player's time and force them to spend, not only in-game money on fuel but also their precious time to fly between stations and pick up crew members. There's better ways to balance this, like making 100 NPC crewed Hammerheads prohibitively expensive to operate.
@I_Am_Empyrean that wouldn't be a normal occurrence and with enough time nothing will be too expensive. They don't need to do that all the time, but if they do it when it's needed, they'd sweep, so it's still an issue.
Sitting in a turret for hours on end is boring while you wait for a ship to come into range . Playing with a crew is fun for sure , however, finding people to play exactly on one's own schedule every time you hope on is not easy. People hope on then have to leave now your down one , two or more crew. That's why you need blades or an NPC crew, even if it's just to fill a few spots
i can already say that it would funnier than to face 5 players all in Redemeer or Tac fully crewed by Ai that gonna screw you because you play solo and only have Ai blades on your turrets.
You aren't supposed to sit in a turret for hours , you are supposed to go the turret when needed lol you are supposed to be doing things in the ship and goofing around with your friends . To be fair tho you need 2 things for that . 1. Friends which some of you don't have for some reason. 2. Actual stuff inside the ship to do lol
depends really, I play wow and we could get 40 people pretty regularly for raid nights. it also depends on what the objective is, a group finder would be beneficial, not saying ai crew is bad, but honestly its an mmo, some content will have to be for groups only, why play a mmo
CIG has said NPC/AI has been the plan since at least 2013. Star Citizen has people that want to fly their own ship, generally, and not crew someone else's. Certainly not reliably. Whether you have one person with 5 people in a Hammerhead or 5 Hammerheads with NPCs, the relative power is the same, and both people can do it. Plus, it only applies to PvP, it doesn't matter at all for PvE. As far as making multicrew OP, yes, an incentive to use multicrew is what you need to promote wanting to do it. When all is said and done it boils down to this, no one pledged $1800 for an Idris K to crew someone else's Idris. Furthermore, they pledged for it being told NPC/AI was going to be an option.
Oh no doubt that is why they pledged. I get it 100%. And, not everyone can mesh schedules to crew these ships. So it has to happen. It just depends on how players Min/Max it.
@@BuzzCutPsychoSomething along the lines of making NPCs expensive to hire and pay or AI blades with an energy cost, computer drain, things like that can help balance it
"Because I spent money on a ship so I could be the captain" is not a justification to throw game balance out the window. The entitlement of this community is gross.
I don't see how this doesn't affect PvE. If the objective is to steamroll bounty missions and get as many credits as possible in a short span of time, why would you multicrew a Hammerhead if you could bring those 7+ friends along in their own Hammerheads? It'd probably be immensely difficult to balance missions around the obvious exploitation of jumping around from bounty to bounty where you and this enormous fleet meander about while NPC/blade gunners do all the work. From an economic system standpoint, it feels like an obvious loophole CIG is exposing themselves to.
I think it matters a lot for pve too. CIG obviously wants to create raid like content with large fleet battles. How do you balance this when some people want to crew fewer ships with full human crews while others bring a lot of ships with NPCs? It also limits CIG in game design because you can't easily introduce special mechanics because you always have to make sure NPCs can interact with these systems too. It's just such a headache for every aspect of the game. Also I have a bunch of large ships and I don't mind crewing someone elses ship. In fact I wouldn't mind if CIG took away all ships on launch because real money ships just make the game so much worse.
Before balancing multicrew you need to balance ship archetypes. Ships need to be weighted that effective Capital ships beat gunships and can scare off fighters, gunship beat fighters and torpedo bombers, torpedo bombers beat capital ships and can threaten gunships, and fighters beat torpedo bombers. Once this balance exists the turret manning becomes a matter of efficiency. The better crew can level the field on the if they have a disadvantage, or increase the combat effectiveness if they have the upperhand based on the archetype. Blades should be mediocre compared to what a effective crew can do. But you wont know this untill you engage in the fight though, this alone makes mediocre blades enough of a show to scare off random attackers. That allows people to get away with an npc crew and encourages real player teamwork to be combat effective. The OPness should only exist with the rock paper scissors balance.
cig will have a serious problem on their hands if they gimp solo focused players who have bought big ships (i.e. contributed massively to CIGs funding to make this game a reality) by not giving them way to operate their big ships in a profitable way. I think there needs to be some middle ground here and the middle ground would look like this: Allow for more profitable things when the ship is manned with real players and cut down the profits from missions etc if you operate the ship with AI. But if 1.0 launches and the solo focused players cant use their ships due to no crew AI (in whichever form) then it will be quite bad. but this is still 10 years away anyways so still a lot of time to adjust moving parts.
CIG has already mentioned that there will be maintenance for components, which should include AI Blades, and for NPC crews there will be salaries involved. As long as those are balanced properly there will be profit still for people who want to do solo play while still providing a benefit for multi-crew player ships.
Enemies also wouldn't know if the ship they're up against is full of npcs or humans. So large ships will have that deterrence factor as well. Edit: also npc crew aren't secret pirates.
Personally, as someone who has been supporting this game from the beginning, and being a "light whale," one of the reasons I decided to buy, or rather, upgrade my Aurora to what is now my beloved Carrack was because I knew that among SC's key features would be the option to hire and manage NPC crews. This doesn't mean I'm closed to having human crew members, especially since the Carrack (is not my only ship, but is the one that started all the whale thing hahaha) is a small ship in the context of large vessels, but as you correctly point out, there are positions that won't be of much interest to other players. Perhaps you can have a group of players aboard for a mission that involves ground combat, and therefore have a group of marines handling that combat at the destination, who don't mind covering turret roles on the way there, which happens today. But once on the ground, assuming the Carrack or another ship needs to provide air support, at that point I lose the necessary personnel for the Carrack to be effective (we know it's not the ship for this, but it's an example that applies in my case). The other reason why NPCs are important for many of us is that many, myself included, aren't the most social and/or popular beings, or at least not enough to have a circle of friends or orgmates numerous enough to make multicrew with players realistically frequent, not to mention all the risks involved in incorporating an unknown crew into your valuable ship using the new party model that was presented. It's useful, yes, but only as long as you have at least half the crew being trusted people, otherwise you're running very high risks. In short, NPCs are important, I believe they should be more or less efficient according to their experience and this should correspond to maintenance costs (salary, food, equipment, etc.), and they will never have the effectiveness of a quality human crew member, but they allow all players to enjoy SC as fully as possible, regardless of their social capabilities which can be affected by how good we are at socializing, how much time we have for it, and how peculiar we are in terms of our character.
You are not wrong at all and the Carrack is one of those ships I think would be fine with NPC crew. My concern was always how it will impact PvP. And with all the talk about PvP in the game I have some serious concerns on that front.
whether anyone likes it or not.. I plan to play my Javelin, Idrrs, Polaris and other large multi crew ships SOLO .. with or without AI blades, etc.. It's a fucking game man.
I'm not sure if the video mentioned the issue of resource balance, but I believe that the situation where players would choose to fly a large ship manned by AI could be limited through resources. Although CIG has said that apart from limited or exclusive ships, all ships can be obtained in-game, they have never specified the price of a ship. Based on the explanation of version 1.0 during CitizenCon, this will not be a simple or quick process. For example, if a *Javelin* requires 50 million SCU of various rare, high-quality materials, extremely high reputation, and over a billion UEC to obtain, then the *Javelin* would not be something everyone has. Players wouldn't be able to deploy 80 AI-controlled *Javelins* to challenge a *Javelin* crewed by 80 players. Even if they are extremely wealthy and willing to spend, CIG may also limit the number of *Javelins* that can be manufactured or purchased in the game each year. In any case, as long as CIG can restrict the number of large ships players can own in the future, I believe the issue won’t be too big. If players can’t get larger ships, they might be more inclined to look for opportunities on those large ships, since bigger ships generally allow for more activities, and the rewards are likely to be better than those from a single-player small ship. This could encourage more multiplayer gameplay. As for the balance between large and small ships, the engineering gameplay will handle this well. After the engineering gameplay is implemented, larger ships usually have thicker armor, which means smaller ships will take longer to penetrate them. For example, an *Arrow* would not be able to effectively damage a *Hammerhead*. Even if smaller ships manage to deplete the armor and start damaging the components, the large ship's engine crew can continuously repair those damaged components, further enhancing the survivability of large, crewed ships. In addition, operating AI or NPCs will require extra resources, such as allocating additional power, producing and upgrading blades, and paying wages for food and accommodation. On the other hand, players only need to split the mission rewards, maybe provide some food. Given their low resource consumption, players' efficiency will likely be better than that of NPCs or blades, and they'll be more flexible, quick to respond, and adaptable. On this basis, if a player asks to board a ship, the owner of the large ship will likely be happy to recruit them, since it consumes fewer resources while providing higher efficiency. Furthermore, if it really is the case, as mentioned in the video, that 8 AI *Hammerheads* can’t beat a single 8-player *Hammerhead*, you can see how unfair it is in terms of resource consumption: 5,800 USD and 64 blades/NPCs can’t beat 725 USD and 8 players with low consumption. I want to point out that not just strength, but also resource consumption is an important aspect of game balance. btw, in games like *Halo*, once you enter a turret, you can quickly engage in intense combat, so it makes sense that players are willing to be gunners, as they can start fighting soon without getting bored. But in *Star Citizen*, just getting the ship out of the space station can take a considerable amount of time: retrieving the ship, gathering the crew, calling air traffic control, traveling to the destination, approaching the target, and then engaging. If you fly a more powerful ship, the battle may be over in less than five minutes, and the rest of the time is spent in quantum travel. Unless the firepower and tactics are well-matched (which isn’t always the case), battles can end very quickly, and most of the time is spent waiting for the battle to happen, which can be quite boring. Therefore, compared to *Halo*, the turrets in *Star Citizen* are not as attractive.
It could be limited via resources. But in my experience resources are hardly ever limited enough so that it matters. I gotta be honest every ounce of my cynicism is based in historical precedent
People can find crew/gunners for things like bounty missions but there’s so much more than just combat missions. Trying finding a gunner to sit in a chair of my M2 starlifter while I do hauling missions? To be able to man my turrets in the off chance I get pirated while hauling cargo. No one is going to do that. Especially with the awful profits from hauling. Even if someone wanted to man a ‘just in case’ turret do you really want to split what little profit you are getting while hauling? Same if I just want to explore the system for a few hours. I’d like to have a gunner on a turret but who is going to sit there while just exploring? Multi crew seems to be a very limited window of opportunity to bang out a few mission while everyone has time. People are going to have to leave mid session, you’re going to feel pressured to chain missions to be the most efficient as possible. Sometimes meeting up with people to play is just more stress, pressure, and aggravation. I am not saying NPC’s and blades shouldn’t come with drawbacks in the form of quality and/or cost but they should be an option.
I cannot think of a single reason why people would sit in gunner seats for those haulers. And that is the most I think blades would be used for if balanced correctly. That is just a silly notion to have people crew those anyway.
I laughed at the false choice part. That's totally Star Citizen. Simply put, Star Citizen has been writing checks that cannot be cashed with every segment of the community. They promised whales AI crew so they would buy those Javelins. They promised the top gun fans the Maverick experience. They promised the masochistic eve online fans the player driven sandbox that actually has flyable ships. They promised the antisocial the 9:1 NPC: player economy where you could simply ignore people. They promised Star Trek strange new worlds exploration to the captain Picards of the Internet. They promised the space dad with a job and kids a game he could play and do everything with NPCs. And they promised the unemployed college student bum in summer break the game they need to avoid sunlight exposure. Well now they can't deliver. Surprise to nobody. They likely realize they can't have it all in one game. When Richard Tyrer shows up with this "game for everyone" nonsense I just lol. Either he is incredibly naive in thinking this can ever work, or he's just reading the teleprompter from the marketing presentation...
NPC crews goes back way way back to 10 For The Chairman episodes when CR said the verse would need to be 90% NPCs and 10% Players to fill it out. He also said that players would need NPCs to multi-crew their bigger ships because it would be unrealistic to always have friends online to join you. He also said that there would need to be a way for friends to take control of your NPCs remotely because of how big the systems are, if you're out several systems away, it could take a very long time for your friends to join you. That being said, CIG have talked about NPC crews and AI blades many times. In 2020 there was an AMA with CR, Tony Z and Todd Papy. Papy talked about NPC crews and gave a big list of what they're thinking of and in discussion on for AI Blades. AI blades, they want to be enhancements of specific systems on your ship. Not just slaving of a turret or two. Things like enhanced mining scanner to pinpointing ores deposits, automated countermeasures, automated offensive ewar, cargo manifest concealment, internal ship security showing life signs and a bunch of other things. Those blades would come with drawbacks, and from the recent dev post, it sounds like additional drain on your ship's power is going to be one drawback. In 2022 there was a SCL AI roundtable where they went into depth on the AI work they were doing for S42 that they planned to bring over to the PU. They showed an NPC changing out fuses(long before they showed us engineering gameplay for PU) and talked about how if you hired a janitor and tasked that janitor to do an engineering job, he'd be a complete novice till he performed the job more and more to become more advanced. They talked about having to develop a UI for the player to assign tasks and jobs to the NPCs. Being able to assign certain NPCs to sectors of the ship to be responsible for. The way I always viewed NPC crews was like how in EVE we have PVE fit and PVP fits. NPCs would be like having a PVE fit. They'd be sufficient enough to do PVE missions and content, but nowhere near advanced as a player crew would be in a PVP engagement. Now not all content in SC is PVP. Mining, salvaging, exploration, search and rescue, farming, repair etc typically dont even involve any sort of combat that would require immediate attention to performing damage control tasks. They day we get NPC crews, I don't plan on using them out in nullsec engaged in org vs org battles over stations and resources. That level of risk is when my org and alliance members will be working together in a multitude of roles across a well formed fleet of ships. That all being said, I have smaller ships for more solo(alone) time, ships for solo with NPCs and ships that will primarily be used with my org/alliance members and maybe some NPCs as redundant backups. Even Jared said recently this year, there's 2 types of solo. Flying A to B solo and solo with an NPC crew. A lot of players seem to fixate on just the pvp and combat gameplay but fail to think about all the non-combat PVE game loops that will be available. They just showed us a chart with a huge variety of gameplay loops in the works for 1.0. Also, to your point about several Hammerheads with 1 player each and NPCs vs 1 Hammerhead with several players, I believe this is where they will put into place the balance of only being able to have a maximum of 4 NPCs to 1 player.
He also said that this would be the "best damn space sim" yet master modes is here, yet sniper glint is here. Things change, different groups in the community have been upset about things and had to just accept it. Your turn.
@@rtek777 That the notion of being able to effectively solo with NPCs in combat is no longer feasible. Clearly, with them not being included in 1.0, this is not the way the game is intended to be balanced. Just like the inclusion of MM indicated that high-level realism wasn't the way the game is going. Sacrificing game balance so a bunch of space dads can try to play a single player game ain't it. There is a new section in the UI they showed at CITCON especially meant to allow people to group up. I suggest you and yours get used to using it.
@@danielfeuling4162 Apparently you didn't read anything I said. You keep talking about combat and MMs, which I assume you're talking about PVP. Go back and read what I said about NPCs being more for PVE content and player crews being more for PVP. Also the reason NPC crews wont come till after 1.0 is they still need to get Dynamic Server Meshing in and stable before they start populating the game with NPCs. They've already said that several times.
@@rtek777 Source for NPCs being more for PvE content? I'll wait. If they make NPCs unable to make an effective replacement in PvP, the solo space dads who want to play a singleplayer game in space (?) will whine. If they make NPCs effective enough in PvP, it will destroy any semblance of balance. NPC crew and AI blades are an absolutely terrible idea. The only reason they're stuck with it is because a bunch of rich carebear anti-social space dads who want to roleplay Captain Picard want an MMO (massively multiplayer btw) to cater it's balance to their single-player desires. Absolutely ridiculous.
1+1=3 needs to be the rule. Without this, multicrew will never be viable. I hope CIG takes this feedback to heart and doesn't give in to people complaining to the contrary.
I personally love the idea, I'm not much of a solo player in these types of games but I'd very much love to have a larger ship that's fully crewed to handle Gunner, security and Engineering tasks. I like Elite Dangerous' system for wing-man Fighter pilots where they get a cut from any income or sales you earn or make instead of Daily or weekly salary requirments. I also like the idea of an experience tier system for efficiency. and maybe Droid members would offer a cheaper and slightly above novice level skills so they sound great as well (definitely great if Human and Droid crews are mixed so more critical crew members aren't at risk)
Love your take on it. And yeah I'm solo 98% of the time. And I have flown my fair share of multicrew ships all by my lonesome, own a few. Part of it is just outside the game life getting in the way and thats my problem, not CIG's, not other players. It just happens many times that I am not on long enough at any given time to do more than a mission or two and have to log for a bit. Not fair to others I might try to recruit for my crew. Not fair to a captain that hired me to man part of their ship. I had store creds and a ship I never flew to melt so I got a Starlancer MAX to check out and will probably fly a bunch if I like it. And I have no delusions of operating it at 100% by myself, even with blades or NPC crew, though they would help. My solution has always been to pay attention to the goings on in the server and avoid the "hotspots" and 100% chance of getting ganked routes. Can honestly say I've never had pirates or any other PVP happen that I didn't go looking for in the past several years of playing. So I know it is not hard for solos to stay out of trouble and still play and make that sweet sweet aUEC in the game. You may not be doing the current mega money maker, but can still make enough to suddenly realize you made a mil and had fun doing it. That said you better believe the times I get on with a day to play and it is a good server and the call goes out to crew a hammerhead, I jump at the chance to get in one of those turrets and have some fun with others.
You have the most realistic take on this and one I wish more had. It is very easy for people to be polarized in the modern world even with stuff as silly as "solo" vs "group" in gaming. I am for sure a group player but I realize how many more are solo. Your example with the Captain and you being unable to show up all the time, or the crew and you not being able to show up and be Captain. It is spot on and great. One of the things I hated most about MMO gaming was doing "raids" and relying on always being there since I was the tank. Or having to scramble and find somebody else to show up for heals or DPS. It was just annoying and it isn't as feasible as people think. And that was in a simple game, far more simple than SC.
I'm in an smallish Org and when we get together and fly multicrew it's always fun. But to get there is an adventure of itself. It just takes too long to go from spawn - to ship - to correct meeting point - to get into the right ship. I sometimes have like two hours to play in an evening and then it takes one hour to get into the big ship with everyone. So I have one hour left to play the actual gameloop we wanted to play. :( Playing solo still takes a while, but it's so much faster! And if I have my NPC crew, they are (I hope) instantly on my ship, especially when I logged out in my bed while having an NPC crew. I don't care how bad they are if they can just keep the ship running.
@@bastiandoen2583 that is my thought. They can be bad, but if they are better than just me and keep things going and are there when I load in from a bed log or board my ship then I'll take it. And if I can get a real crew together I'll take that too. But like you said it can take an hour even with an Org to get everyone on ship and ready to go. I've watched players try to crew ships with randoms through global chat and it always seems like it takes so long since everyone is scattered or is not geared up right. The Org I do stuff with puts up all the get togethers as pre-planed events on their discord. So we all know ahead of time what we will need and what time to be where to catch the ship/ships. Usually have even figured out who is doing what ahead of time. And even then it can take time. Always stragglers or last minute stuff.
Great video as always. I think you have a lot of great points that I hope CiG can solve in the future as we finally get some actual gameplay considerations into the game. For me, I love being a solo pilot and I do enjoy some multi-crew gameplay occasionally when the opportunity presents itself. However, one of THE biggest reasons I don't participate in more multi-crew is that it just takes too long to set up. Almost every scenario where I want to crew with people is turned into getting a pug raid group together. I don't know what a solution would be in a game that prides itself on immersive travel but I think a lot of multi-crew headaches could be alleviated if there was an easier system to get people together faster. The LFG tool may help but we will have to see how it plays out. Also I'd like to add that when there was a proper and very cool reward (f7a upgrade), the amount of people willing to group up and get into turrets was really fun. So I think we could use some more incentives. On the NPC/Blade front, I have always felt like NPC/blades will always be inferior to humans on one major aspect and thats flexability. I've played a lot of Wow and their dungeon npc system is a wonderful addition to the solo player experience. They are able to do decent dps, tanking and healing as long as its in the confines of their pre-determined route. I think the same could be applied to SC. NPC/Blades are going to be probably pretty good at 1 thing and its the thing they were hired/purchased for. So getting them to actually do a different task on the fly would be pretty bad. So like if your npc engineer gets killed from penetrating rounds from a fight, your turret gunners or co-pilot really wont be equiped to deal with engineering. Same with a co-pilot/engineer taking over a gunner seat. If you're running blades and your power plant gets hit or something with your power gets screwy, you don't have anymore blades. With a human crew, they can step up and complete all these tasks and wont be tied to just one particular duty. IDK if this would solve any issues with the NPC/Blade balance but I felt like this would be an easier way to balance. Or I could just be talking out my ass lol.
I've thought about those NPC/Blade limitations too. The difference between a human crew and NPC/Blades is a hard thing to balance. And I can see the "MIN/MAX" approach being players in crew roles and turrets being bladed.
As a solo i agree with everything you say ,yeah AI blades can help you fend off NPC pirates ,or give you a bit of time for you to run away if confronted by real players , but you should never be expected to be anywhere near a fully crewed ship . I think one of the best example in memories i had in Star citizen where even solo were actively looking for ppl to crew their ships was in 3.22 with the salvage being OP and the reclaimer being a beast . Player wer asking to crew Reclaimers , and Reclaimers owners were asking for crew in the chat , because it made things more effective by a large amount , also there was an incentive $ , the gameplay was fairly good , little downtime , the operator was busy salvaging while the cargo guy was busy enough stacking boxes , at the end everyone was satisfied . I am solo , and this period is the one i liked the most , just play with other people on the spot when/if you feel like it , it was organic and not forced , that was the best way .
@@BuzzCutPsycho it may be interesting in some scenarios , like an event with a lot going on , if you have an incentive also , X amount of kills in a turret benefit your level of some skills in game ...but yeah as it is now , its just 99% waiting and 1% action , nobody has time for that .
I feel like a small implementation of basic multi-crew gameplay would be slaving pilot turrets to the co-pilot. This gives the ship that their piloting more versatility in its attack angles
And it would make more sense, and be a more elegant solution. If every ship was, say, pilot, gunner, engineer, and the "gunner" controlled all the guns. It would have been better from a balance pov. But no, we have this cinematic crap and now we have to deal with it.
I think a lot of these issues will no longer be issues once the game is to a point where it works well enough and offers a smooth enough experience for more people to buy into it. Once that happens, there will be a plethora of starter pack timmies that realize they can't do all that much with a mustang and are looking to join one of the larger ships. People that are currently playing have to understand that most of the other people they run into also have larger ships or more ships to use. when everyone has a multicrew ship, then there's no crew left to be had. So at the end of the day, we just need CIG to start releasing big updates that work and people aren't spending all their time losing progress to game/server crashes and not really having much to do as far as gameplay loops.
@@BuzzCutPsycho If they allowed f2p player without ships it could work, but it incentivizes cig to make getting your first ship super hard and expensive so... it actually cant work
Yes Planetside 1. Such a fun game when it came out. Imagine the Original Planetside at this scale. When I hear that ghost quantum jump sound, reminds me of a CR5 Orbital Strike coming in. I see so many similarities in SC lol
As a solo player who isn't interested in "winning the game" I have a different perspective. I've joined ad-hoc groups during the various events and manned a turret or done support duty and it was fun. Day-to-day though - when I get off work and only have a couple hours to play - I want to do my own thing at my own pace without worrying about other player's schedules or availability. I also want to fly around in a Corsair (or a Starlancer or a Carrack). The key, I think, will lie in the computer size/number of the various ships and the AI role. For instance, a medium size ship with a medium computer might have two AI slots available. Re-routing power around a blown fuse panel (or other engineering tasks) or an automated fire-suppression system might take one AI slot, manning a turret two AI slots, etc. So a Hammerhead with two medium computers could at most only man two turrets and have no AI/NPC ability to put out fires. Something along those lines is the solution. For my part, I just want the ability to simply operate a larger ship for day-to-day play sessions, not solo, I realize it isn't feasible (or fair) to expect that if I buy a Javelin I can just pack it with AI/NPC crew and win an epic space battle.
People purchased ships such as the Javelin, which you mentioned, with the idea of NPC crew so I totally get it. And honestly? I do not see a way to crew those WITHOUT a NPC crew unless they redesigned everything. Which cannot happen. My prediction is AI gunners with player crews as the meta.
@@BuzzCutPsycho You may be right. Who knows? I just know I'm way past the age where being a lackey on someone else's capital ship is my idea of a good time. I want to be the captain of my own ship (hopefully one somewhat larger than a Nomad) with no pesky human crew interactions to kill my buzz.
CIG has mentioned multi-crew being a force multiplier a few times, but they seem to struggle with the basic concept. Fighting larger multi-crew ships should be a battle of attrition for the smaller ships.
I do think you've raised good points, but I also think that everything aside from one specific concern is more or less a non-issue. (Assuming we go the way they've initially planned) The issues that arise from an NPC crewed ship are the lack of expected precision for fire or flexibility from crew. I imagine this will stay this way for balance, so you can expect the 1 v X question to have a natural limit to it. 1 filled HH should be able to easily mince 3 NPC filled HHs by derth of being able to swiftly repair the random damage as well as being able to target to disable enemies faster than NPCed ships. Now, the obvious problem is that this is 3, where a balanced fight would see over double the number of enemies. This is the one concern I think needs a very direct solution, likely a limit of how many NPCs a player can hire at a time. 3 per player seems like a good number, solves all but the largest of ships crew issues, and lubricates crewing the capital ships. This doesn't apply to Blades, which should have their own costs associated with running them, and their own qualities and restrictions.
I can see lack of precision being the main drawback. However, without precision you have volume. Which was the reason I gave the 7 solo Hammerhead example. Quantity is a quality too. And, if things were "good enough" i would want to flood the field with more hit points, and more saturation, instead of precision.
As a gamer since online PC gaming has existed, I 100% agree with your assessment of the multicrew issue, and opinion that Multicrew must overpower solo play. It's the only way to make multicrew gameplay work in a game, period. It must reward the players spending that time doing that job by being the most effective way to play - because they will always try to play the way that's most effective. It doesn't need to be the ONLY way - there are times and applications for blades/AI/NPC crew. Low to moderate risk or rather mundane actions OUTSIDE of flying the ship are ripe - even likely preferable - to be NPC or Blade automated. But they just simply should never be "as good" for high stakes gameplay as a human is. Well-oiled and effective crews, strategic and tactical planning, and logistics, should be the main points of pride for any Org. The idea is baked into the name... Org... for Organization.
I remember when games were about working together as a group to achieve greater things. Now all games tend to nerf groups in favor of solos which sucks. Groups just abuse those mechanics to punish solos anyway!
IIRC the original concept was NPC/AI were equivalents to bounty NPCs levels so lone wolves can do PvE content. A PvP crewed ship is going to have the upper hand since ships have blind spots by design. I agree that fighters not designed for anti-ship roles should be a suicide mission taking on larger multicrew ships. Easy way to fix that is relegate medium fighters down to no larger than S3 guns. Everything Heavy fighter and up have S4+. Give light fighters back a little speed so they are harder to hit up close but out ranged by ship turrets. Heavy fighters have the range and enough regular tank so they can guard bombers/Ares doing ship runs or attack turrets to draw fire off them. We kind of saw that play out in the Vega battle and they mentioned fleet battles will be setup where the all the roles will be needed. There is another factor to consider. Engineering, physicalized damage vs HP tank death, and fires. To do engineering and damage control it means a ship has to be very hard to kill to make that feasible. You can come after me with your Hammerheads full of spray and pray AI but my forces are going to focus fire your fuse boxes and power plants and turrets from blind spots or outranged by anti-ship units. I suppose you can live in a spacesuit and pound oxypens all day to mitigate fire unless it causes ships to freeze up and have problems too. Pilot can't hop out and run around to do damage control when the AI fuses pop. NPCs could but they still can't use a chair properly lol. People won't mind those roles if they are fun and the only way to get certain loot in those instanced areas server meshed onto the map. AI ship in theory would have a chance since its NPC content. It sounds like though the really good stuff is like EvE, you have to work together for the biggest rewards. Me personally I like variety of jobs to not get burned out. I own a Polaris but it was always intended for org play and I was close to melting it until I saw the SC 1.0 plan. Capitals are expensive to operate and paint a target on you and will be long claim times to recover them so when it's out you better be rolling heavy. According to the game files the Polaris is getting 7 automated point defense laser repeaters that were tested on the Bengal. I can't help but wonder how many ships will get those too eventually.
You make a lot of good points. One of SC's biggest design issues for ships is the fetish for "punching above their weight" and even now we are getting a new heavy fighter with S5 guns. I just don't get it. These ships NEVER should have had these size of weapons.
If friendly NPC crew won’t be in 1.0, what will be the state of enemy NPC crew in 1.0? Will enemy NPC ships not have to deal with fires and broken fuses? I think the balance of multi-crew & NPC blades is less of a priority issue compared to the accessibility of multi-crew gameplay for time-poor and casual players, which NPC crew and Agent Smith-ing partially addressed. There are other ways CIG could address this, so will wait and see.
totaly agreed, but wanted to add: mutlicrew ships not only have crew to consider, it's also cost to get and operate, thats why multicrew 8 ppl ship should be > then 8 small ship anyway to be worth to use.
Honestly this video speaks the truth, multi crew needs to be a force multiplier. And if they do add npcs/blades those need to be limited. Maybe your allowed 1-2 npcs just to do roles players hate, no one wants to use the small turret or maybe engineering sucks, but if you allow full npc crew, you’ve taken away any multicrew incentive
Another serious problem of multicrew ships right now is lack of any multicrew UI, like targeting system for instance. When you have 6 gunners and 6 targets there is no UI in the game for these gunners to aim one target synchronously other than saying target nameplate in intercom and then let every gunner to search that target himself. If there was anything like Wow-style raid UI with "assist" keybind, fighters who came in range of HH's 20K burst DPS would pop like soap bubbles. PS Btw "AI blades" by default should have no problem with synchronous targetng at all. This is another thing to concider when comapring to players crew. Not only humans need additional UI for that, they also should be trained to use it properly .
Can you make a video about orgs, specifically mega orgs zerging over a whole planet/system? The new org stuff looks awesome, but I fear that it will end up suffocating anyone outside of those orgs.
Great video, I think NPC crewed ships are a good solution for those who just wanna fly a big ship alone. However, I believe a good incentive as to why a player crewed HH would always beat a NPC crewed HH is if in an ideal world they make it so that the ship weapons multiply the power force per player in it... then in that case 1 player crewed HH could beat 3 NPC crewed HH and still mantain an edge on pvp, as to why use player crew over NPC. They must make it worth it. which could also lead to mix between player and NPC crewed ships, getting some of this bonuses on the gunner for the player while still having non force multiplied guns for npc. There is just no other way around it. The only way to make people want players is to make it worth it by making it overpowered. Only then it will be desired over NPC.
That’s what I’m saying, players need to be "OP" for it to even be a consideration for most people. I think that's the only way to do it. I admit I do not care too much how this works in PvE. I am bias, and do not care about PvE. That may be the wrong mindset but I am being honest at least.
I think a simple solution is that AI blades should draw from the turret's power. Either not shooting as fast as a human, running out of ammo quicker before recharging or just outright lower damage output in return for always being online and combat ready. Even defending your ship offline. However. AI crewmates should be expensive to maintain with credit salary, providing full benefits of a player in a turret but no ability to engineer or do complex tasks that a player could normally do. It doesnt have to be complicated. And in terms of balance. A "single seat" hammerhead build should be better that most single seater fighters because that player is paying a premium a be a gunboat with a complement of turret coverage. Don't mess with that guy unless you have torpedoes. He clearly is paying to not be pirated.
I agree, sadly turrets no longer have their own capacitors. When they had their own cap you could really make each one powerful. Just bad ideas all around from CIG at times.
I think a good solution would be making multicrew OP (aka worth using at all) but making NPC crew really expensive to hire. You could add some nuance to this, of course, like tiers where higher-tier NPCs are more skilled but are also more expensive, etc. In the end, my goal with this system would be that it is possible to fly a large ship solo with full NPCs but its damn expensive so its not worth it for anything other than a large-scale battle, which wouldn't last all that long anyway. Of course, with this system, you could also hire a lower-tier NPC to be your gunner on a cargo ship, for instance, just so you have a little extra protection, while still being pretty cheap. It's also a good money sink to pull UEC out of the economy.
NPC quality based on price is for sure a way to do it. Makes sense, and would add a bit of "investment" to it. I am totally fine with that. But, NPC is so far off I do not even consider it, blades, and blade quality, will be the most frequent thing we get I believe. Could make blades draw from power I suppose.
Maybe there should be a limited number of blade slots on a ship and we should only allow one NPC per player ... so a crew of four can have four more NPCs on board. Despite the clear expectations that CIG have unwisely given backers, big multi-crew ships probably should require a CREW ... but augmenting that player crew with NPCs definitely need to be accommodated, since they sold the ships with that expectation.
Played with you in Planetside 2 and think people should take what you say about multicrew and combined arms gameplay seriously. You’ve seen the decade worth of mistakes PS2 made around those areas and just how difficult it is to balance these engagements when the scale of how many players and vehicles can vary so wildly. Combined arms gameplay on a massive scale is one of the least experimented forms of gameplay since it’s so technically hard to achieve in the first place. I’m glad you’ve made this channel and are voicing concerns about the combat side of gameplay from a large group perspective rather than other channels who just focus on individual dog fights. If CIG wants the massive space battles of this game to actually happen and be fun, they need to taking the advice of Planetside veterans who know a thing or two about MMO PvP.
Thanks man. I consider myself a bit of an "expert" in this useless field of knowledge. The whole purpose of this channel was to try and make others aware of what happens when you put things at scale, and how fragile and easy they are to break in unforeseen ways. Sadly, I doubt CIG will see it. Ever.
I wanted to have NPC not because I don’t want to play with other people or I fear boredom sitting in a turret, it’s just because I want to be able to play whenever I want. Log in the bed of my ship and let’s go, not waste half an hour of my precious playtime herding cats to be able to assemble a crew for my play session. Unfortunately, as you point out, npcs create a very difficult balance problem. Make them worse than a player, but still usable and multicrew becomes irrelevant compared to just flying 7 different ships; make them so bad that multicrew is still relevant and then they became not worth the hire money. As you said, one solution is to make multicrew vastly OP, but how? Give turrets a big boost in dps with a player? Give player manned engineering stations a boost to shields and manoeuvrability? Still I think it wouldn’t be enough for the larger boats. 7 people in a hammerhead is a lot compared to 7 different hammerheads… and larger ships are even worse. And on a side note: I don’t know how engineering is going to work… but if it’s so complex to be a skill to learn and be engaging to do as a player, than I have no faith in npcs (other than turret gunners) ever working. If you haven’t, I suggest you take a look at Pulsar the lost colony. It’s basically a multicrew simulator that you can play with friends, really fun. Multicrewing in that game is engaging for all roles, and it’s simpler than what SC is supposed to be. Thing is, there are npcs you can have to fill roles, but apart for the main weapons officer, they don’t work that effectively whatsoever. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but if a simpler game cant manage to simulate npcs that can substitute a real player, I don’t have faith in a more complex (AND MULTIPLAYER AT THAT) game like SC ever will.
I am willing to bet that due to things like engineering players would min/max the seats to have gunner blades with real crew. I too don't ALWAYS have people to play with, or perhaps one day I do not want one. So I will also want AI stuff for myself which is why I support it. I am glad you're reasonable enough to see that :D
I believe the simplest fix would be that.. well.. the cost of taking out and operating 7 Hammerheads with AI-blades should just be astronomically higher than a well crewed 7 man Hammerhead. 7 Hammerheads with 1 player each might not lose to the one Hammerhead in a fair fight but the cost to do so should just make it pointless. Another idea could be that AI-blades as gunners only do the bare minimum defense against small fighters and do not fire at larger ships (kinda dumb but would solve the issue to some degree)
The cost may be higher, yes, but very often in this games the cost doesn't really matter much. And I suspect cost may be a factor. But trust me when I say groups can, and will, find a way to make those costs matter a lot less. Especially with how crafting will work. Maybe this isn't an issue, I personally think it may end up being one in serious org wars, but it just may be part of the game people don't care much about.
I want to be able to have NPC crew supplement player crew. I eventually want to take an Idris with NPC crew overseeing hangar operations (refuel/rearm/repair), doing small repairs, cleaning the ship, and maybe even a few turret gunners, while my friends and I man the bridge. I want a player to be able to assume a lead engineer role over a small team of NPC crew. I want NPCs to take the turrets if I can't get enough friends to man them. I want some NPC marines stationed on the ship to act as cannon fodder for a boarding party and slow them down while my friends and I maneuver through the corridors to hopefully fend them off and get the kills. Everyone keeps thinking of NPC vs player crew as an all-or-nothing affair, and I don't understand why. If I can only get 3 or 4 friends on a given day, I'd still like to be able to take a big ship out and kick ass with them in. Or from an org perspective, it would make sense to take a capital ship out on patrol with an NPC crew with the possibility for org mates to log in and man stations on short notice.
As I see it schedule is issue one. I play solo for that reason, I don't want to be in a crew and then get a call or something comes up where I have to cut and run while others or depending on me to fill a roll. A human multi-crew should be vastly superior to a AI/NPC crew as not every best option is the logical one. I understand your point and agree in a PVP scenario but in PVE I do not see the same issues. Thanks for the video and the information.
When Im in a group you are mostly in combat gameplay, you need the best pilot and the best combat ships, that’s not me so I crew 99% of time. But during the day (Im retired) I like to fly my industry ships, turn on the music and work that minings/salvage laser or run some cargo. Where does the solo begin and end? Single player industrial ships can’t escort themselves, fix things while flying or change/collect those full cargo pods on our prospectors. Bigger ships allow more protection and capabilities but no npc crew impacts that. Flying a solo ships isn’t the answer because really doing anything properly in this game is doing more than one job at a time. Npc are that EXTRA pair of hands even on smaller ships.
@@BuzzCutPsycho balancing npc v player experience is about factoring in needs. Make npc crew a needy bunch, they need food, they need bathroom time, they need relaxation time, they need social modules and supplies on ships to stay happy. Without this they start to get worse and rebel somehow or leave. A tali can’t have two torpedoe modules if it has npcs because it needs one of those to be a social module if they have npcs. You add in the oxygen availability on ships to ensure that players can’t have too many npc on one ship to balance R&R time of npcs, suddenly having too many npc ships is a pain in the arse. Can you imagine 3 players crewed Connie v 3 npc/player crews Connie’s, where in the middle of battle npc get up to use the bathroom, need a break or need to eat. It balances it a little.. granted Connie was a bad example too much pilot firepower but you get the point.
NPCs will also be needed for ship and station defense, not just for ships. NPCs are just as vital to this game as people, maybe more so. NPCs should be our primary enemies as well.
Great take, it's very tough to keep their promises when the premise of the game has changed. A lot of people spent thousands of dollars backing a game that they're not getting, and that really sucks if they don't like what we are getting. But you're absolutely right that NPC crews, as much as i myself want them for my own ship, have the potential to completely ruin PvP balance and multicrew viability. The hammerhead argument is a great one that I've used myself. Outside of Gunner seats, they might be fine though. NPC janitors, lunch ladies, and flight attendants are fine. The only solution have thought of so far is to intentionally make them bad at PvP. Like doing 90%+ less damage to player controlled ships. Not a great solution, but gives those backers something. Btw your take was so reasonable I went back and watched some of your other vids, thank you for the analysis on the redeemer nerfs too! Subscribed.
@@BuzzCutPsycho You could say that about all of Star citizen, in a way. There's a difference between thinking CIG will give you what they sold you on, and thinking that they should give you what they sold you in order to get money out of you. Those who want their NPC crews are justified in feeling entitled to them if they bought a big ship on that promise. So I'm sympathetic to them. I just hope they never get it.
I don't hate the idea of each human player seated at a control chair adding a buff to make the ship tougher to kill and more deadly, ie. like an extra battery plugged in to get a few more pips on the power management. While as a single player I would still like to see the turret on my Scorpius or other ships at least track a target and add some more damage. How many more M2's would be doing ERT's instead of Corsair's this year if the turrets were online.
You had something similar to this before when turrets had their own capacitors. But they got rid of that too! And good point on the M2, I bet they would use those more since they aint bad combat ships.
We need more of this type of discussion. The issue I have with certain individuals in the community, like Avenger One, is that people who are PvPers tunnel vision on ONLY PvP when talking about game issues. Not just in Star Citizen but other games that have both Pvp and Pve elements, the PvP people always have a sense of entitlement or are extremely jaded. The Health of the game should encompass both playstyles and have disadvantages and advantages for choosing which route you go down, GAME HEALTH IS NOT LINKED TO HOW BIG THE SIZE OF THE CORSAIRS GUNS ARE. I understand how difficult balancing can be and I hope we can one day get to the point where light fighters can't just run rings around the Hammerhead NPC or Player controlled, but actually treat it as the anti-fighter threat it is.
I am glad you feel that way about my discussion! I will admit, I am a full time PvP player. It is almost all I do. But I understand that there are just as many PvE players. I have always wanted PvE and PvP to be integrated in some way, even if it isn't via direct combat. Think Foxhole if you ever played it and that game's logistics system. Something like that.
I agree, the overall slider needs to move to rewarding multicrew humans for playing in the same ship; maybe even perks with Guilds and factions that have multipliers for multicrew mission fulfillment.
At this point they should just give all player manned turrets twice the damage output. They could scale it based on how many turrets the ship has. That way NPC's are still good, but if you have a friend in a turret they will be having a blast.
1st, I think we're all complaining about silly things because we're board and tired of waiting, lol. 2nd, AI Blade and NPC will work well in PVE scenarios to support those solo players who have bought multicrew ships... which I will do from time to time. But in PVP situations, AI Blades and NPC Crew will NOT perform anywhere near as well as a fully player crewed ship. To me its a pretty clear cut distinction and solution. Its an MMO after all, group play comes first. But solo players will always needed to be catered for also. All MMOs do this anyway. In the end, it will all work out, it will all be fine😊
My perspective as a dad and as a player who has a lot of severe trust issues from Albion and games that incentivize skullduggery and backstabbing. Im not delusional thinking this won’t happen in star citizen. However the solution presented with the random grouping system leaves more questions than answers. The random que that was shown off at citizen con is going to be worthless unless there’s a serious consequence to dissuade outlaws and pirates trying to abuse in game systems like that to spot easy marks. Which at that point why even allow pirates and criminals if you’re going to throw the hammer at them in the most brutal way possible mechanically. (They won’t) In comes the working man and woman with a family. Scheduling is nightmare fuel and game play time is limited. I don’t want to spend the majority of my time hunting down for a crew sizable enough to just play the game. One or two people sure, but i want ai npcs to be able to fill the ranks and not feel alienated because i can’t play consistently enough for an organization’s schedule. I am fine if multi crew gameplay is overpowered in terms of efficiency. I just don’t want having a multi crew ship be debilitating and non functional if it’s not crewed to the gills. I agree that the biggest issue is the cig have not incentivized players enough to specialize in these roles. That’s a big elephant in the room issue to address.
Dont solo huge multi crew ships or try to take part in mega org level projects like base building - if you need to count on a loose alliance of 'quick join' strangers that all banded together the day the base building mechanics comes to the game. Some ships and some activities are not really designed for solo play. Its not Forbidden - but it just might not end well - there are smarter approaches
I get what you say, but from what they showed theres a lot of ways to avoid that, starting with the rating system, idk if they are going to add it to the party manager, but now that they showed it, they might aswell. theres also the fact that if you have the choice to play on lawfull systems or unlawfull ones, so if you want less trickery and piracy just be on a military system or something, Piracy should be a big part of SC and i like the way theyve shown theyre triying to balace it. There are developing a lot more the Orgs, meant for probably thousands of players so you can join a org that has similar interests and search players to play there instead you will probably find players always in game on big orgs. I feel like there should be more solo-player specialized ships like a miner ship with a big laser but meant for just one person, obviously costing more
Issue for me is two fold. I bought the Banu Merchantman on kickstarter. It was a blockade runner then. It’s a capital ship now. I didn’t ask for a capital ship but it fell in my lap. If CIG wants to constantly change the game that’s their prerogative. I shouldn’t be punished as a player and kickstarter backer because a 3-8 man ship suddenly ballooned beyond the scope of what was originally sold to me. I am not going to trade down either. That’s just silly and frankly asinine. They pitched the system they continue to assure that the system will work in some capacity to alleviate the issues they created. The vast majority of the ships in the game are multi crew. Sure i can staff some of the positions but as was stated in the video, cig isn’t selling the case of having all those roles being filled by humans is a worthwhile experience. So i will crew the roles that have the highest roi on sticking a warm body in there and the rest will be npcs. I am purely speaking as a pragmatist on this because ultimately i am not in my hayday of being able to schedule for raids. Heck if they sell premium npcs, which they probably will, I will straight up buy them for my own convenience.
@@LordStrell The BMM was for sale all the way back during the kickstarter?.. If you bought a BMM and it hasnt been released and has changed from what it was when you bought it - why in the world - 12 years later would you still have the ship, instead of melting it for ship(s) that are already released - or sell it on the gray market and get your $ back
I totally agree with this post. Make each turret powerful and really good fun. Also make it skill based with a reasonable learning curve. I’m waiting for fighter flying etc… for when I can fly in a squad to attack targets. Not interested in soloing in these. Really the blades are there to switch in when turret gunners need to go engineer defend a boarding action or equivalent,
So I just had a thought. What if Players acted as a "buff" for the ship? Just like an armor set bonus so each player unlocks the next bonus for the ship such as 2players=bonus scan range, 3players=shield buff, so on and so on. What ya'll think?
and mix it up like two seaters get 2player=weapons boost of some kind, range, power or what have you. 3seater gets a a different order so that a ship with 8 players get's smaller buffs so its not so op
Doesn't bother me but it sounds too "gamey" for Star Citizen. I imagine the "buff" could be translated into performance, such as higher ROF / Accuracy for a human gunner, or better performance and power for a human engineer. Same as what you are saying but more "believable" since people in SC care about that stuff.
@@BuzzCutPsycho Ok yea it is a bit a "gamey" and I agree. I thought the same thing when I found out about armor sets having slot buffs for a full set... So the advantage of a Human players skill should surely be apparent in comparison hands down that is 100% necessary it's down to doing that in a fair manner.. How about Blades or Ship AI are not only inferior to players but there is a chance of failures or malfunctions that require some form of service say in the form of a reset so the penalty for the non player option not only is of poorer performance but also can stop and require engineering gameplay of some kind. I think this option would be good for the 7 hammer head theory. Say each blade can only operate for a set amount of "run-time" before needing to be serviced say 300seconds plus some random fault bull on top of that. When the blade or ai is engaged in its say shooting operation, engineering, it uses up the time meter and after the time meter is gone its time for service and the ai shuts down.
9:44 " I'd rather have multiple single seat ships" - you ignoring existing CIG plans to evolve component's role in battles. Eventually there will be no "Hull HP", instead there will be "armour"+"hull penetration"+"components HP" leading to ship destruction by damaged components. Which means two things: 1) Attackers will have to keep shorter distance and more precisely target components. This makes scenario with many smaller ships shooting from distance much less likely. Attackers will have to endanger themself in close combat and the smaller they are the more dangerous this will be for them. (Not to say shooting from big distance already has it's significant penalties by projectile speed and spread) 2) Multicrew ships not only have redundant components they also will have engineers in the team who will repair(or replace) damaged components therefore rising survivability. The first question came to my mind when reading Rish post 1:47 - what about engineers, how AI blades will replace them.
I hope what you said is the case. I still do not see turrets even with those changes being able to keep up, especially if crew is moving around playing a fuse box minigame and putting out fires.
Make multicrew great again! I had tons of fun in my Hurricane (flying or gunning) when 3.14 dropped and turrets were absolutely insane, over the top, OP. I do agree that these crew members do need more to do, beyond having fun gunning. Being the second seat in DCS in the F-15E, F-14B, and AH-64D are all awesome, because the player generally has a list of duties to do. Compared to Star Citizen, where you can tab out and watch RUclips due to the amount of dead air.
I totally agree, those are some great real-world examples of what multicrew should be like. It needs to be more than just a "gunner for hire". I don't think anything they do can make that Antres seat fun, unless it was like the DCS stuff you mentioned.
I have to say...spot on. AI blades could take valuable power from systems and NPC crews could be slow to repair and have poor accuracy or fire in bursts. But yes if you have several players in one space they need to be serious threat. Unlike now they are a joke.
I have the wonderful ability where I can sit in a turret and be chill, chatting with the homies and having RUclips playing on the side or listening to music. I don't need to be the main character of the world to be happy. People so badly want to be that guy who can solo a crewed Polaris in an F8 Lightning and that simply should not be possible.
This is how a lot of people are! Everyone is on discord just chatting, drinking, and having fun. Occasionally the social event is interrupted by the need to make some explosions.
The issue here is actually rarity, not multi-crew. The imbalance is that side 1 was balanced vs 1 Hammerhead, and side 2 can show up with 7 Hammerheads. This will always seem absurd and unfair. The question that should have been asked is, "How the f-- did they get SEVEN Hammerheads?!?" ...but we know how. CIG has diminished the presence of the Hammerhead by making them ubiquitous by grossly overselling them to a small market making them disproportionately common amongst the player base, when it should be exceedingly rare. This is an issue with ALL large ships. Add to this, these ships cannot be "lost", making the problem worse and worse over time, until there will come a time where every single player has one on speed dial. Sure...you can make it more miserable for a single person to fly a hammerhead vs multiple people to try and shoehorn in some rarity, but this is really a poor band aid fix and people will just side step to the next imbalance. The real problem is that ships that SHOULD be rare, are exceedingly common...and because they are common, they cannot be powerful.
Correct. The commonality decreases the ability for power. I cannot fathom them ever limiting these things to a point where they just aren't common, even with crafting. Players will ALWAYS have them and the HH is the most common one as you pointed out!
@@BuzzCutPsycho Same thing with Javelins. Sure they will be very expensive and hard to get but eventually most dedicated players will be able to get one. Why the hell would I crew a Javelin with 15 friends when I can get them on 15 Javelins instead for them to solo. Even if a Javelin crewed with 15 players is a lot stronger then npc crewed Javelins i still can't fathom a single Javelin taking out 15 Javelins.
I think a lot of they are thinking is the economy and cost of battle. I feel 7 hanmerheads will always beat one regardless of crew setup. But it also costs probably 7x as much. But then the issue of filthy rich orgs comes up like eve. Where titans went from monuments and powerhouses to being spammed by pure economic scale. I think the hardest part of multicrew is pay. Unless they multiply pay by player instead of divide. But i imagine that creates mass inflation. Honestly no idea how id balance it.
Economy and cost is good and makes plenty of sense except when the rich keep getting richer. Which is another topic for my next video. I don't mind cost and eco for balance. But, it means players will usually just end up spamming the cheapest "bang for your buck" item , weapons, ship, etc, in the game to get the most out of. Totally separate topic I could bore you to death rambling about, sorry!
If seven guys with NPC crews show up with seven hammerheads and order the crews to target the powerplant, I'm pretty sure the multi-crew bros will be toast unless the NPCs are so bad as to be worthless.
I would be ok with NPC or blades only taking support roles, engineer, scan, med (depending on if they actually make it something useful), and maby a weaker turret and only to a certain size. Anything past 3 or 4 size they cannot use, and the higher ones have to be used by actual player.
Thank god we've got someone sensible pointing out the upcoming issues. There's a group of players who just want to fly their huge ships like they were slow-ass fighters and they don't want to have anything to do with other players and they don't want to engage with other systems and they're extremely harmful to the game and everyone else's experience. Multicrew should be broken as hell like you say.
In Elite crew cost from 3-15%. And that is a salary, so they get paid a percentage of any money you make. My crew dude has taken 1.5 billion from me and I’ve used him maybe 200 times. Most of my gameplay is with real humans but npc gets a cut as long as I employ him. And humans are much better than npc at kills of course. So multi crew npc is a very expensive option for someone who really wants it but a much better are humans.
@@BuzzCutPsycho believe me I bitch out the NPc every time see millions going to it. But have not fired him yet. They star at 2% and over time NPC accuracy goes up (like months of gameplay) and as it goes up so does the rate till he takes 10% of all earnings.
AI Blades (and eventually NPCs) will exist. The reason AI Blades are coming in 1.0, and NPCs aren't is simple; NPCs and the gameplay loops involved in that will bee far more complex. A MMO expansion level of complexity. So it *is* coming... but as to the point of how it scales, I do have a thought. I think Multicrew *will* be overpowered for two reasons: a) AI Npc's will be susceptible to boarding *far* moreso than a player crewed one. b) Precision targeting through armour (ie. NOT the hp pools current ships are) to take out components will certainly be the force multiplier you mention. Player Crew on a C2 as you mentioned need to be paid. But they double as security/gunners/cargo monkeys. AI Crew don't... yet they will be draining resources as well, needing to be paid based on skill levels and how they were obtained/hired etc. NPCs will never be as good at any of it... but could fill in, in a pinch. I honestly cannot picture anyone hiring much player crew for a C2. But hiring *escorts* is smart. On a HammerHead simply the ability to precision target and intelligently attack ONLY our enemies will help on offense... and I think when we se engineering *actually* exist it will make bigger ships a LOT harder to kill with players. fixing stuff *in the battle.* I think, honestly, that waiting to see what actual engineering and armour bring to the table will matter. And a lot of big ships with lonely people ill be melted in favour of a wider variety of smaller things.
All good points. You really hit the nail on the head with "wait and see" - Another thing too, the C2 you mentioned. I cannot see people sitting in those turrets EVER. So yes, escorts + blades might be the way to go. The more I think about this the more I think SC just has more core issues underneath every new feature or balance proposal. It makes my head spin.
As a solo player I’d find it really cool if I could hire crew for things like an extra gunner or maybe an ai to help mine in the mole something like that would be cool as I’ve always wanted to play with a full crew but all my friends hate the game with a passion 😂
The bottom line is, they want to make this a MMO. If you haven't got teammates that day, then you use your single player ship and run if you come across a crewed multiplayer ship. I also believe blades will increase the engineering gameplay requirement for that ship, so you will never be able to fly that multi-crew ship alone anyway. I do hope that there will never be a time when 7 single crew hammerheads will be able to defeat a single fully crewed hammerhead.
I'm a believer in having it both ways. Every one of us have different lives that have different responsibilities, and different amounts of freedom to play. I always felt that these ships should have been built with NPC crew that perform specific duties on the ship and respond to commands made by the player. Basically, you purchase a ship in-game or in the store, it comes with an NPC crew specifically setup to operate on that ship. Now, when it comes to Multi-crew, human players could invite another human player to join their ship and serve in one of the NPC roles which would remove the NPC from the ship while docked at a station. It is all about freedom and all the discussion about human players being better than NPC or vice versa misses the point in my eyes. There are a number of ways to play SC and I feel that solo players that have ships with up to 4 crew (and maybe even 5) should be able to get NPCs in them. The higher crewed ships should not be a priority right now and I think that is where the compromise should land. The medium ships and lower should be the focus for NPC crew for 1.0 or even sooner. Just worry about those ships and let the larger ships be more for multi-crew which opens the door for even solo players to switch it up a bit and be part of a larger ship doing some pretty immersive stuff from a different perspective. Take care of the solo players and I believe that the solo players will also help the players that have the much bigger ships. A number of solo players will join other players for multi-crew for a period of time, but once again, it all comes down to TIME. The real world has a massive say when it comes to multi-crew and that is why the solo experience is extremely important.
@@BuzzCutPsycho - I don't think group players would be forced into anything. Group players depend on players who have the schedule to play with them or they already have friends/family that they can rely on often for many sessions. I'm definitely a solo player, but I've joined in with other players here and there whenever I had the time. I think CIG and some of the fans are looking at this the wrong way. Solo players aren't really solo players when they are in the verse. Yes, we may not have a crew or seek to build one, but we aren't cut off from the multi-crew experience and could be recruited depending on our time. The whole thing is to have as many players as possible and group players need to have as many potential recruits as possible playing the game. Solo players will like to mix it up a bit by joining a corporation with their own ship or act in another position on the larger ships doing immersive missions with other other human players who aren't jerks. CIG would be wise to maintain/grow their solo players to keep them in the verse for all the group players to recruit.
To me the simple solution is to make players in multi-crew ships be able to repair it, through the engineering mechanics, whilst AI crew cannot. I think this on top of slightly reduced accuracy of AI turrets would make player multicrew far better than AI multicrew. Through the ability to repair, a large player ships should be able to increase the survivability significantly in such a way that they are as effective as multiple large ships, with only AI crews. This would also incentivize multiple players to pool together in fewer larger ships, rather than swarms of single seaters. My only concern is with such a system how do specialized single seaters get balanced. Things like the Ares, Gladiator, Eclipse, or Vanguard are specialized bombers, or heavy attackers meant to engage larger ships. My only thought, is to make them extremely vulnerable to hostile fighters, whilst maintaining their effectiveness against larger ships. This would encourage use of smaller ships in larger fleets to ensure a fleet composition that isn't entirely capital and sub capital vessels. Additionally with the ability to fully repair ships, it would make carriers crucial as they are needed to maintain the fleets fighters and bombers. Perhaps another thing that only players can do, to add utility to non-NPC crews. The more I think about it, the more I think Empire at War, is a decent example of what I'm talking about. Essentially player ships should have much greater endurance and staying power compared to NPC crew ships. There should also be much more of a rock paper scissors balance between ship classes for the sake of balance. You don't necessarily want bigger to always be better. Otherwise what is the purpose of something like a Kraken. To fully crew it and its flight wing you could have two fully crewed Idris ships.
The Ares series is one I always bring up because it should never have been created. It is a balance nightmare. Specialized? For sure, but it’s a single-seat ship designed to counter multi-crew. I cannot, in any way, shape, or form, see myself wanting to crew multiple Perseus ships, for example, which fulfill the same role as the Ares, instead of just spamming the Ares. I’ve always felt that either a mass of smaller ships should counter bigger ones, or equally big ships designed to counter other big ones should be the way it works. Your comment is great, and I’m not ignoring it. But for things like the Kraken, or any carrier or ship capable of carrying other ships, I fully believe they should be able to "construct" or "assemble" their companion ships inside, similar to how the new Pioneer is going to work with the Nomad. To me, this is the only way I can see carriers being able to sustain and fulfill their roles.
@@BuzzCutPsycho Surely range and endurance of a Perseus would be the trade off between it and 4 Ares fighters? Especially if engineering works like it should and the Perseus can be repaired by its crew. I agree that the Ares is a balance nightmare. Unlike the Gladiator or the Eclipse, an Ares does not have limited ordinance to worry about. Perhaps make it super slow and sluggish for a ship in its class, making it vulnerable to big gun turrets from larger ships? At least with something like an eclipse, its torpedo's can be intercepted by point defense, but an Ares can always stay engaged with a larger ship if there is no escort. Really I'm not sure either. I do think smaller ships need a role to ensure diverse fleet composition. But there are just so many different ships, that balance is very difficult. Especially "multirole" ships, which I think inevitably become OP or useless. I'm not sure about carriers being able to spawn smaller ships as a solution. My gut reaction is that its simply too gamey. Outside of combat as something that takes a lot of time? Sure that doesn't seem too bad. But I've always envisioned that Star Citizen should play more as WW2 in space, at least that's what it was sold as. So in that regard I imagine carriers more as something that facilitates and maintains single seaters. Either through repairs since single seaters are not capable of it, rearming due to limited but hard hitting ordinance, or refueling due to limited range.
I think it's even worse than that. From the look of it, as you go towards bigger ships, they plan require gradually increased support personnel (engineers/repairmen, medical staff, etc.) that don't directly contribute to raw firepower. On the other hand i can imagine blades/npc require a player officer to give commands like wizzo for gunners. From rich's post saying 'blades will require power' is an obvious way of balancing but it can end up in a too op/useless dichotomy.
The only reason I'm fine with people buying the biggest ships in the game is because they need to be multi-crewed. I hate the idea of (capable) NPC crews. What would be nice, would be to give the co-pilot more meaningful stuff to do instead of having your crew perform extremely monotonic tasks. I'm okay with SC going more in a MMO direction but I'm afraid of the NPC feature, turning big ships into p2w juggernauts once players wanna grind for getting their own base and guilds their own space station. The coordination that is needed to get a group of humans together to achieve a bigger task has a lot of potential in this game and the commodification of it is a dangerous direction.
I always assumed they would do some type of logistics cost. So that Orgs or groups could only have x amount of ships out at a time. Like a point system. So they could only have So many of one type of ship class out at once. Then players in a org would have to work together to get the benefit of a "group effort" but couldn't have all 100 members running fully armed hammerheads. regardless of it being AI or other players. would also mean mean if you had a solo boy form his own org, or a small group. They could field the same number of capital ships with AI as a org with 1000 players. Obviously there is holes in that idea, I'm just stating I figured there would be a logistics system in place. Or we could end up like eve where some orgs have 1000000 of the best ships and lock down areas. It works in that game could work in this too...And with the armor and other systems in. a cap ship would be hard pressed to be overwhelmed by just fighters. But bombers would break it. I thought they stated there would be a paper rock scissors things, fighters would beat bombers, bombers beat caps, caps beat gunships, gunships beat fighters. but i guess there would be things that land in-between. Able to punch up or down a bit, So there would be a balance in that way too...im tired, just my two cents.
Your two cents are good. I general I do not like inorganic upkeep systems. Such as a cap. I think the crew being "so good" would act as the up keep in that you WANT the crew, so the limit is the numbers and organizational skill of the org.
@@BuzzCutPsycho I too do not like a point system. But I'm also not sure how they will balance it. Or if it needs to be, again eve survives with super orgs. But I'm also in a smaller group of people who read about Eng gameplay, and went oh cool I can't run bigger ships makes sense. then melted them to get smaller ones. In the end this might be a wait and see scenario. If they did run points Pyro system and other hot areas might be Unlimitied. Then regulated systems might have a limit. unfortunately, no matter how they do it, it won't be pretty, and someone will be upset. if there is no limit, I can see super orgs with 1000 players running 1000 cap ships with AI. While also being able to pay the upkeep for a fleet of that size . They also stated you could give fleet orders via a CMD map. so, you might be able to be on a ship with a real crew and then fully AI cap ships supporting you. As well as they stated build times would reflect insurance times. could be if you lose your cap you have to wait a week to get it back. Sorry for the word vomit. there is a plethora of ways it could be handled bad and good. However, no matter what I will be solo or with my 3 friends. keeping my head down.
What if every ship gave stat boosts for how many real players are partied in it with the owner. Everyship would have a max player count for buffs. Say x ship max players needed is 2 for the bonus so if you had 4 players partied in it the bonus only applies at 2 still. Or something similiar idk i see alot of issues still just throwing out ideas
I am not okay with finding random people I don't know. I do have friends I can crew and play with but finding a time we can all be online only happens once maybe twice a week and sometimes even then friends I know and trust are just not available. That is when I want AI crew to be able to step in. And CIG seems to keep going back and forth about how good this AI crew will be. I've heard them say they will be as good as a player and I've heard they will be not as good. I just wish they would decide on a solid answer. But YES I want to be able to enjoy my ship even when my friends are not available.
@@BuzzCutPsycho Do you think CIG will make them suck or do you think AI can not be as good as a human player? I am pretty sure AI has the capability of being far better than any player with 100% accuracy and zero human error
It really is a simple answer… If you are going to have five players putting time and effort into a single ship, the commensurate effort should be required to defeat that ship. This isn’t something difficult to understand if you approach this from an agnostic perspective and pretend it’s not a space sim- it’s like saying that five guys in counter strike or five people in an MMORPG should have five times the impact of one person. No, we can tweak a bit and maybe not make the scaling so linear… But that has to be the guiding concept
Well. I think that the combat aspect of an ai crew would definitely need to be half as effective of a real man crew but on the exploration side of it I think the ai should be effective and efficient.
Halo's Warthog turrets are fun and effective weapons. Unfortunately, SC turrets have been much less effective than the main pilot guns for most of its development. A Connie's gunner is not a significant part of its firepower. If you get interdicted while on a friend's Connie, you might as well jump in the turret but it is not something most players start a play session intending to do. We *do* have multiple ships with worthwhile turret positions now, but the playerbase culture has already been impacted by hx.
You know I always felt the connie power should come from the turrets not the main gun. Design issue on that one and ships like it. I never put people in those worthless seats.
The problem with beeing a gunner in SC compared to eg Halo is the slow pace of the game. Beeing a warthog gunner gives you something to to for the most time of your playtime. Beeing a gunner in SC, is mostly waiting, and this goes for most mulitcrew jobs...i have hopes for the engineer though.
Well argued and well thought out point of view. I dont agree with it but I see where you are coming from. Where you are coming from is through the lens that Star citizen is only a PvP game. I get why that is, if that is how you want to play I can see why that would be your priority. Here's the thing, the massive elephant in the room. The desires and needs of PvP focussed players are completely different to PvE focussed players... everything is distorted in this game due to the contortions and opposing demands of CIG forcing people that got into this game for PvE to play alongside others that are wanting to WIN vs the other players in the game. Dont get me wrong there is some overlap, sonetimes I do want to PvP, others may want to play PvP relatively more or less. But at a fundamental level it is a different mindset entirely. And it affects nearly every aspect of the game from vehicle balance, economy, mission design, player movement speeds and yes multi-crew. The long since abandoned PvPvs PvE slider would have largely prevented this issue being a big deal. Since it was dropped then we have these issues and will ALWAYS have these issues going forward. You will never be able to get a compromise that works for both sides here. Because the uncomfortable truth here is without the option of having separate PvE and PvP shards this is only going to continue to be an issue i the absence of a slider to control PvP encounter likelihood. Many people were originally sold on pledging into this project because it was offered as a spiritual successor to games like Freelancer, on the kickstarter page it even goes to some length to state that it isn't a MMO (check the Q&A secrtion). Now I dont dispute that has changed since, but CIG can't just pretend that was never the case. Please understand I am not arguing with anything you said about the issues in current approach of AI/NPC vs player roles. And I completely agree that some of the roles just need to be made to not suck so as to incentivise players to fill them. But AI blades and NPCs do need to happen and this is wherevI disagree with your point around having to make real crew massively OP vs partial or mostly AI. That works in a game where everyone wants to play PvP all the time, however playing solo or with an under crew roster and getting bounced by AI pirates is a totally different proposition to getting bounced vs a bunch of hyper competitive PvP focussed players manning that Hammerhead you mentioned. It may be fun to kerb stomp players that are already not interested in competing with others in a game that was sold as being able to play predominantly PvE if you want to. But it destroys the fun of the PvE focussed player. And this game was supposed to cater for and be fun for both types of player. Thanks for reading.
I never think people are arguing with me. Text is toneless. Your comment is very well written. I am a PvP player, through and through. I do not pretend to be anything else. However, I do not believe in the total separation of PvE from PvP. That does not mean gankers killing PvE players with impunity. DAoC did a good job of this back in the day. PvP players fought in the frontiers, and PvE players felt the ramifications of it in the PvE zones via buffs, debuffs, etc. So everybody cared to some degree about how PvP was going. The reason I want real crew to be OP over AI crew is purely because of PvP encounters, which will be min-maxed. If players who want to win find out that it is better to field more effective HP via AI ships, you will see nothing but big AI ships. No small ships, just massive amounts of big ships, because they effectively become single-seat ships. I think for PvE, ships being good for PvE with AI crews is not only expected but mandatory. I do not think it is fair to expect a PvE player to have to crew a ship at all times with players to do any sort of PvE. Did I understand what you wrote correctly? I may not have, as I had a bit of a headache today, but I did want to respond since you wrote such a lovely comment.
@@BuzzCutPsycho I completely agree your point about min/maxxed PvP encounters and the risks of having effective NPC/AI to that scenario it would distort the meta exactly how you suspect in my view.. However, that kind of proves my point doesn't it? CIG have completely opposed demands for different scenarios. If you make the AI so bad that player crewed massively over-powers AI crewed for the purposes of encounters between two opposing PVP oriented players, then in a persistent universe where a PvP encounter can happen anywhere at any time, you get a PvP oriented player vs a PvE one; then the outcome is going to be very ugly for the PvE player, every time. Now it is at this point someone usually will point to, "what about the safe zones protected by UEE security etc? Just stay there PvE player and you won't have to worry about this?" Imagine a world where the slider actually was a thing, and someone had it set to not have PvP encounters. Well, that was what playing Freelancer or Privateer 1/2 were like (damn I am giving my age away here, ha-ha), you could go to really lawless parts, get bounced by pirates in your transport, battle through and limp to your destination in a ship about to fall apart... it was awesome. Best fun I ever had playing these sorts of games. It is that power fantasy thing, I don't necessarily want to restrict myself to safe space, I want to be able to do all those things and feel good about it. I couldn't care less that someone could probably have done those things without taking a scratch if they were a meta optimised PvP crew. I am having fun, being epic (even if I probably am not really). That encapsulates the completely different mindset. If PvE is your primary motivation, you aren't trying to "win" the game you are trying to enjoy the game, yes, I want to beat some pirates and get to my destination and complete my mission, but I am not trying to do it while taking out some other player and preventing them from completing their mission. The problem here is that a player who primarily is geared up for and wants PvP encounters to happen, even when they decide to do some PvE missions, they are prepared for it to happen and have a reasonable chance of coming out on top with no harm done. the PvE player was just trying to do some PvE things and got curb stomped by a PvP player randomly choosing to beat someone because that is what is fun for them. So yes, I agree with you it would be a problem for PvP if AI/NPCs were very effective, however it is a problem for PvE players living in a PvP universe if they aren't at least decent. The only ways I can see this being resolved is either to have shards where PvP is fully allowed just as it is now. and separate shards where it isn't. EDIT: To clarify a PvP shard could still have all the PvE missions and events, I am not proposing taking anything away from PvP oriented players. just that anyone playing on that shard would know they could be PvP'd at any time as is the case now. Or you bring back the PvP/PvE slider option. CIG made a call to sell their game to all sorts of players but didn't think it through what that actually means in practise. For PvP to fully work it has to be at the expense of PvE, or vice versa. It isn't like PvE players are just going to go away, if anything recent success of some games (Helldivers, Space Marine 2) have proven that there is a large group of players out there that want co-op & PvE as much as or even more than straight PvP. What is common to these games is that they do it with separate modes, not under the naïve fallacy that you can mash them all together and make it work. I just want to say how nice it is to debate with someone that tries to see the other point of view and accepts that not all others have the same goals in mind when playing Star Citizen.
That NPC crew will have an in-game financial cost that may or may not be worth it, depending on the price. That high fee for NPCs should serve as the balancing factor. I’m also in favor of incorporating it into the player market. The more people use them, the higher the demand will become, driving up their cost, which will again balance itself out.
I like playing solo sometimes to try and get myself immersed in the game and wold. I can go where I wantz do what I want ect. With a player crew it feels like I'm limited to doing what we are all doing at the same time. Don't get me wrong. I love both aspects of it. Sometimes my friends not on and I just want to run solo. Sure just get a single seat solo ship. But what if I want to do big cargo run or something and I want to use the big ships without players? I think it would be nice to have both. The balance will definitely need to be implemented. The AI needs to be good but not the crazy auto aim they have now. I don't think the AI should be better than a player group but well enough where it can be enjoyable for solo players. This can also make some solo content within the open multiplayer world if they wanted to do such a thing. Idk. I'm up for it tho.
@@BuzzCutPsycho I guess we will just have to wait and see how great or bad it will be. e Either it will improve Star citizen gameplay or just make it annoying to anyone useing AI. And how far will they take it? Will you be able to take your small Squad and do bunker missions? Will they help you care boxes to your ship? It would come to a point if they add actual NPCs where it be like why play with real players? It be like playing a single player game within a multiplayer game or something lol.
As long as i get paid for my time, engineering, containers, guns...idc..that and a sociable crew with hard skins Generally, if the ship says 1+ crew i'll pledge, leaving me torn over the Polaris that i love, but hesitant to commit being listed as 4+
BuzzCutPsycho has very few bad takes. This is a perfect example of a guy that has thought out the long term consequences these choices will make. His solutions would have a favorable impact on the health of the game. It balances mega orgs (100 Hammerheads for 100 players would sweep anything) but it does not limit them if they are able to take 100 players and spread them over 15 Hammerheads. Very powerful, but it should be if you can manage that.
It also distances Star Citizen from your average sci-fi engagements. It makes having a command ship, package based comms systems between linked ships of gunners, captains, engineers, etc. It make the game's depth explorable.
I like this take. I keep coming back here. Way better than channels that only imagine the immediate potential of punching down at players that cannot fight back. This solution causes critical thinking.
If you get jumped by 10 Hammerheads with 150 players while you have 5 in your Hammerhead, you are rightly screwed, but, you can still bloody their nose.
I am glad you feel that way about my channel. I never expect everyone to agree with everything, but I like to believe I have some things to say that others in the SC YT world aren't saying.
Not to toot my own horn, but I have exclusively played large-scale PvP MMO games, and my go-to was always to mass the most effective, easiest-to-use class/weapon/item/etc. and get big results. Quantity is a quality of its own. Effective HP is something to seriously consider, and I don’t think others are factoring it in right now. The way to keep mega orgs in check is to challenge them on their organizational skills, to put that to the test, and reward them if they succeed. In my experience, very, very few can actually pull it off.
I promise you, if AI-bladed ships are "good enough," I will do everything in my power to spam them and overwhelm my opposition with "good enough" survivability and damage. However, if taking the time and effort to crew and coordinate them is very, very heavily rewarded, I would be more inclined to do that despite it being a much more difficult approach.
You can just get 100 Wardens and completely swamp 15 Hammerheads. These types of arguments are void of reason. It's absolutely no excuse to violate a player's time and force them to spend, not only in-game money on fuel but also their precious time to fly between stations and pick up crew members. There's better ways to balance this, like making 100 NPC crewed Hammerheads prohibitively expensive to operate.
@I_Am_Empyrean that wouldn't be a normal occurrence and with enough time nothing will be too expensive. They don't need to do that all the time, but if they do it when it's needed, they'd sweep, so it's still an issue.
@@I_Am_Empyrean Nothing will be too expensive, given perhaps a few months at most with the largest orgs, especially in short bursts of war.
I always enjoy your takes / opinions. Typically it is well thought out and you present a solid case for the topic. 🍻
Sitting in a turret for hours on end is boring while you wait for a ship to come into range . Playing with a crew is fun for sure , however, finding people to play exactly on one's own schedule every time you hope on is not easy. People hope on then have to leave now your down one , two or more crew. That's why you need blades or an NPC crew, even if it's just to fill a few spots
Yup, no doubt. But I bet the gunnery would be fun if the turrets were better. ;)
i can already say that it would funnier than to face 5 players all in Redemeer or Tac fully crewed by Ai that gonna screw you because you play solo and only have Ai blades on your turrets.
You aren't supposed to sit in a turret for hours , you are supposed to go the turret when needed lol you are supposed to be doing things in the ship and goofing around with your friends .
To be fair tho you need 2 things for that .
1. Friends which some of you don't have for some reason.
2. Actual stuff inside the ship to do lol
When da captain hits the alert you rush to your battle station
depends really, I play wow and we could get 40 people pretty regularly for raid nights. it also depends on what the objective is, a group finder would be beneficial, not saying ai crew is bad, but honestly its an mmo, some content will have to be for groups only, why play a mmo
CIG has said NPC/AI has been the plan since at least 2013.
Star Citizen has people that want to fly their own ship, generally, and not crew someone else's. Certainly not reliably.
Whether you have one person with 5 people in a Hammerhead or 5 Hammerheads with NPCs, the relative power is the same, and both people can do it.
Plus, it only applies to PvP, it doesn't matter at all for PvE.
As far as making multicrew OP, yes, an incentive to use multicrew is what you need to promote wanting to do it.
When all is said and done it boils down to this, no one pledged $1800 for an Idris K to crew someone else's Idris. Furthermore, they pledged for it being told NPC/AI was going to be an option.
Oh no doubt that is why they pledged. I get it 100%. And, not everyone can mesh schedules to crew these ships. So it has to happen. It just depends on how players Min/Max it.
@@BuzzCutPsychoSomething along the lines of making NPCs expensive to hire and pay or AI blades with an energy cost, computer drain, things like that can help balance it
"Because I spent money on a ship so I could be the captain" is not a justification to throw game balance out the window. The entitlement of this community is gross.
I don't see how this doesn't affect PvE. If the objective is to steamroll bounty missions and get as many credits as possible in a short span of time, why would you multicrew a Hammerhead if you could bring those 7+ friends along in their own Hammerheads? It'd probably be immensely difficult to balance missions around the obvious exploitation of jumping around from bounty to bounty where you and this enormous fleet meander about while NPC/blade gunners do all the work. From an economic system standpoint, it feels like an obvious loophole CIG is exposing themselves to.
I think it matters a lot for pve too. CIG obviously wants to create raid like content with large fleet battles. How do you balance this when some people want to crew fewer ships with full human crews while others bring a lot of ships with NPCs?
It also limits CIG in game design because you can't easily introduce special mechanics because you always have to make sure NPCs can interact with these systems too. It's just such a headache for every aspect of the game.
Also I have a bunch of large ships and I don't mind crewing someone elses ship. In fact I wouldn't mind if CIG took away all ships on launch because real money ships just make the game so much worse.
Before balancing multicrew you need to balance ship archetypes. Ships need to be weighted that effective Capital ships beat gunships and can scare off fighters, gunship beat fighters and torpedo bombers, torpedo bombers beat capital ships and can threaten gunships, and fighters beat torpedo bombers. Once this balance exists the turret manning becomes a matter of efficiency.
The better crew can level the field on the if they have a disadvantage, or increase the combat effectiveness if they have the upperhand based on the archetype. Blades should be mediocre compared to what a effective crew can do. But you wont know this untill you engage in the fight though, this alone makes mediocre blades enough of a show to scare off random attackers. That allows people to get away with an npc crew and encourages real player teamwork to be combat effective. The OPness should only exist with the rock paper scissors balance.
You have the most accurate thinking I’ve ever seen in this comment section.
I did a video like this actually. Way back. Had ship roles or some such in it. Good comment.
cig will have a serious problem on their hands if they gimp solo focused players who have bought big ships (i.e. contributed massively to CIGs funding to make this game a reality) by not giving them way to operate their big ships in a profitable way. I think there needs to be some middle ground here and the middle ground would look like this: Allow for more profitable things when the ship is manned with real players and cut down the profits from missions etc if you operate the ship with AI. But if 1.0 launches and the solo focused players cant use their ships due to no crew AI (in whichever form) then it will be quite bad.
but this is still 10 years away anyways so still a lot of time to adjust moving parts.
10? You are being generous.
@@BuzzCutPsycho i hope not
CIG has already mentioned that there will be maintenance for components, which should include AI Blades, and for NPC crews there will be salaries involved. As long as those are balanced properly there will be profit still for people who want to do solo play while still providing a benefit for multi-crew player ships.
@@Tsudico AI blades also take extra power
Enemies also wouldn't know if the ship they're up against is full of npcs or humans. So large ships will have that deterrence factor as well. Edit: also npc crew aren't secret pirates.
I would ideally like for them to know the ship has real players in it when they get in range and destroyed by turrets. ;)
@BuzzCutPsycho after posting that I realized human crew does like to just shoot into space if they're waiting for targets. So there would be signs. 😂
@@Frank-costanza Pretty sure you can get the names of the crew by scanning the ship. Probably not too many NPCs named XXXl337Killer.
Personally, as someone who has been supporting this game from the beginning, and being a "light whale," one of the reasons I decided to buy, or rather, upgrade my Aurora to what is now my beloved Carrack was because I knew that among SC's key features would be the option to hire and manage NPC crews. This doesn't mean I'm closed to having human crew members, especially since the Carrack (is not my only ship, but is the one that started all the whale thing hahaha) is a small ship in the context of large vessels, but as you correctly point out, there are positions that won't be of much interest to other players. Perhaps you can have a group of players aboard for a mission that involves ground combat, and therefore have a group of marines handling that combat at the destination, who don't mind covering turret roles on the way there, which happens today. But once on the ground, assuming the Carrack or another ship needs to provide air support, at that point I lose the necessary personnel for the Carrack to be effective (we know it's not the ship for this, but it's an example that applies in my case). The other reason why NPCs are important for many of us is that many, myself included, aren't the most social and/or popular beings, or at least not enough to have a circle of friends or orgmates numerous enough to make multicrew with players realistically frequent, not to mention all the risks involved in incorporating an unknown crew into your valuable ship using the new party model that was presented. It's useful, yes, but only as long as you have at least half the crew being trusted people, otherwise you're running very high risks.
In short, NPCs are important, I believe they should be more or less efficient according to their experience and this should correspond to maintenance costs (salary, food, equipment, etc.), and they will never have the effectiveness of a quality human crew member, but they allow all players to enjoy SC as fully as possible, regardless of their social capabilities which can be affected by how good we are at socializing, how much time we have for it, and how peculiar we are in terms of our character.
You are not wrong at all and the Carrack is one of those ships I think would be fine with NPC crew. My concern was always how it will impact PvP. And with all the talk about PvP in the game I have some serious concerns on that front.
whether anyone likes it or not.. I plan to play my Javelin, Idrrs, Polaris and other large multi crew ships SOLO .. with or without AI blades, etc.. It's a fucking game man.
Do you own any shirts with skeletons smoking cigarettes and flipping people off?
I'm not sure if the video mentioned the issue of resource balance, but I believe that the situation where players would choose to fly a large ship manned by AI could be limited through resources. Although CIG has said that apart from limited or exclusive ships, all ships can be obtained in-game, they have never specified the price of a ship. Based on the explanation of version 1.0 during CitizenCon, this will not be a simple or quick process. For example, if a *Javelin* requires 50 million SCU of various rare, high-quality materials, extremely high reputation, and over a billion UEC to obtain, then the *Javelin* would not be something everyone has. Players wouldn't be able to deploy 80 AI-controlled *Javelins* to challenge a *Javelin* crewed by 80 players. Even if they are extremely wealthy and willing to spend, CIG may also limit the number of *Javelins* that can be manufactured or purchased in the game each year. In any case, as long as CIG can restrict the number of large ships players can own in the future, I believe the issue won’t be too big. If players can’t get larger ships, they might be more inclined to look for opportunities on those large ships, since bigger ships generally allow for more activities, and the rewards are likely to be better than those from a single-player small ship. This could encourage more multiplayer gameplay. As for the balance between large and small ships, the engineering gameplay will handle this well. After the engineering gameplay is implemented, larger ships usually have thicker armor, which means smaller ships will take longer to penetrate them. For example, an *Arrow* would not be able to effectively damage a *Hammerhead*. Even if smaller ships manage to deplete the armor and start damaging the components, the large ship's engine crew can continuously repair those damaged components, further enhancing the survivability of large, crewed ships. In addition, operating AI or NPCs will require extra resources, such as allocating additional power, producing and upgrading blades, and paying wages for food and accommodation. On the other hand, players only need to split the mission rewards, maybe provide some food. Given their low resource consumption, players' efficiency will likely be better than that of NPCs or blades, and they'll be more flexible, quick to respond, and adaptable. On this basis, if a player asks to board a ship, the owner of the large ship will likely be happy to recruit them, since it consumes fewer resources while providing higher efficiency. Furthermore, if it really is the case, as mentioned in the video, that 8 AI *Hammerheads* can’t beat a single 8-player *Hammerhead*, you can see how unfair it is in terms of resource consumption: 5,800 USD and 64 blades/NPCs can’t beat 725 USD and 8 players with low consumption. I want to point out that not just strength, but also resource consumption is an important aspect of game balance.
btw, in games like *Halo*, once you enter a turret, you can quickly engage in intense combat, so it makes sense that players are willing to be gunners, as they can start fighting soon without getting bored. But in *Star Citizen*, just getting the ship out of the space station can take a considerable amount of time: retrieving the ship, gathering the crew, calling air traffic control, traveling to the destination, approaching the target, and then engaging. If you fly a more powerful ship, the battle may be over in less than five minutes, and the rest of the time is spent in quantum travel. Unless the firepower and tactics are well-matched (which isn’t always the case), battles can end very quickly, and most of the time is spent waiting for the battle to happen, which can be quite boring. Therefore, compared to *Halo*, the turrets in *Star Citizen* are not as attractive.
It could be limited via resources. But in my experience resources are hardly ever limited enough so that it matters. I gotta be honest every ounce of my cynicism is based in historical precedent
People can find crew/gunners for things like bounty missions but there’s so much more than just combat missions. Trying finding a gunner to sit in a chair of my M2 starlifter while I do hauling missions? To be able to man my turrets in the off chance I get pirated while hauling cargo. No one is going to do that. Especially with the awful profits from hauling. Even if someone wanted to man a ‘just in case’ turret do you really want to split what little profit you are getting while hauling? Same if I just want to explore the system for a few hours. I’d like to have a gunner on a turret but who is going to sit there while just exploring? Multi crew seems to be a very limited window of opportunity to bang out a few mission while everyone has time. People are going to have to leave mid session, you’re going to feel pressured to chain missions to be the most efficient as possible. Sometimes meeting up with people to play is just more stress, pressure, and aggravation. I am not saying NPC’s and blades shouldn’t come with drawbacks in the form of quality and/or cost but they should be an option.
I cannot think of a single reason why people would sit in gunner seats for those haulers. And that is the most I think blades would be used for if balanced correctly. That is just a silly notion to have people crew those anyway.
I laughed at the false choice part. That's totally Star Citizen. Simply put, Star Citizen has been writing checks that cannot be cashed with every segment of the community. They promised whales AI crew so they would buy those Javelins. They promised the top gun fans the Maverick experience. They promised the masochistic eve online fans the player driven sandbox that actually has flyable ships. They promised the antisocial the 9:1 NPC: player economy where you could simply ignore people. They promised Star Trek strange new worlds exploration to the captain Picards of the Internet. They promised the space dad with a job and kids a game he could play and do everything with NPCs. And they promised the unemployed college student bum in summer break the game they need to avoid sunlight exposure. Well now they can't deliver. Surprise to nobody.
They likely realize they can't have it all in one game. When Richard Tyrer shows up with this "game for everyone" nonsense I just lol. Either he is incredibly naive in thinking this can ever work, or he's just reading the teleprompter from the marketing presentation...
Your comment is so beyond spot on I am going to post it in our Discord.
Great insight and well presented, well done 🤘
Glad you enjoyed it!
NPC crews goes back way way back to 10 For The Chairman episodes when CR said the verse would need to be 90% NPCs and 10% Players to fill it out. He also said that players would need NPCs to multi-crew their bigger ships because it would be unrealistic to always have friends online to join you. He also said that there would need to be a way for friends to take control of your NPCs remotely because of how big the systems are, if you're out several systems away, it could take a very long time for your friends to join you. That being said, CIG have talked about NPC crews and AI blades many times. In 2020 there was an AMA with CR, Tony Z and Todd Papy. Papy talked about NPC crews and gave a big list of what they're thinking of and in discussion on for AI Blades. AI blades, they want to be enhancements of specific systems on your ship. Not just slaving of a turret or two. Things like enhanced mining scanner to pinpointing ores deposits, automated countermeasures, automated offensive ewar, cargo manifest concealment, internal ship security showing life signs and a bunch of other things. Those blades would come with drawbacks, and from the recent dev post, it sounds like additional drain on your ship's power is going to be one drawback. In 2022 there was a SCL AI roundtable where they went into depth on the AI work they were doing for S42 that they planned to bring over to the PU. They showed an NPC changing out fuses(long before they showed us engineering gameplay for PU) and talked about how if you hired a janitor and tasked that janitor to do an engineering job, he'd be a complete novice till he performed the job more and more to become more advanced. They talked about having to develop a UI for the player to assign tasks and jobs to the NPCs. Being able to assign certain NPCs to sectors of the ship to be responsible for.
The way I always viewed NPC crews was like how in EVE we have PVE fit and PVP fits. NPCs would be like having a PVE fit. They'd be sufficient enough to do PVE missions and content, but nowhere near advanced as a player crew would be in a PVP engagement. Now not all content in SC is PVP. Mining, salvaging, exploration, search and rescue, farming, repair etc typically dont even involve any sort of combat that would require immediate attention to performing damage control tasks. They day we get NPC crews, I don't plan on using them out in nullsec engaged in org vs org battles over stations and resources. That level of risk is when my org and alliance members will be working together in a multitude of roles across a well formed fleet of ships.
That all being said, I have smaller ships for more solo(alone) time, ships for solo with NPCs and ships that will primarily be used with my org/alliance members and maybe some NPCs as redundant backups. Even Jared said recently this year, there's 2 types of solo. Flying A to B solo and solo with an NPC crew. A lot of players seem to fixate on just the pvp and combat gameplay but fail to think about all the non-combat PVE game loops that will be available. They just showed us a chart with a huge variety of gameplay loops in the works for 1.0.
Also, to your point about several Hammerheads with 1 player each and NPCs vs 1 Hammerhead with several players, I believe this is where they will put into place the balance of only being able to have a maximum of 4 NPCs to 1 player.
He also said that this would be the "best damn space sim" yet master modes is here, yet sniper glint is here. Things change, different groups in the community have been upset about things and had to just accept it.
Your turn.
@@danielfeuling4162 Accept what exactly? That NPC crews are still coming?
@@rtek777
That the notion of being able to effectively solo with NPCs in combat is no longer feasible. Clearly, with them not being included in 1.0, this is not the way the game is intended to be balanced. Just like the inclusion of MM indicated that high-level realism wasn't the way the game is going.
Sacrificing game balance so a bunch of space dads can try to play a single player game ain't it. There is a new section in the UI they showed at CITCON especially meant to allow people to group up. I suggest you and yours get used to using it.
@@danielfeuling4162 Apparently you didn't read anything I said. You keep talking about combat and MMs, which I assume you're talking about PVP. Go back and read what I said about NPCs being more for PVE content and player crews being more for PVP. Also the reason NPC crews wont come till after 1.0 is they still need to get Dynamic Server Meshing in and stable before they start populating the game with NPCs. They've already said that several times.
@@rtek777
Source for NPCs being more for PvE content? I'll wait.
If they make NPCs unable to make an effective replacement in PvP, the solo space dads who want to play a singleplayer game in space (?) will whine. If they make NPCs effective enough in PvP, it will destroy any semblance of balance.
NPC crew and AI blades are an absolutely terrible idea. The only reason they're stuck with it is because a bunch of rich carebear anti-social space dads who want to roleplay Captain Picard want an MMO (massively multiplayer btw) to cater it's balance to their single-player desires. Absolutely ridiculous.
Sitting here while eating or watching some yt always been awsome.
I am glad I bring some joy to you
Absolutely I want a ship with an NPC crew! I’d imagine the vast majority of players will want their own ship.
Hopefully they aren't as good as a real crew!
1+1=3 needs to be the rule. Without this, multicrew will never be viable. I hope CIG takes this feedback to heart and doesn't give in to people complaining to the contrary.
They just dont get it
I personally love the idea, I'm not much of a solo player in these types of games but I'd very much love to have a larger ship that's fully crewed to handle Gunner, security and Engineering tasks.
I like Elite Dangerous' system for wing-man Fighter pilots where they get a cut from any income or sales you earn or make instead of Daily or weekly salary requirments.
I also like the idea of an experience tier system for efficiency.
and maybe Droid members would offer a cheaper and slightly above novice level skills so they sound great as well (definitely great if Human and Droid crews are mixed so more critical crew members aren't at risk)
The more people tell me about ED the better it sounds
Love your take on it. And yeah I'm solo 98% of the time. And I have flown my fair share of multicrew ships all by my lonesome, own a few. Part of it is just outside the game life getting in the way and thats my problem, not CIG's, not other players. It just happens many times that I am not on long enough at any given time to do more than a mission or two and have to log for a bit. Not fair to others I might try to recruit for my crew. Not fair to a captain that hired me to man part of their ship.
I had store creds and a ship I never flew to melt so I got a Starlancer MAX to check out and will probably fly a bunch if I like it. And I have no delusions of operating it at 100% by myself, even with blades or NPC crew, though they would help. My solution has always been to pay attention to the goings on in the server and avoid the "hotspots" and 100% chance of getting ganked routes. Can honestly say I've never had pirates or any other PVP happen that I didn't go looking for in the past several years of playing. So I know it is not hard for solos to stay out of trouble and still play and make that sweet sweet aUEC in the game. You may not be doing the current mega money maker, but can still make enough to suddenly realize you made a mil and had fun doing it.
That said you better believe the times I get on with a day to play and it is a good server and the call goes out to crew a hammerhead, I jump at the chance to get in one of those turrets and have some fun with others.
You have the most realistic take on this and one I wish more had. It is very easy for people to be polarized in the modern world even with stuff as silly as "solo" vs "group" in gaming. I am for sure a group player but I realize how many more are solo. Your example with the Captain and you being unable to show up all the time, or the crew and you not being able to show up and be Captain. It is spot on and great. One of the things I hated most about MMO gaming was doing "raids" and relying on always being there since I was the tank. Or having to scramble and find somebody else to show up for heals or DPS. It was just annoying and it isn't as feasible as people think. And that was in a simple game, far more simple than SC.
I'm in an smallish Org and when we get together and fly multicrew it's always fun. But to get there is an adventure of itself. It just takes too long to go from spawn - to ship - to correct meeting point - to get into the right ship. I sometimes have like two hours to play in an evening and then it takes one hour to get into the big ship with everyone. So I have one hour left to play the actual gameloop we wanted to play. :(
Playing solo still takes a while, but it's so much faster! And if I have my NPC crew, they are (I hope) instantly on my ship, especially when I logged out in my bed while having an NPC crew. I don't care how bad they are if they can just keep the ship running.
@@bastiandoen2583 that is my thought. They can be bad, but if they are better than just me and keep things going and are there when I load in from a bed log or board my ship then I'll take it. And if I can get a real crew together I'll take that too. But like you said it can take an hour even with an Org to get everyone on ship and ready to go. I've watched players try to crew ships with randoms through global chat and it always seems like it takes so long since everyone is scattered or is not geared up right.
The Org I do stuff with puts up all the get togethers as pre-planed events on their discord. So we all know ahead of time what we will need and what time to be where to catch the ship/ships. Usually have even figured out who is doing what ahead of time. And even then it can take time. Always stragglers or last minute stuff.
Great video as always. I think you have a lot of great points that I hope CiG can solve in the future as we finally get some actual gameplay considerations into the game.
For me, I love being a solo pilot and I do enjoy some multi-crew gameplay occasionally when the opportunity presents itself. However, one of THE biggest reasons I don't participate in more multi-crew is that it just takes too long to set up. Almost every scenario where I want to crew with people is turned into getting a pug raid group together. I don't know what a solution would be in a game that prides itself on immersive travel but I think a lot of multi-crew headaches could be alleviated if there was an easier system to get people together faster. The LFG tool may help but we will have to see how it plays out. Also I'd like to add that when there was a proper and very cool reward (f7a upgrade), the amount of people willing to group up and get into turrets was really fun. So I think we could use some more incentives.
On the NPC/Blade front, I have always felt like NPC/blades will always be inferior to humans on one major aspect and thats flexability. I've played a lot of Wow and their dungeon npc system is a wonderful addition to the solo player experience. They are able to do decent dps, tanking and healing as long as its in the confines of their pre-determined route. I think the same could be applied to SC. NPC/Blades are going to be probably pretty good at 1 thing and its the thing they were hired/purchased for. So getting them to actually do a different task on the fly would be pretty bad. So like if your npc engineer gets killed from penetrating rounds from a fight, your turret gunners or co-pilot really wont be equiped to deal with engineering. Same with a co-pilot/engineer taking over a gunner seat. If you're running blades and your power plant gets hit or something with your power gets screwy, you don't have anymore blades. With a human crew, they can step up and complete all these tasks and wont be tied to just one particular duty.
IDK if this would solve any issues with the NPC/Blade balance but I felt like this would be an easier way to balance. Or I could just be talking out my ass lol.
I've thought about those NPC/Blade limitations too. The difference between a human crew and NPC/Blades is a hard thing to balance. And I can see the "MIN/MAX" approach being players in crew roles and turrets being bladed.
Nicely put, and I'm usually a solo player in a multi-crew ship.
Thank you. I'm not ignorant to the need. Just concerned about the balance on both sides.
As a solo i agree with everything you say ,yeah AI blades can help you fend off NPC pirates ,or give you a bit of time for you to run away if confronted by real players , but you should never be expected to be anywhere near a fully crewed ship .
I think one of the best example in memories i had in Star citizen where even solo were actively looking for ppl to crew their ships was in 3.22 with the salvage being OP and the reclaimer being a beast .
Player wer asking to crew Reclaimers , and Reclaimers owners were asking for crew in the chat , because it made things more effective by a large amount , also there was an incentive $ , the gameplay was fairly good , little downtime , the operator was busy salvaging while the cargo guy was busy enough stacking boxes , at the end everyone was satisfied .
I am solo , and this period is the one i liked the most , just play with other people on the spot when/if you feel like it , it was organic and not forced , that was the best way .
OH yeah nobody wants to gun. I get it. I think turrets being manned was a bad idea personally and it shows
@@BuzzCutPsycho it may be interesting in some scenarios , like an event with a lot going on , if you have an incentive also , X amount of kills in a turret benefit your level of some skills in game ...but yeah as it is now , its just 99% waiting and 1% action , nobody has time for that .
I feel like a small implementation of basic multi-crew gameplay would be slaving pilot turrets to the co-pilot. This gives the ship that their piloting more versatility in its attack angles
And it would make more sense, and be a more elegant solution. If every ship was, say, pilot, gunner, engineer, and the "gunner" controlled all the guns. It would have been better from a balance pov. But no, we have this cinematic crap and now we have to deal with it.
I think a lot of these issues will no longer be issues once the game is to a point where it works well enough and offers a smooth enough experience for more people to buy into it. Once that happens, there will be a plethora of starter pack timmies that realize they can't do all that much with a mustang and are looking to join one of the larger ships. People that are currently playing have to understand that most of the other people they run into also have larger ships or more ships to use. when everyone has a multicrew ship, then there's no crew left to be had. So at the end of the day, we just need CIG to start releasing big updates that work and people aren't spending all their time losing progress to game/server crashes and not really having much to do as far as gameplay loops.
Good point. Now, imagine if it was an awful F2P games and F2P players just started without ships?!? There is your answer to multicrew!
Sarcasm, btw.
@@BuzzCutPsycho Buzz please, I was eating. blehhhh
@@BuzzCutPsycho If they allowed f2p player without ships it could work, but it incentivizes cig to make getting your first ship super hard and expensive so... it actually cant work
Yes Planetside 1. Such a fun game when it came out. Imagine the Original Planetside at this scale. When I hear that ghost quantum jump sound, reminds me of a CR5 Orbital Strike coming in. I see so many similarities in SC lol
PS1 solved most of the problems game face today!
As a solo player who isn't interested in "winning the game" I have a different perspective. I've joined ad-hoc groups during the various events and manned a turret or done support duty and it was fun. Day-to-day though - when I get off work and only have a couple hours to play - I want to do my own thing at my own pace without worrying about other player's schedules or availability. I also want to fly around in a Corsair (or a Starlancer or a Carrack).
The key, I think, will lie in the computer size/number of the various ships and the AI role. For instance, a medium size ship with a medium computer might have two AI slots available. Re-routing power around a blown fuse panel (or other engineering tasks) or an automated fire-suppression system might take one AI slot, manning a turret two AI slots, etc. So a Hammerhead with two medium computers could at most only man two turrets and have no AI/NPC ability to put out fires. Something along those lines is the solution.
For my part, I just want the ability to simply operate a larger ship for day-to-day play sessions, not solo, I realize it isn't feasible (or fair) to expect that if I buy a Javelin I can just pack it with AI/NPC crew and win an epic space battle.
People purchased ships such as the Javelin, which you mentioned, with the idea of NPC crew so I totally get it. And honestly? I do not see a way to crew those WITHOUT a NPC crew unless they redesigned everything. Which cannot happen.
My prediction is AI gunners with player crews as the meta.
@@BuzzCutPsycho You may be right. Who knows? I just know I'm way past the age where being a lackey on someone else's capital ship is my idea of a good time. I want to be the captain of my own ship (hopefully one somewhat larger than a Nomad) with no pesky human crew interactions to kill my buzz.
CIG has mentioned multi-crew being a force multiplier a few times, but they seem to struggle with the basic concept. Fighting larger multi-crew ships should be a battle of attrition for the smaller ships.
They don't get the concept. AT ALL.
Great take. i don't have anything better in my mind so i backup your ideas 😅👍
The comment is good enough support!
I do think you've raised good points, but I also think that everything aside from one specific concern is more or less a non-issue. (Assuming we go the way they've initially planned)
The issues that arise from an NPC crewed ship are the lack of expected precision for fire or flexibility from crew. I imagine this will stay this way for balance, so you can expect the 1 v X question to have a natural limit to it. 1 filled HH should be able to easily mince 3 NPC filled HHs by derth of being able to swiftly repair the random damage as well as being able to target to disable enemies faster than NPCed ships. Now, the obvious problem is that this is 3, where a balanced fight would see over double the number of enemies. This is the one concern I think needs a very direct solution, likely a limit of how many NPCs a player can hire at a time. 3 per player seems like a good number, solves all but the largest of ships crew issues, and lubricates crewing the capital ships. This doesn't apply to Blades, which should have their own costs associated with running them, and their own qualities and restrictions.
I can see lack of precision being the main drawback. However, without precision you have volume. Which was the reason I gave the 7 solo Hammerhead example. Quantity is a quality too. And, if things were "good enough" i would want to flood the field with more hit points, and more saturation, instead of precision.
As a gamer since online PC gaming has existed, I 100% agree with your assessment of the multicrew issue, and opinion that Multicrew must overpower solo play. It's the only way to make multicrew gameplay work in a game, period. It must reward the players spending that time doing that job by being the most effective way to play - because they will always try to play the way that's most effective. It doesn't need to be the ONLY way - there are times and applications for blades/AI/NPC crew. Low to moderate risk or rather mundane actions OUTSIDE of flying the ship are ripe - even likely preferable - to be NPC or Blade automated. But they just simply should never be "as good" for high stakes gameplay as a human is. Well-oiled and effective crews, strategic and tactical planning, and logistics, should be the main points of pride for any Org. The idea is baked into the name... Org... for Organization.
I remember when games were about working together as a group to achieve greater things. Now all games tend to nerf groups in favor of solos which sucks. Groups just abuse those mechanics to punish solos anyway!
IIRC the original concept was NPC/AI were equivalents to bounty NPCs levels so lone wolves can do PvE content. A PvP crewed ship is going to have the upper hand since ships have blind spots by design. I agree that fighters not designed for anti-ship roles should be a suicide mission taking on larger multicrew ships. Easy way to fix that is relegate medium fighters down to no larger than S3 guns. Everything Heavy fighter and up have S4+. Give light fighters back a little speed so they are harder to hit up close but out ranged by ship turrets. Heavy fighters have the range and enough regular tank so they can guard bombers/Ares doing ship runs or attack turrets to draw fire off them. We kind of saw that play out in the Vega battle and they mentioned fleet battles will be setup where the all the roles will be needed.
There is another factor to consider. Engineering, physicalized damage vs HP tank death, and fires. To do engineering and damage control it means a ship has to be very hard to kill to make that feasible. You can come after me with your Hammerheads full of spray and pray AI but my forces are going to focus fire your fuse boxes and power plants and turrets from blind spots or outranged by anti-ship units. I suppose you can live in a spacesuit and pound oxypens all day to mitigate fire unless it causes ships to freeze up and have problems too. Pilot can't hop out and run around to do damage control when the AI fuses pop. NPCs could but they still can't use a chair properly lol. People won't mind those roles if they are fun and the only way to get certain loot in those instanced areas server meshed onto the map. AI ship in theory would have a chance since its NPC content. It sounds like though the really good stuff is like EvE, you have to work together for the biggest rewards.
Me personally I like variety of jobs to not get burned out. I own a Polaris but it was always intended for org play and I was close to melting it until I saw the SC 1.0 plan. Capitals are expensive to operate and paint a target on you and will be long claim times to recover them so when it's out you better be rolling heavy. According to the game files the Polaris is getting 7 automated point defense laser repeaters that were tested on the Bengal. I can't help but wonder how many ships will get those too eventually.
You make a lot of good points. One of SC's biggest design issues for ships is the fetish for "punching above their weight" and even now we are getting a new heavy fighter with S5 guns. I just don't get it. These ships NEVER should have had these size of weapons.
If friendly NPC crew won’t be in 1.0, what will be the state of enemy NPC crew in 1.0? Will enemy NPC ships not have to deal with fires and broken fuses?
I think the balance of multi-crew & NPC blades is less of a priority issue compared to the accessibility of multi-crew gameplay for time-poor and casual players, which NPC crew and Agent Smith-ing partially addressed. There are other ways CIG could address this, so will wait and see.
Waiting and seeing is all we can do. I can however see turrets being bladed and players doing the other duties.
totaly agreed, but wanted to add:
mutlicrew ships not only have crew to consider, it's also cost to get and operate, thats why multicrew 8 ppl ship should be > then 8 small ship anyway to be worth to use.
That makes a lot of sense
Honestly this video speaks the truth, multi crew needs to be a force multiplier. And if they do add npcs/blades those need to be limited.
Maybe your allowed 1-2 npcs just to do roles players hate, no one wants to use the small turret or maybe engineering sucks, but if you allow full npc crew, you’ve taken away any multicrew incentive
It is a delicate balance and one I am not convinced they can actually do.
Another serious problem of multicrew ships right now is lack of any multicrew UI, like targeting system for instance. When you have 6 gunners and 6 targets there is no UI in the game for these gunners to aim one target synchronously other than saying target nameplate in intercom and then let every gunner to search that target himself. If there was anything like Wow-style raid UI with "assist" keybind, fighters who came in range of HH's 20K burst DPS would pop like soap bubbles.
PS Btw "AI blades" by default should have no problem with synchronous targetng at all. This is another thing to concider when comapring to players crew. Not only humans need additional UI for that, they also should be trained to use it properly .
The UI is TERRIBLE. And has NO organizational value whatsoever.
Great points you bring up here.
Thanks!
Can you make a video about orgs, specifically mega orgs zerging over a whole planet/system? The new org stuff looks awesome, but I fear that it will end up suffocating anyone outside of those orgs.
Next one.
@@BuzzCutPsycho 👑
Great video, I think NPC crewed ships are a good solution for those who just wanna fly a big ship alone. However, I believe a good incentive as to why a player crewed HH would always beat a NPC crewed HH is if in an ideal world they make it so that the ship weapons multiply the power force per player in it... then in that case 1 player crewed HH could beat 3 NPC crewed HH and still mantain an edge on pvp, as to why use player crew over NPC. They must make it worth it. which could also lead to mix between player and NPC crewed ships, getting some of this bonuses on the gunner for the player while still having non force multiplied guns for npc. There is just no other way around it. The only way to make people want players is to make it worth it by making it overpowered. Only then it will be desired over NPC.
That’s what I’m saying, players need to be "OP" for it to even be a consideration for most people. I think that's the only way to do it. I admit I do not care too much how this works in PvE. I am bias, and do not care about PvE. That may be the wrong mindset but I am being honest at least.
@@BuzzCutPsycho what works for pvp works for pve in consequence is my mindset, I always gear up for pvp even if I do pve.
Awesome take and unless I can think of a reason to not like it, I like it. Alot.
And it is totally okay if you didn't like it!
Operational costs. Fuel costs will munch up credits so fielding many ships. This won't cure multicrew but mentioning it regardless.
Yes, a very real concern that is not being addressed yet. I never really even factor it into anything currently. Hah!
I think a simple solution is that AI blades should draw from the turret's power. Either not shooting as fast as a human, running out of ammo quicker before recharging or just outright lower damage output in return for always being online and combat ready. Even defending your ship offline. However. AI crewmates should be expensive to maintain with credit salary, providing full benefits of a player in a turret but no ability to engineer or do complex tasks that a player could normally do. It doesnt have to be complicated. And in terms of balance. A "single seat" hammerhead build should be better that most single seater fighters because that player is paying a premium a be a gunboat with a complement of turret coverage. Don't mess with that guy unless you have torpedoes. He clearly is paying to not be pirated.
I agree, sadly turrets no longer have their own capacitors. When they had their own cap you could really make each one powerful. Just bad ideas all around from CIG at times.
I think a good solution would be making multicrew OP (aka worth using at all) but making NPC crew really expensive to hire. You could add some nuance to this, of course, like tiers where higher-tier NPCs are more skilled but are also more expensive, etc. In the end, my goal with this system would be that it is possible to fly a large ship solo with full NPCs but its damn expensive so its not worth it for anything other than a large-scale battle, which wouldn't last all that long anyway. Of course, with this system, you could also hire a lower-tier NPC to be your gunner on a cargo ship, for instance, just so you have a little extra protection, while still being pretty cheap. It's also a good money sink to pull UEC out of the economy.
NPC quality based on price is for sure a way to do it. Makes sense, and would add a bit of "investment" to it. I am totally fine with that. But, NPC is so far off I do not even consider it, blades, and blade quality, will be the most frequent thing we get I believe.
Could make blades draw from power I suppose.
You are the only critical thinker i hear on Star Citizen. Im ringing the bell 🔔
Oh why thank you. Be warned I have my moments. ;)
I like being a gunner do to my real life schedule its a great way to join a crew and enjoy the game.
Let's hope gunners stop sucking.
Maybe there should be a limited number of blade slots on a ship and we should only allow one NPC per player ... so a crew of four can have four more NPCs on board.
Despite the clear expectations that CIG have unwisely given backers, big multi-crew ships probably should require a CREW ... but augmenting that player crew with NPCs definitely need to be accommodated, since they sold the ships with that expectation.
"CIG have unwisely" is so spot on. They have spoken themselves into a development corner and here we are.
Played with you in Planetside 2 and think people should take what you say about multicrew and combined arms gameplay seriously. You’ve seen the decade worth of mistakes PS2 made around those areas and just how difficult it is to balance these engagements when the scale of how many players and vehicles can vary so wildly.
Combined arms gameplay on a massive scale is one of the least experimented forms of gameplay since it’s so technically hard to achieve in the first place. I’m glad you’ve made this channel and are voicing concerns about the combat side of gameplay from a large group perspective rather than other channels who just focus on individual dog fights.
If CIG wants the massive space battles of this game to actually happen and be fun, they need to taking the advice of Planetside veterans who know a thing or two about MMO PvP.
Thanks man. I consider myself a bit of an "expert" in this useless field of knowledge. The whole purpose of this channel was to try and make others aware of what happens when you put things at scale, and how fragile and easy they are to break in unforeseen ways. Sadly, I doubt CIG will see it. Ever.
I wanted to have NPC not because I don’t want to play with other people or I fear boredom sitting in a turret, it’s just because I want to be able to play whenever I want. Log in the bed of my ship and let’s go, not waste half an hour of my precious playtime herding cats to be able to assemble a crew for my play session.
Unfortunately, as you point out, npcs create a very difficult balance problem. Make them worse than a player, but still usable and multicrew becomes irrelevant compared to just flying 7 different ships; make them so bad that multicrew is still relevant and then they became not worth the hire money.
As you said, one solution is to make multicrew vastly OP, but how? Give turrets a big boost in dps with a player? Give player manned engineering stations a boost to shields and manoeuvrability? Still I think it wouldn’t be enough for the larger boats. 7 people in a hammerhead is a lot compared to 7 different hammerheads… and larger ships are even worse.
And on a side note: I don’t know how engineering is going to work… but if it’s so complex to be a skill to learn and be engaging to do as a player, than I have no faith in npcs (other than turret gunners) ever working. If you haven’t, I suggest you take a look at Pulsar the lost colony. It’s basically a multicrew simulator that you can play with friends, really fun. Multicrewing in that game is engaging for all roles, and it’s simpler than what SC is supposed to be. Thing is, there are npcs you can have to fill roles, but apart for the main weapons officer, they don’t work that effectively whatsoever. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but if a simpler game cant manage to simulate npcs that can substitute a real player, I don’t have faith in a more complex (AND MULTIPLAYER AT THAT) game like SC ever will.
I am willing to bet that due to things like engineering players would min/max the seats to have gunner blades with real crew. I too don't ALWAYS have people to play with, or perhaps one day I do not want one. So I will also want AI stuff for myself which is why I support it. I am glad you're reasonable enough to see that :D
I believe the simplest fix would be that.. well.. the cost of taking out and operating 7 Hammerheads with AI-blades should just be astronomically higher than a well crewed 7 man Hammerhead.
7 Hammerheads with 1 player each might not lose to the one Hammerhead in a fair fight but the cost to do so should just make it pointless.
Another idea could be that AI-blades as gunners only do the bare minimum defense against small fighters and do not fire at larger ships (kinda dumb but would solve the issue to some degree)
The cost may be higher, yes, but very often in this games the cost doesn't really matter much. And I suspect cost may be a factor. But trust me when I say groups can, and will, find a way to make those costs matter a lot less. Especially with how crafting will work. Maybe this isn't an issue, I personally think it may end up being one in serious org wars, but it just may be part of the game people don't care much about.
I want to be able to have NPC crew supplement player crew. I eventually want to take an Idris with NPC crew overseeing hangar operations (refuel/rearm/repair), doing small repairs, cleaning the ship, and maybe even a few turret gunners, while my friends and I man the bridge. I want a player to be able to assume a lead engineer role over a small team of NPC crew. I want NPCs to take the turrets if I can't get enough friends to man them. I want some NPC marines stationed on the ship to act as cannon fodder for a boarding party and slow them down while my friends and I maneuver through the corridors to hopefully fend them off and get the kills.
Everyone keeps thinking of NPC vs player crew as an all-or-nothing affair, and I don't understand why. If I can only get 3 or 4 friends on a given day, I'd still like to be able to take a big ship out and kick ass with them in. Or from an org perspective, it would make sense to take a capital ship out on patrol with an NPC crew with the possibility for org mates to log in and man stations on short notice.
I agree with you, they should make the NPCs more integrated, with more "roles" than just pilot/gunner.
As I see it schedule is issue one. I play solo for that reason, I don't want to be in a crew and then get a call or something comes up where I have to cut and run while others or depending on me to fill a roll. A human multi-crew should be vastly superior to a AI/NPC crew as not every best option is the logical one. I understand your point and agree in a PVP scenario but in PVE I do not see the same issues. Thanks for the video and the information.
I hate schedule stuff myself, hated it in wow too.
When Im in a group you are mostly in combat gameplay, you need the best pilot and the best combat ships, that’s not me so I crew 99% of time. But during the day (Im retired) I like to fly my industry ships, turn on the music and work that minings/salvage laser or run some cargo.
Where does the solo begin and end? Single player industrial ships can’t escort themselves, fix things while flying or change/collect those full cargo pods on our prospectors. Bigger ships allow more protection and capabilities but no npc crew impacts that.
Flying a solo ships isn’t the answer because really doing anything properly in this game is doing more than one job at a time. Npc are that EXTRA pair of hands even on smaller ships.
No dispute here. But how does making sure the solo experience is good impact the group experience? For PvP anyway. That is my argument.
@@BuzzCutPsycho balancing npc v player experience is about factoring in needs. Make npc crew a needy bunch, they need food, they need bathroom time, they need relaxation time, they need social modules and supplies on ships to stay happy. Without this they start to get worse and rebel somehow or leave. A tali can’t have two torpedoe modules if it has npcs because it needs one of those to be a social module if they have npcs. You add in the oxygen availability on ships to ensure that players can’t have too many npc on one ship to balance R&R time of npcs, suddenly having too many npc ships is a pain in the arse. Can you imagine 3 players crewed Connie v 3 npc/player crews Connie’s, where in the middle of battle npc get up to use the bathroom, need a break or need to eat. It balances it a little.. granted Connie was a bad example too much pilot firepower but you get the point.
NPCs will also be needed for ship and station defense, not just for ships. NPCs are just as vital to this game as people, maybe more so. NPCs should be our primary enemies as well.
NPC station defense I am all for. I think that is needed since I do not want to be called at 3AM to stop a raid.
Great video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great take, it's very tough to keep their promises when the premise of the game has changed. A lot of people spent thousands of dollars backing a game that they're not getting, and that really sucks if they don't like what we are getting. But you're absolutely right that NPC crews, as much as i myself want them for my own ship, have the potential to completely ruin PvP balance and multicrew viability. The hammerhead argument is a great one that I've used myself. Outside of Gunner seats, they might be fine though. NPC janitors, lunch ladies, and flight attendants are fine.
The only solution have thought of so far is to intentionally make them bad at PvP. Like doing 90%+ less damage to player controlled ships. Not a great solution, but gives those backers something.
Btw your take was so reasonable I went back and watched some of your other vids, thank you for the analysis on the redeemer nerfs too! Subscribed.
Anyone expecting a promise from 12+ years ago is beyond gullible. I do not expect anything at this point other than a playable MMO.
@@BuzzCutPsycho You could say that about all of Star citizen, in a way. There's a difference between thinking CIG will give you what they sold you on, and thinking that they should give you what they sold you in order to get money out of you. Those who want their NPC crews are justified in feeling entitled to them if they bought a big ship on that promise. So I'm sympathetic to them. I just hope they never get it.
I don't hate the idea of each human player seated at a control chair adding a buff to make the ship tougher to kill and more deadly, ie. like an extra battery plugged in to get a few more pips on the power management. While as a single player I would still like to see the turret on my Scorpius or other ships at least track a target and add some more damage. How many more M2's would be doing ERT's instead of Corsair's this year if the turrets were online.
You had something similar to this before when turrets had their own capacitors. But they got rid of that too! And good point on the M2, I bet they would use those more since they aint bad combat ships.
We need more of this type of discussion. The issue I have with certain individuals in the community, like Avenger One, is that people who are PvPers tunnel vision on ONLY PvP when talking about game issues. Not just in Star Citizen but other games that have both Pvp and Pve elements, the PvP people always have a sense of entitlement or are extremely jaded. The Health of the game should encompass both playstyles and have disadvantages and advantages for choosing which route you go down, GAME HEALTH IS NOT LINKED TO HOW BIG THE SIZE OF THE CORSAIRS GUNS ARE. I understand how difficult balancing can be and I hope we can one day get to the point where light fighters can't just run rings around the Hammerhead NPC or Player controlled, but actually treat it as the anti-fighter threat it is.
I am glad you feel that way about my discussion! I will admit, I am a full time PvP player. It is almost all I do. But I understand that there are just as many PvE players. I have always wanted PvE and PvP to be integrated in some way, even if it isn't via direct combat. Think Foxhole if you ever played it and that game's logistics system. Something like that.
I agree, the overall slider needs to move to rewarding multicrew humans for playing in the same ship; maybe even perks with Guilds and factions that have multipliers for multicrew mission fulfillment.
That is good too. Or, seperate capacitors for the turrets like we USED to have!
At this point they should just give all player manned turrets twice the damage output. They could scale it based on how many turrets the ship has. That way NPC's are still good, but if you have a friend in a turret they will be having a blast.
I always felt turrets should just be different in some way from fixed weapons. Damage, range, velocity, whatever.
Never had so much fun than soloing a Hammer head with npc crew. Loved it. I do agree I think multiplayer should be totally OP.
The Idris guns were nuts too when crewed by AI during the event. I enjoyed that.
1st, I think we're all complaining about silly things because we're board and tired of waiting, lol.
2nd, AI Blade and NPC will work well in PVE scenarios to support those solo players who have bought multicrew ships... which I will do from time to time. But in PVP situations, AI Blades and NPC Crew will NOT perform anywhere near as well as a fully player crewed ship.
To me its a pretty clear cut distinction and solution. Its an MMO after all, group play comes first. But solo players will always needed to be catered for also. All MMOs do this anyway. In the end, it will all work out, it will all be fine😊
Complaining is the primary gameplay loop of SC
My perspective as a dad and as a player who has a lot of severe trust issues from Albion and games that incentivize skullduggery and backstabbing. Im not delusional thinking this won’t happen in star citizen. However the solution presented with the random grouping system leaves more questions than answers. The random que that was shown off at citizen con is going to be worthless unless there’s a serious consequence to dissuade outlaws and pirates trying to abuse in game systems like that to spot easy marks.
Which at that point why even allow pirates and criminals if you’re going to throw the hammer at them in the most brutal way possible mechanically. (They won’t)
In comes the working man and woman with a family. Scheduling is nightmare fuel and game play time is limited. I don’t want to spend the majority of my time hunting down for a crew sizable enough to just play the game. One or two people sure, but i want ai npcs to be able to fill the ranks and not feel alienated because i can’t play consistently enough for an organization’s schedule.
I am fine if multi crew gameplay is overpowered in terms of efficiency. I just don’t want having a multi crew ship be debilitating and non functional if it’s not crewed to the gills.
I agree that the biggest issue is the cig have not incentivized players enough to specialize in these roles. That’s a big elephant in the room issue to address.
Dont solo huge multi crew ships or try to take part in mega org level projects like base building - if you need to count on a loose alliance of 'quick join' strangers that all banded together the day the base building mechanics comes to the game. Some ships and some activities are not really designed for solo play. Its not Forbidden - but it just might not end well - there are smarter approaches
I get what you say, but from what they showed theres a lot of ways to avoid that, starting with the rating system, idk if they are going to add it to the party manager, but now that they showed it, they might aswell. theres also the fact that if you have the choice to play on lawfull systems or unlawfull ones, so if you want less trickery and piracy just be on a military system or something, Piracy should be a big part of SC and i like the way theyve shown theyre triying to balace it. There are developing a lot more the Orgs, meant for probably thousands of players so you can join a org that has similar interests and search players to play there instead you will probably find players always in game on big orgs. I feel like there should be more solo-player specialized ships like a miner ship with a big laser but meant for just one person, obviously costing more
Issue for me is two fold. I bought the Banu Merchantman on kickstarter. It was a blockade runner then. It’s a capital ship now. I didn’t ask for a capital ship but it fell in my lap. If CIG wants to constantly change the game that’s their prerogative. I shouldn’t be punished as a player and kickstarter backer because a 3-8 man ship suddenly ballooned beyond the scope of what was originally sold to me.
I am not going to trade down either. That’s just silly and frankly asinine. They pitched the system they continue to assure that the system will work in some capacity to alleviate the issues they created. The vast majority of the ships in the game are multi crew. Sure i can staff some of the positions but as was stated in the video, cig isn’t selling the case of having all those roles being filled by humans is a worthwhile experience. So i will crew the roles that have the highest roi on sticking a warm body in there and the rest will be npcs. I am purely speaking as a pragmatist on this because ultimately i am not in my hayday of being able to schedule for raids.
Heck if they sell premium npcs, which they probably will, I will straight up buy them for my own convenience.
@@LordStrell The BMM was for sale all the way back during the kickstarter?.. If you bought a BMM and it hasnt been released and has changed from what it was when you bought it - why in the world - 12 years later would you still have the ship, instead of melting it for ship(s) that are already released - or sell it on the gray market and get your $ back
@@LordStrell You might want to pause the sad violin music and edit your comment.. the BMM wasnt announced until November 2013
I totally agree with this post. Make each turret powerful and really good fun. Also make it skill based with a reasonable learning curve. I’m waiting for fighter flying etc… for when I can fly in a squad to attack targets. Not interested in soloing in these. Really the blades are there to switch in when turret gunners need to go engineer defend a boarding action or equivalent,
In a way the need for blades reflects the poor decision and design of the original ships BEFORE a game was made
So I just had a thought. What if Players acted as a "buff" for the ship? Just like an armor set bonus so each player unlocks the next bonus for the ship such as 2players=bonus scan range, 3players=shield buff, so on and so on. What ya'll think?
and mix it up like two seaters get 2player=weapons boost of some kind, range, power or what have you. 3seater gets a a different order so that a ship with 8 players get's smaller buffs so its not so op
Doesn't bother me but it sounds too "gamey" for Star Citizen. I imagine the "buff" could be translated into performance, such as higher ROF / Accuracy for a human gunner, or better performance and power for a human engineer. Same as what you are saying but more "believable" since people in SC care about that stuff.
@@BuzzCutPsycho Ok yea it is a bit a "gamey" and I agree. I thought the same thing when I found out about armor sets having slot buffs for a full set... So the advantage of a Human players skill should surely be apparent in comparison hands down that is 100% necessary it's down to doing that in a fair manner.. How about Blades or Ship AI are not only inferior to players but there is a chance of failures or malfunctions that require some form of service say in the form of a reset so the penalty for the non player option not only is of poorer performance but also can stop and require engineering gameplay of some kind. I think this option would be good for the 7 hammer head theory. Say each blade can only operate for a set amount of "run-time" before needing to be serviced say 300seconds plus some random fault bull on top of that. When the blade or ai is engaged in its say shooting operation, engineering, it uses up the time meter and after the time meter is gone its time for service and the ai shuts down.
9:44 " I'd rather have multiple single seat ships" - you ignoring existing CIG plans to evolve component's role in battles. Eventually there will be no "Hull HP", instead there will be "armour"+"hull penetration"+"components HP" leading to ship destruction by damaged components. Which means two things:
1) Attackers will have to keep shorter distance and more precisely target components. This makes scenario with many smaller ships shooting from distance much less likely. Attackers will have to endanger themself in close combat and the smaller they are the more dangerous this will be for them. (Not to say shooting from big distance already has it's significant penalties by projectile speed and spread)
2) Multicrew ships not only have redundant components they also will have engineers in the team who will repair(or replace) damaged components therefore rising survivability.
The first question came to my mind when reading Rish post 1:47 - what about engineers, how AI blades will replace them.
I hope what you said is the case. I still do not see turrets even with those changes being able to keep up, especially if crew is moving around playing a fuse box minigame and putting out fires.
Make multicrew great again! I had tons of fun in my Hurricane (flying or gunning) when 3.14 dropped and turrets were absolutely insane, over the top, OP. I do agree that these crew members do need more to do, beyond having fun gunning. Being the second seat in DCS in the F-15E, F-14B, and AH-64D are all awesome, because the player generally has a list of duties to do. Compared to Star Citizen, where you can tab out and watch RUclips due to the amount of dead air.
I totally agree, those are some great real-world examples of what multicrew should be like. It needs to be more than just a "gunner for hire". I don't think anything they do can make that Antres seat fun, unless it was like the DCS stuff you mentioned.
Yessss, I have great memories of being tank crew in battlefield.
I have to say...spot on. AI blades could take valuable power from systems and NPC crews could be slow to repair and have poor accuracy or fire in bursts. But yes if you have several players in one space they need to be serious threat. Unlike now they are a joke.
I think power is the only solution here. Big power draw from other systems to run blades. Especially since you wont need life support.
I have the wonderful ability where I can sit in a turret and be chill, chatting with the homies and having RUclips playing on the side or listening to music. I don't need to be the main character of the world to be happy.
People so badly want to be that guy who can solo a crewed Polaris in an F8 Lightning and that simply should not be possible.
You're my kind of org member.
This is me as well. I was / am always happy to just be party of the fun in any role. Squad Plantside 2 etc.
This is how a lot of people are! Everyone is on discord just chatting, drinking, and having fun. Occasionally the social event is interrupted by the need to make some explosions.
@@BuzzCutPsycho Decided to take you up on it
The issue here is actually rarity, not multi-crew. The imbalance is that side 1 was balanced vs 1 Hammerhead, and side 2 can show up with 7 Hammerheads. This will always seem absurd and unfair. The question that should have been asked is, "How the f-- did they get SEVEN Hammerheads?!?" ...but we know how. CIG has diminished the presence of the Hammerhead by making them ubiquitous by grossly overselling them to a small market making them disproportionately common amongst the player base, when it should be exceedingly rare. This is an issue with ALL large ships. Add to this, these ships cannot be "lost", making the problem worse and worse over time, until there will come a time where every single player has one on speed dial. Sure...you can make it more miserable for a single person to fly a hammerhead vs multiple people to try and shoehorn in some rarity, but this is really a poor band aid fix and people will just side step to the next imbalance. The real problem is that ships that SHOULD be rare, are exceedingly common...and because they are common, they cannot be powerful.
doesnt matter that they sell ships this was problem in elite dangerous as well, ai crew kills multicrew
Correct. The commonality decreases the ability for power. I cannot fathom them ever limiting these things to a point where they just aren't common, even with crafting. Players will ALWAYS have them and the HH is the most common one as you pointed out!
@@BuzzCutPsycho Same thing with Javelins. Sure they will be very expensive and hard to get but eventually most dedicated players will be able to get one. Why the hell would I crew a Javelin with 15 friends when I can get them on 15 Javelins instead for them to solo. Even if a Javelin crewed with 15 players is a lot stronger then npc crewed Javelins i still can't fathom a single Javelin taking out 15 Javelins.
Is the background music from a game lobby? I feel like ive heard it on repeat a lot.
Hazmoses made it
I think a lot of they are thinking is the economy and cost of battle. I feel 7 hanmerheads will always beat one regardless of crew setup. But it also costs probably 7x as much. But then the issue of filthy rich orgs comes up like eve. Where titans went from monuments and powerhouses to being spammed by pure economic scale. I think the hardest part of multicrew is pay. Unless they multiply pay by player instead of divide. But i imagine that creates mass inflation. Honestly no idea how id balance it.
Economy and cost is good and makes plenty of sense except when the rich keep getting richer. Which is another topic for my next video.
I don't mind cost and eco for balance. But, it means players will usually just end up spamming the cheapest "bang for your buck" item , weapons, ship, etc, in the game to get the most out of. Totally separate topic I could bore you to death rambling about, sorry!
@@BuzzCutPsycho no need to be sorry. Your rambling is why we are here!
Seven man crew hammerheads will be able to do damage control and repair the ship, making it essentially invulnerable.
If seven guys with NPC crews show up with seven hammerheads and order the crews to target the powerplant, I'm pretty sure the multi-crew bros will be toast unless the NPCs are so bad as to be worthless.
Perhaps. But I do not see them getting through the collective mass of "HP" the other AI crewed ships have.
@@BuzzCutPsycho They should be able to kill one hammerhead at a time since it cannot repair. Assuming their repair resources are sufficient.
i know this is off topic but are u playing the aoc alpha 2 playtest?
Nah, no interest.
I would be ok with NPC or blades only taking support roles, engineer, scan, med (depending on if they actually make it something useful), and maby a weaker turret and only to a certain size. Anything past 3 or 4 size they cannot use, and the higher ones have to be used by actual player.
That or lower caps on the weapons. A variety of solutions really. I guess we just have to wait and see.
Thank god we've got someone sensible pointing out the upcoming issues. There's a group of players who just want to fly their huge ships like they were slow-ass fighters and they don't want to have anything to do with other players and they don't want to engage with other systems and they're extremely harmful to the game and everyone else's experience. Multicrew should be broken as hell like you say.
People seem to forget that a lot of players WANT to be in the bigger ships, they just aint the more vocal types.
Idk why , but i can just imagine that future big ships are just npc imperial star destroyers against player millennium Falcons
I like your dreams
Well you will see what the first pass looks like with the Perseus automated turrets.
I would almost bet that is why they are doing it lol.
Yeah I do not expect PDC to be manned.
In Elite crew cost from 3-15%. And that is a salary, so they get paid a percentage of any money you make. My crew dude has taken 1.5 billion from me and I’ve used him maybe 200 times. Most of my gameplay is with real humans but npc gets a cut as long as I employ him. And humans are much better than npc at kills of course. So multi crew npc is a very expensive option for someone who really wants it but a much better are humans.
That is a pretty good solution. NPC gets a cut of the earnings. I like that!
@@BuzzCutPsycho believe me I bitch out the NPc every time see millions going to it. But have not fired him yet. They star at 2% and over time NPC accuracy goes up (like months of gameplay) and as it goes up so does the rate till he takes 10% of all earnings.
AI Blades (and eventually NPCs) will exist. The reason AI Blades are coming in 1.0, and NPCs aren't is simple; NPCs and the gameplay loops involved in that will bee far more complex. A MMO expansion level of complexity.
So it *is* coming... but as to the point of how it scales, I do have a thought. I think Multicrew *will* be overpowered for two reasons:
a) AI Npc's will be susceptible to boarding *far* moreso than a player crewed one.
b) Precision targeting through armour (ie. NOT the hp pools current ships are) to take out components will certainly be the force multiplier you mention.
Player Crew on a C2 as you mentioned need to be paid. But they double as security/gunners/cargo monkeys. AI Crew don't... yet they will be draining resources as well, needing to be paid based on skill levels and how they were obtained/hired etc. NPCs will never be as good at any of it... but could fill in, in a pinch.
I honestly cannot picture anyone hiring much player crew for a C2. But hiring *escorts* is smart.
On a HammerHead simply the ability to precision target and intelligently attack ONLY our enemies will help on offense... and I think when we se engineering *actually* exist it will make bigger ships a LOT harder to kill with players. fixing stuff *in the battle.*
I think, honestly, that waiting to see what actual engineering and armour bring to the table will matter.
And a lot of big ships with lonely people ill be melted in favour of a wider variety of smaller things.
All good points. You really hit the nail on the head with "wait and see" - Another thing too, the C2 you mentioned. I cannot see people sitting in those turrets EVER. So yes, escorts + blades might be the way to go. The more I think about this the more I think SC just has more core issues underneath every new feature or balance proposal. It makes my head spin.
I think with the new power distribution system. AI blades should pull from those points. AI in real life requires a lot of power and cooling.
100%.
As a solo player I’d find it really cool if I could hire crew for things like an extra gunner or maybe an ai to help mine in the mole something like that would be cool as I’ve always wanted to play with a full crew but all my friends hate the game with a passion 😂
I think that is totally fine and worth doing. I just get concerned about the PvP is all.
The bottom line is, they want to make this a MMO. If you haven't got teammates that day, then you use your single player ship and run if you come across a crewed multiplayer ship.
I also believe blades will increase the engineering gameplay requirement for that ship, so you will never be able to fly that multi-crew ship alone anyway.
I do hope that there will never be a time when 7 single crew hammerheads will be able to defeat a single fully crewed hammerhead.
I am in agreement with you. But I'm concerned for the people that purchased ships under the premise of NPC crew.
I'm a believer in having it both ways. Every one of us have different lives that have different responsibilities, and different amounts of freedom to play. I always felt that these ships should have been built with NPC crew that perform specific duties on the ship and respond to commands made by the player. Basically, you purchase a ship in-game or in the store, it comes with an NPC crew specifically setup to operate on that ship. Now, when it comes to Multi-crew, human players could invite another human player to join their ship and serve in one of the NPC roles which would remove the NPC from the ship while docked at a station.
It is all about freedom and all the discussion about human players being better than NPC or vice versa misses the point in my eyes. There are a number of ways to play SC and I feel that solo players that have ships with up to 4 crew (and maybe even 5) should be able to get NPCs in them. The higher crewed ships should not be a priority right now and I think that is where the compromise should land. The medium ships and lower should be the focus for NPC crew for 1.0 or even sooner. Just worry about those ships and let the larger ships be more for multi-crew which opens the door for even solo players to switch it up a bit and be part of a larger ship doing some pretty immersive stuff from a different perspective.
Take care of the solo players and I believe that the solo players will also help the players that have the much bigger ships. A number of solo players will join other players for multi-crew for a period of time, but once again, it all comes down to TIME. The real world has a massive say when it comes to multi-crew and that is why the solo experience is extremely important.
Solo players should never be ignored. I agree. I just do not want group players to be forced into solo because it ends up being the "best" way to play
@@BuzzCutPsycho - I don't think group players would be forced into anything. Group players depend on players who have the schedule to play with them or they already have friends/family that they can rely on often for many sessions. I'm definitely a solo player, but I've joined in with other players here and there whenever I had the time. I think CIG and some of the fans are looking at this the wrong way. Solo players aren't really solo players when they are in the verse. Yes, we may not have a crew or seek to build one, but we aren't cut off from the multi-crew experience and could be recruited depending on our time.
The whole thing is to have as many players as possible and group players need to have as many potential recruits as possible playing the game. Solo players will like to mix it up a bit by joining a corporation with their own ship or act in another position on the larger ships doing immersive missions with other other human players who aren't jerks. CIG would be wise to maintain/grow their solo players to keep them in the verse for all the group players to recruit.
To me the simple solution is to make players in multi-crew ships be able to repair it, through the engineering mechanics, whilst AI crew cannot. I think this on top of slightly reduced accuracy of AI turrets would make player multicrew far better than AI multicrew. Through the ability to repair, a large player ships should be able to increase the survivability significantly in such a way that they are as effective as multiple large ships, with only AI crews. This would also incentivize multiple players to pool together in fewer larger ships, rather than swarms of single seaters.
My only concern is with such a system how do specialized single seaters get balanced. Things like the Ares, Gladiator, Eclipse, or Vanguard are specialized bombers, or heavy attackers meant to engage larger ships. My only thought, is to make them extremely vulnerable to hostile fighters, whilst maintaining their effectiveness against larger ships. This would encourage use of smaller ships in larger fleets to ensure a fleet composition that isn't entirely capital and sub capital vessels. Additionally with the ability to fully repair ships, it would make carriers crucial as they are needed to maintain the fleets fighters and bombers. Perhaps another thing that only players can do, to add utility to non-NPC crews. The more I think about it, the more I think Empire at War, is a decent example of what I'm talking about.
Essentially player ships should have much greater endurance and staying power compared to NPC crew ships. There should also be much more of a rock paper scissors balance between ship classes for the sake of balance. You don't necessarily want bigger to always be better. Otherwise what is the purpose of something like a Kraken. To fully crew it and its flight wing you could have two fully crewed Idris ships.
The Ares series is one I always bring up because it should never have been created. It is a balance nightmare. Specialized? For sure, but it’s a single-seat ship designed to counter multi-crew. I cannot, in any way, shape, or form, see myself wanting to crew multiple Perseus ships, for example, which fulfill the same role as the Ares, instead of just spamming the Ares. I’ve always felt that either a mass of smaller ships should counter bigger ones, or equally big ships designed to counter other big ones should be the way it works.
Your comment is great, and I’m not ignoring it. But for things like the Kraken, or any carrier or ship capable of carrying other ships, I fully believe they should be able to "construct" or "assemble" their companion ships inside, similar to how the new Pioneer is going to work with the Nomad. To me, this is the only way I can see carriers being able to sustain and fulfill their roles.
@@BuzzCutPsycho Surely range and endurance of a Perseus would be the trade off between it and 4 Ares fighters? Especially if engineering works like it should and the Perseus can be repaired by its crew. I agree that the Ares is a balance nightmare. Unlike the Gladiator or the Eclipse, an Ares does not have limited ordinance to worry about. Perhaps make it super slow and sluggish for a ship in its class, making it vulnerable to big gun turrets from larger ships? At least with something like an eclipse, its torpedo's can be intercepted by point defense, but an Ares can always stay engaged with a larger ship if there is no escort.
Really I'm not sure either. I do think smaller ships need a role to ensure diverse fleet composition. But there are just so many different ships, that balance is very difficult. Especially "multirole" ships, which I think inevitably become OP or useless.
I'm not sure about carriers being able to spawn smaller ships as a solution. My gut reaction is that its simply too gamey. Outside of combat as something that takes a lot of time? Sure that doesn't seem too bad. But I've always envisioned that Star Citizen should play more as WW2 in space, at least that's what it was sold as. So in that regard I imagine carriers more as something that facilitates and maintains single seaters. Either through repairs since single seaters are not capable of it, rearming due to limited but hard hitting ordinance, or refueling due to limited range.
I think it's even worse than that. From the look of it, as you go towards bigger ships, they plan require gradually increased support personnel (engineers/repairmen, medical staff, etc.) that don't directly contribute to raw firepower.
On the other hand i can imagine blades/npc require a player officer to give commands like wizzo for gunners. From rich's post saying 'blades will require power' is an obvious way of balancing but it can end up in a too op/useless dichotomy.
I can see people doing AI blade gunners and real humans for everything else.
To me, blades are best because, and correct me if I’m wrong, ships can only take a few blades at most and they still drain power from the ship
That SHOULD be the case I believe. You are not wrong.
The only reason I'm fine with people buying the biggest ships in the game is because they need to be multi-crewed. I hate the idea of (capable) NPC crews.
What would be nice, would be to give the co-pilot more meaningful stuff to do instead of having your crew perform extremely monotonic tasks.
I'm okay with SC going more in a MMO direction but I'm afraid of the NPC feature, turning big ships into p2w juggernauts once players wanna grind for getting their own base and guilds their own space station.
The coordination that is needed to get a group of humans together to achieve a bigger task has a lot of potential in this game and the commodification of it is a dangerous direction.
Your reasoning is sound. I support it too for the same reason you gave
I always assumed they would do some type of logistics cost. So that Orgs or groups could only have x amount of ships out at a time. Like a point system. So they could only have So many of one type of ship class out at once. Then players in a org would have to work together to get the benefit of a "group effort" but couldn't have all 100 members running fully armed hammerheads. regardless of it being AI or other players. would also mean mean if you had a solo boy form his own org, or a small group. They could field the same number of capital ships with AI as a org with 1000 players. Obviously there is holes in that idea, I'm just stating I figured there would be a logistics system in place. Or we could end up like eve where some orgs have 1000000 of the best ships and lock down areas. It works in that game could work in this too...And with the armor and other systems in. a cap ship would be hard pressed to be overwhelmed by just fighters. But bombers would break it. I thought they stated there would be a paper rock scissors things, fighters would beat bombers, bombers beat caps, caps beat gunships, gunships beat fighters. but i guess there would be things that land in-between. Able to punch up or down a bit, So there would be a balance in that way too...im tired, just my two cents.
Your two cents are good. I general I do not like inorganic upkeep systems. Such as a cap. I think the crew being "so good" would act as the up keep in that you WANT the crew, so the limit is the numbers and organizational skill of the org.
@@BuzzCutPsycho I too do not like a point system. But I'm also not sure how they will balance it. Or if it needs to be, again eve survives with super orgs.
But I'm also in a smaller group of people who read about Eng gameplay, and went oh cool I can't run bigger ships makes sense. then melted them to get smaller ones. In the end this might be a wait and see scenario.
If they did run points Pyro system and other hot areas might be Unlimitied. Then regulated systems might have a limit. unfortunately, no matter how they do it, it won't be pretty, and someone will be upset. if there is no limit, I can see super orgs with 1000 players running 1000 cap ships with AI. While also being able to pay the upkeep for a fleet of that size .
They also stated you could give fleet orders via a CMD map. so, you might be able to be on a ship with a real crew and then fully AI cap ships supporting you. As well as they stated build times would reflect insurance times. could be if you lose your cap you have to wait a week to get it back.
Sorry for the word vomit. there is a plethora of ways it could be handled bad and good. However, no matter what I will be solo or with my 3 friends. keeping my head down.
What if every ship gave stat boosts for how many real players are partied in it with the owner. Everyship would have a max player count for buffs. Say x ship max players needed is 2 for the bonus so if you had 4 players partied in it the bonus only applies at 2 still. Or something similiar idk i see alot of issues still just throwing out ideas
Well if you saw the most recent IAE talk they discussed their vision for capital ships. Seems far fetched.
I am not okay with finding random people I don't know. I do have friends I can crew and play with but finding a time we can all be online only happens once maybe twice a week and sometimes even then friends I know and trust are just not available. That is when I want AI crew to be able to step in. And CIG seems to keep going back and forth about how good this AI crew will be. I've heard them say they will be as good as a player and I've heard they will be not as good. I just wish they would decide on a solid answer. But YES I want to be able to enjoy my ship even when my friends are not available.
I do not suspect AI will be worth a damn
@@BuzzCutPsycho Do you think CIG will make them suck or do you think AI can not be as good as a human player? I am pretty sure AI has the capability of being far better than any player with 100% accuracy and zero human error
It really is a simple answer… If you are going to have five players putting time and effort into a single ship, the commensurate effort should be required to defeat that ship.
This isn’t something difficult to understand if you approach this from an agnostic perspective and pretend it’s not a space sim- it’s like saying that five guys in counter strike or five people in an MMORPG should have five times the impact of one person.
No, we can tweak a bit and maybe not make the scaling so linear… But that has to be the guiding concept
Of course, ideally a little more effort.
Well. I think that the combat aspect of an ai crew would definitely need to be half as effective of a real man crew but on the exploration side of it I think the ai should be effective and efficient.
Of course, no argument here.
Halo's Warthog turrets are fun and effective weapons. Unfortunately, SC turrets have been much less effective than the main pilot guns for most of its development. A Connie's gunner is not a significant part of its firepower. If you get interdicted while on a friend's Connie, you might as well jump in the turret but it is not something most players start a play session intending to do. We *do* have multiple ships with worthwhile turret positions now, but the playerbase culture has already been impacted by hx.
You know I always felt the connie power should come from the turrets not the main gun. Design issue on that one and ships like it. I never put people in those worthless seats.
Blades is mandatory. But it has to be less efficient.
I can see people blading turrets and filling out crew
The problem with beeing a gunner in SC compared to eg Halo is the slow pace of the game. Beeing a warthog gunner gives you something to to for the most time of your playtime.
Beeing a gunner in SC, is mostly waiting, and this goes for most mulitcrew jobs...i have hopes for the engineer though.
I would say that is an issue with SC and seperate from the main issue of turrets , etc, being bad. You aint wrong, but it is imo a seperate issue
Well argued and well thought out point of view. I dont agree with it but I see where you are coming from.
Where you are coming from is through the lens that Star citizen is only a PvP game. I get why that is, if that is how you want to play I can see why that would be your priority.
Here's the thing, the massive elephant in the room. The desires and needs of PvP focussed players are completely different to PvE focussed players... everything is distorted in this game due to the contortions and opposing demands of CIG forcing people that got into this game for PvE to play alongside others that are wanting to WIN vs the other players in the game.
Dont get me wrong there is some overlap, sonetimes I do want to PvP, others may want to play PvP relatively more or less.
But at a fundamental level it is a different mindset entirely.
And it affects nearly every aspect of the game from vehicle balance, economy, mission design, player movement speeds and yes multi-crew.
The long since abandoned PvPvs PvE slider would have largely prevented this issue being a big deal.
Since it was dropped then we have these issues and will ALWAYS have these issues going forward. You will never be able to get a compromise that works for both sides here.
Because the uncomfortable truth here is without the option of having separate PvE and PvP shards this is only going to continue to be an issue i the absence of a slider to control PvP encounter likelihood.
Many people were originally sold on pledging into this project because it was offered as a spiritual successor to games like Freelancer, on the kickstarter page it even goes to some length to state that it isn't a MMO (check the Q&A secrtion). Now I dont dispute that has changed since, but CIG can't just pretend that was never the case.
Please understand I am not arguing with anything you said about the issues in current approach of AI/NPC vs player roles. And I completely agree that some of the roles just need to be made to not suck so as to incentivise players to fill them.
But AI blades and NPCs do need to happen and this is wherevI disagree with your point around having to make real crew massively OP vs partial or mostly AI. That works in a game where everyone wants to play PvP all the time, however playing solo or with an under crew roster and getting bounced by AI pirates is a totally different proposition to getting bounced vs a bunch of hyper competitive PvP focussed players manning that Hammerhead you mentioned.
It may be fun to kerb stomp players that are already not interested in competing with others in a game that was sold as being able to play predominantly PvE if you want to. But it destroys the fun of the PvE focussed player.
And this game was supposed to cater for and be fun for both types of player.
Thanks for reading.
I never think people are arguing with me. Text is toneless. Your comment is very well written.
I am a PvP player, through and through. I do not pretend to be anything else. However, I do not believe in the total separation of PvE from PvP. That does not mean gankers killing PvE players with impunity. DAoC did a good job of this back in the day. PvP players fought in the frontiers, and PvE players felt the ramifications of it in the PvE zones via buffs, debuffs, etc. So everybody cared to some degree about how PvP was going.
The reason I want real crew to be OP over AI crew is purely because of PvP encounters, which will be min-maxed. If players who want to win find out that it is better to field more effective HP via AI ships, you will see nothing but big AI ships. No small ships, just massive amounts of big ships, because they effectively become single-seat ships.
I think for PvE, ships being good for PvE with AI crews is not only expected but mandatory. I do not think it is fair to expect a PvE player to have to crew a ship at all times with players to do any sort of PvE.
Did I understand what you wrote correctly? I may not have, as I had a bit of a headache today, but I did want to respond since you wrote such a lovely comment.
@@BuzzCutPsycho I completely agree your point about min/maxxed PvP encounters and the risks of having effective NPC/AI to that scenario it would distort the meta exactly how you suspect in my view..
However, that kind of proves my point doesn't it? CIG have completely opposed demands for different scenarios. If you make the AI so bad that player crewed massively over-powers AI crewed for the purposes of encounters between two opposing PVP oriented players, then in a persistent universe where a PvP encounter can happen anywhere at any time, you get a PvP oriented player vs a PvE one; then the outcome is going to be very ugly for the PvE player, every time.
Now it is at this point someone usually will point to, "what about the safe zones protected by UEE security etc? Just stay there PvE player and you won't have to worry about this?"
Imagine a world where the slider actually was a thing, and someone had it set to not have PvP encounters. Well, that was what playing Freelancer or Privateer 1/2 were like (damn I am giving my age away here, ha-ha), you could go to really lawless parts, get bounced by pirates in your transport, battle through and limp to your destination in a ship about to fall apart... it was awesome. Best fun I ever had playing these sorts of games.
It is that power fantasy thing, I don't necessarily want to restrict myself to safe space, I want to be able to do all those things and feel good about it. I couldn't care less that someone could probably have done those things without taking a scratch if they were a meta optimised PvP crew. I am having fun, being epic (even if I probably am not really).
That encapsulates the completely different mindset. If PvE is your primary motivation, you aren't trying to "win" the game you are trying to enjoy the game, yes, I want to beat some pirates and get to my destination and complete my mission, but I am not trying to do it while taking out some other player and preventing them from completing their mission.
The problem here is that a player who primarily is geared up for and wants PvP encounters to happen, even when they decide to do some PvE missions, they are prepared for it to happen and have a reasonable chance of coming out on top with no harm done. the PvE player was just trying to do some PvE things and got curb stomped by a PvP player randomly choosing to beat someone because that is what is fun for them.
So yes, I agree with you it would be a problem for PvP if AI/NPCs were very effective, however it is a problem for PvE players living in a PvP universe if they aren't at least decent.
The only ways I can see this being resolved is either to have shards where PvP is fully allowed just as it is now. and separate shards where it isn't.
EDIT: To clarify a PvP shard could still have all the PvE missions and events, I am not proposing taking anything away from PvP oriented players. just that anyone playing on that shard would know they could be PvP'd at any time as is the case now.
Or you bring back the PvP/PvE slider option.
CIG made a call to sell their game to all sorts of players but didn't think it through what that actually means in practise. For PvP to fully work it has to be at the expense of PvE, or vice versa. It isn't like PvE players are just going to go away, if anything recent success of some games (Helldivers, Space Marine 2) have proven that there is a large group of players out there that want co-op & PvE as much as or even more than straight PvP. What is common to these games is that they do it with separate modes, not under the naïve fallacy that you can mash them all together and make it work.
I just want to say how nice it is to debate with someone that tries to see the other point of view and accepts that not all others have the same goals in mind when playing Star Citizen.
That NPC crew will have an in-game financial cost that may or may not be worth it, depending on the price. That high fee for NPCs should serve as the balancing factor.
I’m also in favor of incorporating it into the player market. The more people use them, the higher the demand will become, driving up their cost, which will again balance itself out.
That would make sense, as long as the other issues like turret-aim are resolved.
I like playing solo sometimes to try and get myself immersed in the game and wold. I can go where I wantz do what I want ect. With a player crew it feels like I'm limited to doing what we are all doing at the same time. Don't get me wrong. I love both aspects of it. Sometimes my friends not on and I just want to run solo. Sure just get a single seat solo ship. But what if I want to do big cargo run or something and I want to use the big ships without players? I think it would be nice to have both. The balance will definitely need to be implemented. The AI needs to be good but not the crazy auto aim they have now. I don't think the AI should be better than a player group but well enough where it can be enjoyable for solo players. This can also make some solo content within the open multiplayer world if they wanted to do such a thing. Idk. I'm up for it tho.
What you described is why even if I disagree with it the AI crew is essential. Because sometimes I just cannot HAVE a player crew due to real life.
@@BuzzCutPsycho I guess we will just have to wait and see how great or bad it will be. e
Either it will improve Star citizen gameplay or just make it annoying to anyone useing AI. And how far will they take it? Will you be able to take your small Squad and do bunker missions? Will they help you care boxes to your ship? It would come to a point if they add actual NPCs where it be like why play with real players? It be like playing a single player game within a multiplayer game or something lol.
I miss gunning. Flying a hornet with cannons was not fun but I wanted to win so that's what I did and killed many people because that was what worked.
People are always going to use what works. I still have a hard time seeing multi-crew ever being better than mass single seaters.
As long as i get paid for my time, engineering, containers, guns...idc..that and a sociable crew with hard skins
Generally, if the ship says 1+ crew i'll pledge, leaving me torn over the Polaris that i love, but hesitant to commit being listed as 4+
Your concerns are precisely why we need the blades! You are the majority.
Amen brother
Hallelujah!
i feel the deemer that i use for bounties.
It aint too bad now