Manpower as a resource

[Makinus]

One way to not create more micromanagement would be to treat manpower in global scale, so planets with small and unhappy populations would produce only a very small quantity of ship crews, and big, happier populations would produce a lot of crews (with modifiers of facilities, if the planet is blockadedit will not produce crews, etc.), but the actual skill levels of the crews crewing the ships would be a simply comparasion of the number of ships in the fleet (with modifiers to attrition) with the global crew production of the empire...

So newbies to the game would not need to actually manage any new resource, since the "crew production" would not be actually "spent" but shared by all ships in a global scale (with some ships using more than others, since warships would need more crews)...

As an example in how this would work in game terms, if you have 3 planets, one being you homeworld and the other 2 being a small undeveloped colonies, and you have 15 ships

Let´s state that a ship need 1 "manpower point" to have a crew with 100% skill.

The homeworld would produce 10 "manpower points"
The colonies would produce each 1 "manpower points"
We would have a totoal pool of 12 "manpower points" that need to be divided to 15 ships, resulting in 0.8 point per ship, that would result in a crew with 80% skill handling the ships...

Of course we will need additional ways to represent the increased use of manpower by warships, and a crew skill would need to be capped at something like (like 150%), ships lost would decrease temporarily the global "manpower pool" and facilities could increase the "manpower points" productions of a planet or system, but the advantage of such system would be that you don´t increase micromanagement in any significat way, and adds a very fun factor to the game...

[gregebowman]

Another thing that might affect ships is computers. The more that the tech is researched, the more things can be automated and there would be less need for a skilled crew. It might take a lot of game years to do the research and gain the technology. In the meantime, you would need such skilled staff. But eventually, you'll need less population to build and crew ships. Then you can use them to colonize more planets.