Hi, I'm new to this forum, but not new to SE. When I saw all the fuss over the SDD's and troops, I thought to myself, if you have a ship with a crew, arn't all the crew certified to a degree to protect the ship? I remember playing a game that was called Begin2.exe a long long time ago. It was all Dos based.
It was based on Star Trek ships roughly with different sized ships (dreadnaught, destroyer, escorts ect...). All these different ships had different amounts of crew according to their size. You could beam boarding parties over to a jacked up ship and capture it if you had enough crew to overtake theirs.
I'm not one for micromanagement, but if the basic design of a Dreadnaught held say...5000 people (or whatever you determined in the settings file) so be its ability to board. Forget the boarding parties and defense stations, they seem frvilous to anything close to reality. You could assume a computer controled ship had an android crew or whatever floats your boat. Now if you want a ship for boarding, then put pieces that allow additional crew space. Say a 1000 per pod or section that you wish to add into the design.
You could easily balance people from putting the max amount of people on a ship with the morality effect of a ship with "X" amount of people lost in battle. I remember in that begin game, once the shields were gone, you started to loose crew for damage taken to the hull. The more you had, the more you lost in variance to the impact bLast.
Now you could go all out and require facilities to be built on the planets to recruit soldiers, but I don't like micromanagement. Yet, you could leave something like that up to the ministers, or just turn it off in the settings. All depends on how much control you want in your game. The skys the limit in this game.
Sorry for such a long post...
Steve
PS: What ship dosn't have the little red button? None of that sacraligious mumbojumbo in my fleet. Besides, every ship has the ability to destory itself, it's called a 'fine tunner' to the <Copyright infringement>Warp Drive </Copyright infringement> aka a sledge hammer).
[This message has been edited by Steven-n-Donna (edited 01 June 2001).]