Restructure the Cryo as a colony

Exanimus

It might be helpful to the game to reframe the deepfreeze as a colony. It would offer the development side of the game more opportunities to expand the game in the future by creating uses for characters not on ships.

One thing that seems like a hole in the game to me is that beyond basic collection and completing collections there is no use for most of the characters beyond a certain point.

Kinda like starbases but not shared. Buildings to build and perhaps expanding departments and functions. For example, a science centre. Collecting components from missions and voyages to build it. As it grows it expands. An astrometrics department, a medical sciences. Allow people to assign crew to stations on them for some form of useful effect in the game. Rather than the permanent like the reward for completing a collection, maybe putting a certain amount of Med base in your hospital provides a Med bonus in the rest of the game.

You could also throw a random daily, weekly, and/or monthly challange at the player for the colony to deal with. Kinda like voyages. Like every hour, quarter of a day, day a hazard effects the colony. And every week a dilemma occurs (lol, like a TV show). And presents a challange. Deal with an outbreak, deal with an attack. So lets say there is an outbreak, maybe you need to assign a Physician and a Nurse. Or maybe you are asked to send a Diplomat on mission. For the day/week that character would be "busy". For an hourly hazard maybe "someone broke their arm" so a physician is busy for the next 4 hours until it resolves, your academy might need a guest lecturer or demonstrator so you a marksman is busy for the hour. If you ignore it then it resolves itself, if you staff the challenge then maybe it drops a reward. Maybe every month there is a universal challange people can rank in.

Different buildings could build certain things to be collected maybe. Build a shipyard and maybe it drops a schematic you tell it to focus on as a daily. Maybe once a month it drops a voyage refill at a certain level. A market that's kinda like your own faction. You could have to staff a shop in the market, bigger markets more shop. If you have the shop staffed it drops a daily reward. A bar might drop a drink. In order to staff the shop a card would have to match traits. A bar would have to be staffed by a Bartender. A Klingon shop would require a Klingon and a Merchant trait.

MiT Sanoa

Love it! That would be an awesome addition and would also feel better than freezing the crew which is somehow sad as the never-come-backs are somehow sent to die.

Prime Lorca

How about a little story twist? Have you heard about the animated series in production called Lower Decks? Well, how about we change "freeze crew member" to "send to lower decks"? And it would make sense that it takes merits to get back to the main duty roster.

While stationed on the lower decks, they do all those things in the original post. It's just a thematic change to tie the new series to the game more strongly. And instead of building a colony, they're upgrading your ship(s).

Thanks for offering up this idea!

guest_692137023680515

This is great! I like both the original idea to have some use for non-active crew, and the tie-in to a new Trek IP.

The Big Ticket •4LB•

OP`s idea is mega !

Commander Sinclair

It could even be a Starbase since there are supposed to be thousands of people wandering around those all the time. I am sure Starbases get their own drama, and this way it could tie into Prime Lorca's idea as well.

Septani Ainalrami

The "lower decks" crew could even see some action, at least passively, if they became spotlighted in some new type of ranked competition. Something along the lines of an Arena or Gauntlet, where another player could challenge your designated LD crew in a test of skills/traits/whatever...?

Capt. One of Three

Exanimus wrote: »

Kinda like starbases but not shared.

On another hand, incorporating the freezer crew into the shared starbase would be interesting too. That would open new possibilities for multiplayer among the fleet members, and I do think that it would be very interesting to see more of multiplay and cooperation options within the fleet.

Keeping the inactive crew on a starbase also makes much more sense story-wise than freezing and unfreezing them constantly.

Agador Spartacus

1 more Awesone to OP.

Septani Ainalrami

The more we discuss this concept, the more it seems like a personal space station for each player would be an apt replacement for the vault. Starbases already exist in the game, and operate on a much larger scale than what we're looking for, here. Colonies don't really fit the bill, since they're typically more isolated and remote...crew must be readily accessible to be activated /deactivated at a moment's notice. A space station could be located anywhere and everywhere, even as part of a starbase's greater infrastructure, and can contain many of the same facilities in microcosm. Ship construction, docking & maintenance; Crew training, upgrading, & transfers; Inventory management & storage; Departments/Services dedicated to each of the 6 skills...all designed to accommodate a captain's diverse crew, and plausibly explain how they've all come to be working together under one roof.

As for creating some type of PvP competition that makes use of these crew, this could be a perfect opportunity to introduce a new Gauntlet that fixes the broken elements of the old one. This has all been discussed elsewhere, but in short there would be Arena-style divisions which each allow participation of certain crew rarities. Perhaps crew levels/upgrades might also be taken into account, to best match players against one another in apples-to-apples fashion. The nature of the competition itself needn't be only combat...all skills/traits can be potentially used, with possible synergy bonuses gained if a player's entire lineup meets certain criteria. Also, we may want to generally reexamine the parameters of just what sorts of activities a vaulted (stationed?) crew member can/cannot engage in. Makes sense that they couldn't do typical away missions, space battles, shuttle missions, or voyages, without first being called into active duty. But what about participating in the more specialized Cadet Challenges, Arena Battles, or Gauntlets...could these be done by stationed crew? I'm just spitballing, thanks for listening.