Balancing Multi-Crew, AI Blades, and Solo Play in Star Citizen | Is CIG Catering to All Players?

Also, i think blades should have some sort of leveling scheme. Rookie blades being poor quality and pro blades being just skilled enough to help a decent pilot get through some of the more difficult contracts.
I think all of the top end end game pve should require actually having every crew member being a human.

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.

5 jet skis should not take down a multi crew coast guard boat. Right now in game they can

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.

As a business. I would rather sell more expensive ships than not. They are going to do AI Crew positions.

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 personally don't have the charisma of a cult leader and thus, will never be able to convince a real human to crew my ship. I need Ai.

Star Wars Galaxies had this problem and they never solved it. that's what i was worried about when they announced players can make their own EVERYTHING and upgrade them. that's a massive imbalance if they don't get it right.

Well, one, its not a 10 second halo match. Two, death of a spaceman. Three, finding people worth a sht, and btw I was in my 20s when this game started and everyone i played with stopped playing this game a long time ago, is not a job i plan on partaking. Because i dont care about 'you and yours'. If the events come naturally in the process of me partaking in an orgs content then ill participate or if i find the content enjoyable. The game is fine. Its all this instant gratification dudes, eh hem, that try to take a game, i quite enjoy and not built by me but even more dudes whom feel the same way, and make it something its not and never will be. Thats just how it is.

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.

I have to say its because getting people together is not fun, but on top of that how many of us want to see fleets? Do you think we can achieve thwt with just player crews? How does this make the game more welcoming and inviting for smaller orgs?

Don't make it less fun because its not players or unfair off of nonsense changes like less sheilds. It should be more resorce heavy, what is the point of stalking good food vs. bad or good habitation vs dirty uncomfortable habitation. This doesn't effect a player crew but npc yes it could. If my npc crew gets to upset could they steal my ship a strand me because i was a bad captain.

Make the ships less effective or not fun with npc crew is weak sauce man come on give actual feed back or ideas to improve the game not balancing off of spreadsheets. Try suggesting new fun features that have benefits and consequences that ifbyou have player crew don't effect you as a advantage. Npc crew getting moody because all you have is dry food because you didn't want to hire a cook or because you didn't hire cleaners would be better than making it less fun.

If you have 7 players in hammerheads with NPCs though shouldn’t they win against 7 players in one ship? This isn’t honour duelling, committing 7 hammerheads requires an immense amount of resources and they’re also risking a lot more so shouldn’t the odds then be in their favour?

8 Connies (rip corsair until AI blades)
in PVE, npc crew will cost "daily money" making your mission income tanks.
in PVP they will be not as good as normal players, and we will pick the best ratio "human per ship".
(ex) for 100 peoples pvp battle i prefer
10 idris over 3 bengal
80 solo Connies over 10 npc crewed HH
20 medium fighters over 10 hurricane.

This "multicrew" against "AI" problem looks very very far fetched right now, comparing to the problem of current "stealth" mechanics )) Right now any multicrew ship can't do anything against attack from a number of "stealth" small ships with emissions like 1500 and weapon range 2600. Only available solution is to jump away.

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 .

o7

Ultimately players will vote with their wallets. Looking like this will be the a worse year financially than last, and another declining year in player sign up which has been trending downwards as marketing is unable to expand the audience. Whatever CIG has done in the past 12 months clearly isn't having the intended effect. looking real bad for a company that burns so much money snd still two years out their first game...if you believe Chris

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.

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.

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.

What? I want real people, that is the only sense why I would play this? I don't want NPCs. They just need to implement a real good looking for group tool and the have to make the ships good.

I remember Planetside 2, you could usually get someone in your Liberator. But to get more than one player to help was almost impossible as the tail turret sucked.

Filling a Galaxy with 4 players.. forget it.

And that a combat game. Getting players to sit in your turret while you haul coal! Not going to happen.

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 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)

I guess you could always throw the technicality of "you didnt buy the ship, you pledged money to the project and got a reward for it" at them when people start crying about not being able to fly their "bought" ships with maximum efficiency

Multi crew with NPCs will work cause No NPC will/should be able to pilot a space craft there for if mr money bags pay to win wants to brig 7 hammer heads with NPC crew each ship will have to be piloted by a real player. NPC crew = less effective in battle as a maned crew. MR money bags pay to win sitting on his huge star destroyer Wah haha look at me and tremble with fear, well guess what one good team of players could easily bord that death star and take out all the NPC's and blow the thing to Hell.

This is the problem with player vs player not the star citizen I signed up for I wanted what they originally advertised I wanted a realistic vast space game where we could meet new people and team up with and go off and fight the aliens in unique Taylored quests made by the developers thats what they promised not this grindy player vs player sand box bull Sh . I wanted to hunt a golengazoo from the plant of Naroo for their prized poisonous fangs used to make exotic party drugs only to be double crossed by a rival warlord on return to lawless space station X.

I like being a gunner do to my real life schedule its a great way to join a crew and enjoy the game.

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 know this is off topic but are u playing the aoc alpha 2 playtest?

well as a solo player the direction the game is taking i will stick to Elite as i cannot see any reason to go beyond my avenger titan
no point grinding rep for blueprints when you cannot fly the ship solo
no point grinding rep to get more lucrative missions that require ships that the solo player cannot fly
solo non combat players are screwed

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 .

I just don't see how AI crews can be balanced properly. I'd love to be proven wrong. I think players that bought ships designed for multiple crew members should use them as they were designed, the point of having a ship of that size is to fill it with people and engage in a multiplayer experience. It seems absurd to expect bots to do all the work for you because you paid real money or used a bunch of in game AUEC. Wealth should not be an auto win, be it real or fake money and paying for AI crew members should never lead to any kind of advantage in any situation.

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.

All the games that favored PvP over fun, lost. This game will not subside only with pvpers. So this talk about favoring fun over power is bush*t.

100% Always Knew this would be a Requirement. Any Gamer with a Brain knows this. NPC can not beat Crewed or the game will not be in a playable state.

They should not have touched multicrew ships at all before there exists an engaging game with actual gameplay in the first place. Then it could be figured out iterating on what exists and works, and based on existing playerbase. Classic SC mismanagement and feature creep. I'm still personally waiting for SQ 42 to release to even try this game at, as there doesn't seem to be much there currently after 12 years. Shame.

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.

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.

human players you can give new orders on the fly ai that probably is harder

These are highly nitpicked examples,
Biggest of which assume that the player multicrew ship are a bunch of idiots. Your reasoning for them getting a bonus for being idiots is a terrible example.

You had your multicrew ship go up against impossible odds, first against multiple HHs and second against ships designed to kill HHs.

Players will benefit from being players, they will be able to read situations, adjust power, prioritize larger threat targets, and use the area to their advantage.

AI/NPC crewed ship will be first off reduced in power if using blades, making them weaker, and second will be limited in their overall effectiveness because AI/NPC crew will not be as good as decent players (CIG has said this)

You have made the assumption these ships will all be the exact same, they will not. Least of all, the player multicrew ship if staffed by decent players will outperform any solo crewed ship, they will outperform several, the ship will already be more powerful and technically smarter than the solo crewed one. (Also not to mention skills which CIG Still haven’t really expanded on)

its better to view it as a ship vs ship instead of player vs player scenario.

ship vs ship, player crewed ships (assuming decent skill) win.

if you are saying a single ship with 8 players inside should always overpower 8 random solo ships i highly disagree with you, why would any sane person fly a single hammerhead into 7-8 connies, firepower wise its the same, ship wise the connys have overwhelmingly more shields, health, and maneuverability than a single HH. numbers wise, the connies (assuming no ai crew or blades or missiles) should devastate the HH.

player crewed ships already benefit from no power loss, and no limiters on skill.

ai crewed ships suffer power loss, and have a hard skill limit.

a single ship should not be more powerful artificially just because jt has more players on it.

People want to fly their own ships. No matter how much fun they make sitting in a turret.
The main way of progression in the game is getting a better ship. What's the point if you barely get to fly it?

There is no need to make it "unfun" for solo players. That only hurts the game so a very bad idea. And at that point, being crippled, NPC crew is no longer an actual option, even if you can say "Technically you have the option to crew with NPC".

Just make the advantage of player crew big enough so people actually consider it worth it.
NPC crew should be the default way to play, entirely viable. But those that invest the effort of crewing with players should get a proper return on their investment.

For the rest, I largely agree with your suggestions but it only really applies to PvP players. PvE players use player crew for different reasons, fun being a main one, rather than "using the meta".

Hmm NPC will need to be an expense. They need rest and so on, i as a solo player with capital ships it was so difficult to fill up my ship even my Carrack so yea I want NPC crew as long as you can train your NPC crew or grind to be on the same level as human players that's the balance why can only humans learn from mistakes. Just like you can lose your gear and ship if you die the same logic should apply to A.i whay should it be un fun for solo players to have an NPC crew? Should it be difficult to get to that point where you have an entire crew of NPC? Absolutely. Should it be as expensive to run a ship as a player crewed ship of course with he added factvthat they have to continuously get paid for their work. player crewed ship was always have that problem because orgs.i don't understand this hate again solo players we have most of the risk and so on we have more of the expenses things like that. No one talks about that part at all only about oohhh no npc crew will ruin the game, why about the people who did the grind huh?

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

Id love to join a crew when i get on. But it takes forever for numbnuts to get there shit together or i get shot in the back as soon as we leave safe zones.

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)

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 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.

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.