Hi Tom.
It would all depend upon the mechanics of how your game worked over all,
what sort of timings were involved and what the crew were needed for. In a
game like Lone wolf, or for that matter most starship games we have, you do
something, it happens pretty instantly, ie, on the next turn for turn based
games, or immediately for realtime games like lone wolf. Thus, in most games
the crew just serve the function they do in something like smugglers, core
exiles or star traders, ie they give percentage bonuses to turn based
battles.
What I think however Milo was suggesting here was something a little more
like castaways, where your orders were not obeyed instantly and just like in
a real ship you had to assign crew to perform them, with the more crew you
assign changing the efficiency of the task.
For example, in napoleonic war era navy ships, you were pretty limited in
battle, sinse you needed three men loading each gun (and some of the larger
ships had upwards of 120 guns), as well as other crewmen carrying around
important things like gunpouder, balls, wadding for the cannons, barrels of
water both for making sure the cannon barrels didn't melt and for giving the
men a drink. thus, a captain could only get a full broadside going by
dedicating most of the crew to the task, there would be no way to hoist full
sales or repel boarders at the same time, (even hoisting half of the sales
would mean a good fewer guns were manned).
Naval Battles indeed usually came down to first maneuvering into the best
possible position, ie, where most of the cannons along the side of your ship
would hit the enemy while the enemy was hopefully face on to you, and then
sitting the ship still (or near as was possible on the open sea), and
pounding away.
I could imagine a naval game similar to castaways working on this model,
where you have to assign different members of crew to different tasks
according to what you were trying to achieve, with the art of the game being
able to respond quickly to say changing from maneuvering to gunnery to ship
repare after battle, working on the pumps, hoisting different rigs of sales
depending upon the whether and the course required and navigation, keeping
the ship clean to avoid disease etc.
it'd take a lot of working out of the numbers, but the need to vary your
stratogy and judge what was happening would make for something addictive.
With a starship the mechanics would need a little more thinking out,
possibly with micro managing a smaller group of people in more detail, sinse
after all the enterprise doesn't need three weapons officers on it's
phasers, indeed watching startrek I sometimes got the impression that most
of the crew basically were only busy when there was damage to the ship to
repare or some policing duties to be done, ---- or if they were attractive
and female and there weren't enough pretty aliens on Captain Kirk's latest
mission :D.
All the best,
Dark.
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