Captains and Governors

[Taqwus]

Nifty idea, 'tho might be hard to balance -- perhaps they should cost more Organics and fewer Radioactives? An unbalanced resource cost would increase build (training) time...

I notice that you don't have a technology requirement; the most obvious candidate in the default tech tree seems to be Advanced Military Science.

Other ideas, although I haven't checked whether or not the abilities would work --

- Engineering experts.
[AMS + Ship Construction + Repair]

Provides some repair ability (damage control).
MAY provide a tiny maintenance bonus, but be very careful balancing it.


- Astrogation experts.
[AMS + Astrophysics ]

Provides bonus movement points.

- Recon experts.
[AMS + Astrophysics + Sensors]

Advanced form of above. Bonus move, plus
basic passive ECM sensing, MAYBE long-range scanning at a very short range.

- Tactical combat experts.
[AMS]

Possibly bonus combat move, and some +att /
+def.


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[dmm]

I love these ideas. Are they really do-able? I also like how they can be easily destroyed by chance in battle -- just like real life. (E.g., King Harald was killed by an enemy arrow in his eye during the Battle of Hastings, which saved the day for the Normans, who were losing to the Saxon infantry.)

[Suicide Junkie]

All those suggestions are doable. The only thing wrong is that concentrating the cost into organics and radioactives will not increase the build time.
For any ship in most mods, the only construction bottleneck is minerals.

Making the specialist crew components use organics and radioactives much more than minerals is a good idea.

The one per vehicle restriction is important, and I suggest complementing it with the "can't be repaired" ability when the next SE4 patch comes out.

[Mad_Lear]

I really Like the idea of having specialist crew components, especially the graded captains. I think that certain racial techs should produce specialized crew/captains. For example, psyhic races should be able to get captains whose vastly superior psychic powers act as a 40 odd member security squad for boarding defense and also maybe a free level one psychic sensor ability for the ship. Organic races could produce "genetically engineered" or even "genetically perfect" (think 5th element) captains who also provide extra security (being able to single-handedly massacre whole squads of lesser creatures) and provide extra bonuses combat bonuses to the whole ship (due to naturally superior intellegence and the whole biological computer thing). Of course, a high level of research in the appropriate racial tech along with whatever research is necessary to get high-grade captains in the first place would be required to get the racial tech captains, and the point cost of the racial techs might have to be tweaked a bit for balance.
Anyway, just a few quick ideas....

[Hotfoot]

Just a thought, but wouldn't it be easier just to kill two birds with one stone by making the elite commanders simply branch somehow (be it by racial or highly advanced tech) from the bridge component? Just give it all the properties that a Bridge section usually has, and then add on the abilities of the high-level commander (or in this case, top-notch commander and bridge crew). That way you wouldn't need to clear up any extra space for it, and you could have the redundant bridge crews always be somewhat less capable than the main Bridge Crew, but still there to make sure that the drop in combat effectiveness isn't disasterous.

And in order to balance it out, you can increase the costs involved to make this advanced bridge component and justify it as both advanced bridge design and construction and the training of the critical officers. And a "Cannot be repaired except at shipyard" tag might be useful. I wonder if you can make the tag read "planetary shipyard", in order to represent the need to train a brand new bridge crew from the local naval bases.

-Hotfoot
"Make it so."

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