Splitting Crew into Ordinary and Able Seamen

[Fluffy Fishy]

I glossed over the idea slightly in the topic "Crew cost is obviously too expensive or..." by Wind but the idea simply comes down to splitting crew up so its handled slightly differently, to better show some balance and help give more of a curve to affordability of ships, rather than the fairly flat line we have now, while adding some realism and depth. It also adds a nice little complimentary idea that goes well with the officers, allowing for multiple ranks.

The System in Basics:
Able Seamen should be expensive and costly to replace, I would also be tempted to suggest that they should be of a limited supply so as to add a bit of balance for the smaller nations. The point of able seamen should be to keep a ship operating at peak efficiency, I am currently uncertain whether I would like to see a soft/hard/unlimited supply but I am leaning towards a soft limit, where the higher cost and lack of benefit by manning a ship with able seamen gives above what is needed. I am also quite happy to see a hard limit, for example, if a ship required 40% able seamen you shouldn't be able to have any more than say 50%, which allows a buffer for crew loss.

Ordinary Seamen, these should be fairly cheap to replace, fairly if not totally unlimited and you can have the ability to crew any ship entirely with ordinary seamen should you wish, however, crewing ships with too many ordinary seamen would come with some fairly substantial inefficiency problems, things like yard turning and reload times should be affected, I'd even go to the point of saying everything should be affected apart from turning the rudder, or working the pumps which I can't see how having someone inexperienced would create a major issue turning a tiller or a wheel.

Each ship should have a rough ideal number of Ordinary vs Able seamen needed to crew it effectively, and where we can start thinking about gameplay a bit more, smaller ships should require a lower percentage of Able seamen when compared to larger ships, allowing for a nice curve. My initial idea is to say that you would need around 10% of the crew on a Brig, or other ship around 120-130 crew, this goes up to around 20-25% on the Frigates and their crews between 200-300, with the need to have something like 40% able seamen on the large ships of the line. This would hopefully simulate the need for more skilled men on larger ships, able to operate more fluidly and independently with a longer chain of communication, where as the smaller ships can operate more efficiently with less experienced crew.

Some of the Complexities
Crew damage should be taken as a percentage, where if you are running with 30% Able crew, there should be a 30% chance that when taking crew damage that it should be an Able seaman that gets taken out, compared to a 70% chance for the ordinary seamen, I would quite like to see a historic weighting to show that a higher percentage of Able seamen would traditionally operate, there would be a higher chance of killing Able to Ordinary, and vice versa, however I would be more than happy to just see a simple model for now at least.

Only the Captain of a ship should know how many of each crew he has onboard, while I like that you can see the amount of crew an enemy ship has, I don't think you should see the make up, or be able to tell how many crew of which type you have killed in a rake.

Extras
I believe this system would work nicely with the proposed suggestions to Marines and how they will eventually make up a percentage of crew, again using this similar system they could be well represented and generally use a lot of the same mechanics, so in this circumstance its pretty much 2 birds one stone.

DeRuyter has suggested that we could also have Landsmen, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this, but i thought it was important enough to be worth mentioning, in the circumstance it would be nice to see an extra little allowance for these unskilled crewmen, it would be nice to see them being truly unlimited and frankly disposable. It would also be fairly nice to see a small portion of the crew percentage allowed to be landsmen, where they can take part in the most basic tasks, such as running powder and working the pumps. My worry with allowing Landsmen as well is it may overcomplicate the calculations and am personally of the opinion that Landsmen should be suggested as part of the numbers of ordinary seamen, leaving us with three options Marines, Able Seamen, Ordinary Seamen. Thank you DeRuyter for your suggestion.


Please do suggest any queries or quarrels you have with the ideas I have suggested here, thank you very much for reading. I would love to hear any ideas that other people might have on the subject, especially those who are more savvy to how ship crews worked.

Edited January 16, 2017 by Fluffy Fishy

[Sir Texas Sir]

I would prefer if we tweek the current systems and get them working before we think of any type of micro crew systems.  Hell we don't even have pirate mechanics yet in game.  

Though I think things like marines and boarding parties and able seaman should be a slider bar thing instead of magical mods that only few folks have cause they are so rare.  This way no matter what you have to have a min crew to man the ship to sale it properly.  Than of the rest of the crew you can arrange them for gunnery or boarding/marine parties as you feel fit for that ship depending on it's builds.     Don't get to fancy with it and each ship has a cap that you can't go over (the crew needed to properly sail it) so you can't make a ship just nothing but boarders.  Now remember if you take say lets use a Connie per example.  450 crew is what it normally holds with 145 needed for Sailing.   That leaves you with 305 for manning the guns or marines.   In the current system Marines will offer yo what 1-50% crew so you can have 45 to 225 marines on board depending on the mod you pick.  This means with normal gun set up and gold marines you pretty much have only 80 crew for your guns unless you use some from sailing.   Which your crew should be allowed to move around like that to fill the positions if needed.  Though I think they should make the 10-50% off the none sailing crew so that you can only have 30-150 marines top for that ship.   But you get to pick when you are in port what number of crews you have dedicated to marines and/or not.  This way no one needs fancy mods and you don't have these gold fit board only modded ships that just rage board.  Than maybe limit the supplies of marines you have in a pool of your total number of crew you can have for your rank.  You board and loose them a lot your pool shrinks until refilled.   Though you could later make up for the lost by just adding sailors to the ship.  Make the cost of marines higher than normal crew to replace.   When marines are lost they are only replaced by able body sail crew through press gang.  Perks like Doctor and using Medkits after a battles returns crew like normal, but only to the max of what was set to that ship when it was in port for each crew type. 

Edited January 16, 2017 by Sir Texas Sir

[Angus McGregor]

19 minutes ago, Sir Texas Sir said:

Though I think things like marines and boarding parties and able seaman should be a slider bar thing instead of magical mods that only few folks have cause they are so rare.

Thank you!  I've never understood why having Marines on your ship is a hard-to-get 'mod'. Say what?? They were on *every* military ship as far as I know.