Erin Roberts @ PAX East

[TeaLeaf]

More gravy from the PAX East show.

THIS FROM OUR DIRECT CONVERSATION WITH ERIN ROBERTS:


Ship systems will be EXTREMELY complex - engineering will have more than one interface and depending on how crazy things are getting more hands down to engineering may be needed to push the system harder. There will be random effects when routing power and you'll need to also keep a second set of hands/eyes on the power panel and fix blown "fuses".

The more effective the crew - the more effective the ship - they want to reward this.

Idris can be fully crewed with NPCs but will be inferior - significantly so - to a crewed ship.

Ship systems on a capital ship will also be on smaller ships - but the ability to manually control them will obviously be harder and doing so simultaneously limited by crew size. So a RL crew on a Constellation will make it much, much more powerful/effective than a NPC constellation.

BIG NEWS
All ships will have a CPU which will "level up" with use. Perhaps a max CPU will have "25-30%" better efficiency on systems and weapons. When a ship goes boom - the CPU is gone. This is to couple with the re-build time (Mentioned a week for an Idris) as a deterrent to wasting ships. (All numbers are examples of the order of magnitude and not what may be in final game).

Ship defense systems are not likely going to be in ship auto turrets but rather innovative use of gravity/no gravity, auto bolting doors, and venting to space among other things.

Hacking will play a very big roll in ship combat, but will be "very hard" as well. When successful, it can be a huge equalizer. Hacking can be done by large and small ships to different degrees.

The way ER's face got when he talked of "Other ships" we've not seen yet was extremely devious and enthusiastic.

[TeaLeaf]

...and more from the ER chat from PAX East.

When ER spoke of systems and crews he clearly made these correlations:

IDRIS
Fully Crewed by NPC < Fully Crewed by mediocre PC Crew < Fully Crewed by excellent PC Crew

He said the design philosophy is to reward great teamwork on multicrew ships. In the context of the conversation he indicated that the efficacy of crews is tied to WHERE they fly in space. So if you have a fully NPC crewed ships you're better served being in more secure space - with PCs you are better served moving into high-risk space.

Beyond that, in several instances, he reinforced the notion that solo players will generally find themselves in safer space and groups of players (grouped in different ways) will find themselves in less safe place. The risk reward component of each thing we discussed always came down to this.

He was clear that an Idris with top leveled CPU and top notch NPC crew will find a challenging and lucrative role in safer space - but it will not be a match for a PC crew - especially a good one.

HACKING
He said "Hacking will be quite hard". I never got the impression it will be the goto method of fighting. He also mentioned nothing about how a small ship would handle it either as a hacker or being hacked. But if it is meant to be "Hard" then one can assume it would be hard to do with a small ship as well. He did not address hacking by NPCs. But that only means it was not discussed. Based on what he said about all other systems, it seems that NPCs are inferior to PCs. (This has been stated so many times by all of CIG since the very, very beginning.)


STATIONS
There are several player stations - Engineering for instance has at least TWO stations. One is power distribution, the other is power management. ER made it clear that at times of normal low intensity conflict one engineer would be doing both, but if the captain anticipated a wild fight or really pushing his systems, he would assign another player to run down to engineering and assist the engineer by repairing failing systems real time -while the engineer was "giving her all she's got!"

ER made it crystal clear that what they are doing is building all these very, very detailed ship systems to give us tools and then "WATCH" what we do with them. They "KNOW" we're going to come up with crazy weapons and ways to do things un-imagined and then they know people will come up with crazy countermeasures. When a system is overpowered, then that system can be balanced - that is what's so key to doing this in modules. [That is a close paraphrase of exactly what he said]

[TeaLeaf]