Author Topic: Many many crews  (Read 21654 times)

Offline Indreams

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Many many crews
« on: November 12, 2014, 09:07:44 am »
Have anybody thought about this?

How would the game balance change if ships had more than 4 people on it?

Offline DJ Logicalia

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2014, 09:58:33 am »
You would need more ships for one. It's easy enough to mange the current fleet with the 4 man crew. I think multiple gunners would be viable if the crew number was bumped up. All in all, though, I think 4 is the perfect number, mostly because the game in its current state is designed around it, but I could imagine a drasict game play shift (like a new game mode) in which a 5 or 6 man crew would be fun

Offline Alistair MacBain

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #2 on: November 12, 2014, 10:20:19 am »
That was something Muse considered during development but they decided against it.
4 is a reasonable number to be able to do most tasks but not everything at once thus forcing the players to actually coordinate and optimize.

Offline RedRoach

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #3 on: November 12, 2014, 10:46:44 am »
Could you imagine the power of a 5 engie build? Oh my god that be OP as hell.

Offline Indreams

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #4 on: November 12, 2014, 10:50:57 am »
I thought, in the adventure mode, a cool perk would be to have a 5th crew as AI engineer.

And I've recently played a match with a mobula, 1 gunner, 3 engi. That was a pretty effective ship.

Some ships really shine (or are really op) when they can get all four crews on guns. I want to see custom game modes that features 5 crew mobula or 6 crew galleons. (Because, let's be honest, no competent Yesha general will man their galleon with the same crew he mans squids with).

Offline RearAdmiralZill

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #5 on: November 12, 2014, 11:50:32 pm »
Yes he would. Manpower is scarce in these lands, and getting more than four crew lost per ship is just wasteful.

Offline RedRoach

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #6 on: November 13, 2014, 09:26:51 am »
I can imagine for some reason Adventure mode spotting boss ships with 6+ crew members to fire their guns and repair like hell at the same time.

Offline HamsterIV

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #7 on: November 17, 2014, 01:18:00 am »
There has been some psycological research (can't find citation) that the human mind can hold up to three concepts at once without having to abstract. That is why there are a lot of 4 player coop games even though the technology exists to have more players in the game. You can give some attention to what each of the three other players are doing. When there are 4 or more other players you have to start abstracting things. It ceases to be the main engie and becomes those guys who are responsible for the hull and engines.

The ships in this game are designed that 3 people will be stretched to capacity doing all the non flying things to keep a ship fighting at its limit. If you have ever suffered an AFK player you know how bad a ship performs with a man down. Also if you have a captain that is good enough to ghost fly the ship without loosing gun arcs you can see how an extra crew member is slightly redundant.

Offline Squidslinger Gilder

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #8 on: November 17, 2014, 01:51:30 am »
There has been some psycological research (can't find citation) that the human mind can hold up to three concepts at once without having to abstract.

You know you just proved that powder monkeys aren't human dontcha? :D

Offline nanoduckling

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #9 on: December 08, 2014, 12:36:13 pm »
The research Hamster is referencing is Cowan[1] which follows from work by Miller[2]. Basically humans can keep track of a small number of 'objects' at once (objects sometimes including people in this context) before they start to abstract. The exact number depends on circumstances a varies from about 4 to about 9 depending on what is being kept track of. In a social game where you want people to be viewed as individuals it is prudent to keep the number of folks to be kept track of small, otherwise people with start treating each other as collectives rather than individual people, and that hasn't always worked out so well.

Since our context here is basically combat and psychology gives you variable (if interesting) results it pays to look at the anecdotal evidence of how similar teams are organized. I will consider military organizations like those of the US[3] or Britain, so this isn't universal, but it is illustrative. Roughly speaking the crew of a single ship in Guns of Icarus is equivalent to a fireteam. The typical number of soldiers in a fireteam is four, sometimes less. This is the second smallest unit of organization, the smallest being a support team, used when specialist roles are needed such as operating a mortar. I don't think it is a co-incidence that in Guns of Icarus we typically organize ourselves so that we have a captain at the top which generally instructs the gunners as to targets, below the captain is a main engineer with some command authority over a combat engineer. We have basically organized ourselves into a fireteam with an engineering support team.

Then again at the level of ship-to-ship interactions we encounter a similar effect. Groups of ships are a little like squads or sections. Typically these consist of between 7-12 soldiers, about two or three fireteams. I think this hints at something interesting. I find 2v2 and 3v3 matches are a lot easier to manage than 4v4 (the jump from coordinating 3 ships effectively to 4 seems very large to me), especially since I'm trying to manage my own ship at the same time. I suspect we wont ever see a 5v5 or 6v6 map even if the player base expands, not because of lag or performance (although those are probably also reasons), but because it would be very hard to command these things without further explicit or implicit command structures.

In the same way I suspect adding players would seriously disrupt this command structure and be very destabilizing. I also suspect it might make people less civil. As of right now many of us only get grumpy with folks if they ignore the communication side of things. Being crap or being new is okay, dumping an entire clip next to the target I ask you to shoot at is fine, firing it into the wrong target will not get you in my good book even if you hit every shot. If the number of players on a ship were changed we would abstract people into groups, and part of that abstraction is likely to conflate 'new and learning' with 'unresponsive', with undesirable results.

As a side note for those of you who captain a fair bunch the leaders of squads and fireteams are typically NCOs (non-commissioned officers). While it is tempting to think of oneself as a captain or admiral leading a ship or fleet, it is likely that given the game scale the field manual I referenced earlier or the works of someone like S.L.A. Marshall are more likely to be of utility than the works of Clausewitz, Jomini or even Sun Tzu.

[1] Cowan, Nelson (2001). "The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (1): 87–114; discussion 114–85.
[2] Miller, G. A. (1956). "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information". Psychological Review 63 (2): 81–97
[3] Department of the Army (1992-04-22). "Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad". Field Manual Nº 7-8. Washington, DC, USA: globalsecurity.org. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
« Last Edit: December 08, 2014, 12:40:42 pm by nanoduckling »

Offline DMaximus

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2014, 01:08:10 pm »
That's probably the most thoroughly cited forum post I've ever seen.

Offline HamsterIV

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2014, 01:35:54 pm »
Serves me right for saying "can't find citation". Thank you nanoduckling for doing all the research.

Offline DJ Logicalia

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #12 on: December 08, 2014, 01:38:01 pm »
Nano is literally a theoretical physicist. He's a pro  :D

Offline Arturo Sanchez

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #13 on: December 08, 2014, 03:56:18 pm »
Could you imagine the power of a 5 engie build? Oh my god that be OP as hell.

cool downs say otherwise.

Offline ShadedExalt

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Re: Many many crews
« Reply #14 on: December 08, 2014, 05:29:20 pm »
Could you imagine the power of a 5 engie build? Oh my god that be OP as hell.

cool downs say otherwise.

Spanner repair x5 brah.  Also, guy for hull, guy for bloon, guy for fixing/shooting guns, guy for engines, guy for flying/maybe even buff.  Also x5 chemspray.  Yeah, still OP.
« Last Edit: December 08, 2014, 05:31:16 pm by ShadedExalt »