Crew Training (Making The Crew More Important).

[Terox]

To make both the loss of a crew more damaging and the expertise of a crew more important I have the following suggestion:

 

Add a crew training mechanic for the various aspects of the game, which could FOR EXAMPLE be

• Sailing
  • Tacking
  • Hoisting and lowering sails
  • Rigging
• Repair
  • Sails
  • Carpentry
  • Rigging
• Gunnery
  • Marksmanship
  • Ranging
  • reloading
• Medical
  • Ability to keep crew alive and return to duty
• Hand to hand combat (For or defence against boarding)
  • Sword fighting
  • Musketry
  • Boarding 
  • Grappeling
  • Defence

Suggestion for crew training Mechanic

 

Have a gui option list for "Training" which can be accessed while at sea or for the case of gunnery practise at set locations where there is a "gunnery Range"

and then select from a drop down list the type of training you want to carry out.

 

Training time earns training points per individual crew member who carried out the training

The training points that an individual crew member can have is capped, lets say for easy maths 10 points per crew member

The crew skill over the range of possible skills is then given as a percentage, lets say we have a ship of 100 men

Losing that crew member loses that training skill set for the ship

Have a cooldown timer that reduces the number of training sessions you can have over a period of online time players online time

Or you could buy from the shop "Training Aids"

 

The training mechanic would obviously increase the skill of the crew at whatever skillset they trained at

 

The maths principle

Lets say we have a ship with 100 men

Each crew member has 10 possible training points then can aspire to

So the maximum skill points for that ship would be 1000 points

lets say the captain has fully trained his crew, half of all training was spent on Gunnery and he has 500 points, of which half of the gunnery training was spent on Marksmanship and half on reloading. So the training points awarded so far are:

250 for marksmanship

250 for reloading.

 

He then spends all the other training time on repair until he reaches the following status

250 for Carpentry repair

250 on Rigging repair

 

The crew would then have achieved a professionally trained status and the data that the captain and only the captain would be given would be something like

 

Training Skillset

• Crew Training @ 100%
• Gunnery: Marskmanship 25%
• Gunnery: reloading 25%
• Repair: Carpentry 25%
• Repair: sails: reloading 25%

 

What happens if he wants to retrain the crew.

He needs to select the skill sets he wants to lose in order to retrain a different skill set.

if the skill set is in the same category, for example Repair, lets say he wants to retrain from rigging to sail repair, the training is done more quickly.

however if he wants to retrain Gunnery reloading to Sailing - Tacking, this would take longer because its a new concept to the crew

 

What happens if a crew member dies

Those 10 points are deducted from the ships skill set and the captain needs to recruit a new member back at a port or can use  a crew members from a ship he has captured if he hasn't sold them into slavery (A crew full of slaves could mutiny)

 

To simplify the system, you could allocate training values to each deck and split them between port and starboard

So you could have a port lower deck crew which has a deck full of carronades fully trained in just reloading quickly 

 

 

In Summary

Adding a crew training mechanic like this makes the crew and the captains ability to look after his crew way more important and adds an additional element to combat

 

 

 

[ashley]

I think this is a perfect idea and provides better versatility within fleets and with different ships. Some people within fleet would be able to focus on certain things. One fleet member could focus on repairs for their crews and be a damage sponge, soaking up broadsides and repairing while the other guy that focused on gunnery is sitting back and doing all the damage. Another could also focus on sailing inorder to get better speed from his/her ship in order to chase down more agile or faster ships for the rest of the fleet.

[Taranis]

I also think that the crew should be depleted after boarding actions.  You should have to either convince captured crews to join your rank or go to a friendly port to enlist new crew.

[Ghroznak]

Sounds great.

 

I absolutely want the crew to be an important factor. After all, crew is what keeps the ship going. 

 

I want crews to have varying quality, reflected in the cost associated with hiring them. I also want a poorly trained crew to progress and become better over time, as this will also make you care more about the crew that you spent hours on training and improving.

 

Also, a separation between crew and officers would be nice, as crew might have more task oriented skills such as gunnery, repairs, tacking and so forth while the officers would have skills related to morale, bonuses to the crews base ability at different tasks or during boarding and such.

 

This way you could have a superior crew with shoddy officers, or vice versa. It would certainly add more depth to the game and also make the ship feel more "alive" as it were.