NPC fighter pilots; an overhaul of a missed opportunity.

Longpost incoming

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NPC Crewmates need a complete overhaul; as it stands they’re little more than gimmicks that cause a considerable drain on a player’s resources and combat rank gain for what could be considered negligible combat benefit, and are a pinnacle of the missed opportunity in my opinion.

As such, I consider an overhaul to be in order. Proposed changes, in order of importance;

1. NPC crew should not take a portion of pay when they’re not on-duty. NPC crewmates having a detrimental effect on overall income even while you’re not using them in combat is frustrating. It incentivises hiring and firing crewmates for short stints of wanting to use your fighters over having any potential for bonding and making them grow with you, as losing upwards of 1/10th of your income from a 6 day exploration trip or a large trade haul to someone who was sitting in the station the whole time is annoying at worst, and an active detriment to your exploration and trade rank gain, which is income based. Proposed changes:
   1. NPC crew members only take their cut while on-duty. While not a big change on its own, this will go a long way towards making NPC crewmembers feel less like a burden to be dropped when you’re done with your fighter, and more like an asset worth keeping around. Current cut percentages are balanced just fine.
   2. NPC crew should cost more for their initial hiring costs; 5x more at minimum. Being honest with ourselves, paying 100,000 – 1,000,000 (from Harmless to Elite) credits for anything in the economy of E:D is essentially pocket change if you’re in the market for a fighter pilot, and having a larger hiring cost will justify wanting to keep them around as you’ve already sunk quite a bit into them.
   3. NPC crew should have a firing/insurance cost equal to 2x their hiring cost *at the time of hiring*. Disincentivizing just hiring and firing an expert ranked crew by making it cost 1 million credits to do so will balance them out, while incentivizing hiring less experienced crew will make insurance rebuys and potential future firing less taxing on a commander’s wallet; simultaneously promoting growth with your new crewmate.
2. NPC crew should not take a portion of combat rank gain at all. While it might seem like good balance to have the crewmembers take a portion of your gain while active to offset their benefit; the reality is that the fighter is almost never such a great asset to a fight that their contribution could be considered worth the price of reduced gain of combat rank. Proposed changes:
   1. NPC crew members gain combat rank independently of, but at an equal rate to, the player who hired them. This change is self-explanatory.
   2. NPC crew should gain rank at 1.5x the rate of players while below their CMDR’s rank, and at 1x while matching, but should never be able to rank up more than 1 rank above their CMDR.
   3. A CMDR should not be able to hire a crewmember of greater than 1 combat rank higher than themselves (unless for an exorbitant cost, say, 3x normal hiring price). No expert ranked combat pilot in the galaxy worth their salt will throw their life on the line for some greenhorn at the controls, and this will also go a little further towards growing that bond with a pilot. If you hired them at harmless and you both grow together in combat rank, keeping them around will feel a little more special.
3. NPC crew should be treated like ships in terms of transfer while off duty; if you move to a new station and you want to bring your pilot with you, but they’re not in the co-pilots’ seat, bringing them to your new location should cost a small fee and take a small amount of time. Having my crewmember available to me in, say, Jaques at a moment’s notice is a bit odd when it took me 2-3 hours of constant jumping to get there. Proposed changes:
   1. Essentially making it so you’re paying their taxi costs, this travel time should never be longer than 5 minutes within the bubble (1hr to colonia) and cost maybe a flat rate of 25k, but it would be just a bit of worldbuilding to make the galaxy feel a little bigger if these people you’re building a bond with need to travel with you wherever you go.
4. NPC crew members should be visible in the extra chairs available to you in your ship. I don’t even care if they always have their rem-lock helmets on, as long as their suit is coloured to whatever colour they’re shown to be wearing when you get them, their physical presence in the ship would be fantastic.
5. NPC crew should be able to boost the effectiveness of turreted weapons. Nothing too crazy, but if you have turrets on your ship you’re already a little insane. Hiring an NPC crew member and assigning them to the ‘gunner’ position should boost the turret’s tracking speed and potentially even their damage output by 1-10%. This will make hiring a crew member a little more viable for ships that don’t run fighters but still run turrets.
6. If a ship has the capacity to hold 2 people, a CMDR should be able to bring along 2 NPC’s. This is self-explanatory, and will be balanced out by reduced overall income for increased firepower. This might be interesting to implement with the current code, but it could also allow for interesting situations such as having a wingman while you’re flying and your mothership is sitting pretty, or launching 2 fighters while you tear it up in an Anaconda. 2 fighters won’t add an insane amount of extra damage, and can allow for some interesting combinations of fighter weapons to compliment your ship. A fixed plasma and a fixed multicannon comes to mind, personally.
7. This one would be the hardest to change, obviously, but: NPC crew members should have a little extra voiced dialogue. Nothing too crazy is required, but hearing simple little things like ‘nice shooting, CMDR’ or ‘That one’s history’ from your crewmate while they’re not out in the fighter but still in the cockpit would be a little extra touch of personality. Even potentially add some extra voice lines that they only say while you’ve had them for at least one rank-up; “you’re getting better at this!” or some things along those lines.

Personally, I just want more reasons to actually bond with my pilots; right now I’ve hired and fired about 13 crewmembers in a few days while I swap between fighting, trading, and exploring, since I don’t get much benefit from having higher ranked pilots sitting in a lounge somewhere eating up tonnes of my money and hiring a crewmate at expert rank for 150,000 credits, having my fun with the fighter, and then firing them before I cash my bounties is what I’ve resorted to to avoid paying a pilot who contributes very little to my killcount tens of millions of dollars.

These changes aren’t too difficult IMO, and they’re not game breaking in terms of balance; they’re just enough to potentially make running an NPC companion less of a credit and experience drain and more of a character you’ve brought on to help take on the world.