Service Crew on Ships.

[waynetarlton]

Hi all,

Just setting up a Shuyaku with the capacity for 180+ service crew.
Does anyone know if it makes any difference in having a full service crew or for example, 20?
Does a full crew improve efficiencies and if so, in what area?
Thanks,
Wayne

[Falcrack]

I don't think it is really necessary to have a full crew. But, I choose to max out the crew on all my ships as a general rule for myself. I also have installed a mod which gives ship crew a regular salary, so there is a running cost to all of my ships, since Egosoft does not seem inclined to provide this challenge, I will provide it for myself.

[Imperial Good]

Does anyone know if it makes any difference in having a full service crew or for example, 20?

Yes there is a difference. For the ship to operate at maximum performance (full 5 star) it needs a full service crew of 5 star crew as well as a 5 star captain. Any crew missing or anyone not 5 star would cause the ship to fall below 5 star.

Does a full crew improve efficiencies and if so, in what area?

It improves its performance in some aspects. Mostly repair. Honestly not at all worth it.

L container ships like the Shuyaku clearly were intended as shuttle ships to move crew around. It makes no sense that they would need such stupidly large number of crew. I would not recommend filling such ships with crew as the bloat to the save file would be utterly stupid if they were built in large numbers.

Ships need a per ship specified optimum service crew amount. Past this amount no more performance should be gained. This can be lower than the crew capacity of the ship, such as with container ships. S ships this should be 0-1. M ships it should be 2-5. L ships it should be 15-30. XL ships should be 100-150.

As an optional, but possibly fun/game enhancing, feature, with insufficient crew there could be penalties to ship general performance. These penalties are small for S ships, such as only 10% flight speed or shield recharge rate, but could be very large for XL ships such as 95% flight speed and shield recharge rate. The penalties are irrespective of crew skill, with crew skill only counting to ship skill and any bonuses that brings. This encourages the purchase of crew since currently one can get away with 0 service crew which also avoiding ships like L container transports ending up with hundreds of crew for no benefit.

[mr.WHO]

Does anyone know if it makes any difference in having a full service crew or for example, 20?

Yes there is a difference. For the ship to operate at maximum performance (full 5 star) it needs a full service crew of 5 star crew as well as a 5 star captain. Any crew missing or anyone not 5 star would cause the ship to fall below 5 star.

Can anyone from Egosoft could confirm this? I think it's rudiculously high requirement to have entire full crew 5-stars for ship to perform 5-stars. It's hard to have 5-star captain in the first place and you need everyone to bottom janitor to be elite?

[Imperial Good]

Can anyone from Egosoft could confirm this? I think it's rudiculously high requirement to have entire full crew 5-stars for ship to perform 5-stars. It's hard to have 5-star captain in the first place and you need everyone to bottom janitor to be elite?

They kind of did indirectly here...
viewtopic.php?f=192&t=421088&p=4905893& ... w#p4905893

Confirm that it's intentional, although the effect of having marines on board is identical to not having service crew on board with regard to ship crew skill, shouldn't make it worse. And the reasoning is as you stated: marines don't crew the ship so don't contribute to how well the ship performs.

Someone even ran experiments.

Hmm alright, i've spent the past 3 hours logging and testing values. The 3,5 stars value isn't constant, turns out it depends how many ppl are on board the ship.
Max combinedskill possible on a 20 crew ship 19 + pilot is 85/100.

Assigned marines don't seem to influence the combinedcrew stat. If all assigned crew is service crew, the combined skill value will reach 100%, but as soon as some are assigned as marines, it will drop.

The test was with cheated crew (5 star). It only reached 5 star when captain + all crew were 5 star. Anything less such as crew missing or not being 5 star would result in a non-5 star value. Any marines count as missing crew and will prevent the ship from reaching 5 star.

Hence my above recommendation. There should be a smaller optimum crew amount X so only the best X service crew count towards ship performance. One could also have a penalty for having too few service crew, preventing people from operating an entire carrier with just a captain.

[mr.WHO]

Hmm, that would explain why most of my ship act like braindead during combat - usually I go for pilot only for fighters and captain + 10-20 service on bigger ships.

[tomchk]

If having full crews isn’t worth it, I may have to fire a ton to see if it’ll speed up gameplay, saving, and loading. Any experience testing that?

[Imperial Good]

If having full crews isn’t worth it, I may have to fire a ton to see if it’ll speed up gameplay, saving, and loading. Any experience testing that?

It will potentially speed up save/load speed. Especially if you have 10,000s of crew on L container ships. Every crew person is a unique entry that gets saved. 100s of crew could be as much data as a few ships.

Generally I recommend your elite combat ships should have full service crew. They benefit the most from skill. These service crew can even double as marines for boarding operations, there is no penalty reassigning them between deployments and they will still gain morale doing both. Also combat ships have reasonable crew capacities given their purpose.

Miners and traders seem to benefit very little from service crew. Container ships are especially problematic with regard to this as they are clearly intended to double as people transports since they have more crew capacity that similar sized combat ships. In real life massive container ships run on practically skeleton crew sizes to save costs, a tiny fraction of the crew size that a much smaller frigate uses.

[pref]

Container ships are especially problematic with regard to this as they are clearly intended to double as people transports since they have more crew capacity that similar sized combat ships. In real life massive container ships run on practically skeleton crew sizes to save costs, a tiny fraction of the crew size that a much smaller frigate uses.

Shuyaku and the likes are funny to board with. I have stolen quite a few carriers and destroyers using that insane crew capacity