Being a passenger in Ialie's ship, she's alone a lot of the time.

This brings up an interesting point. People can't really solo this. If you don't have an empath, for instance, you are more likely to die. There are likely to be more ships that crew, because it seems everybody wants one.

Thus I can see people actually hiring themselves out as mercenary crews. Hire their services for 1-3 (lusternian) weeks. I could even see mercenary clans forming, freebooting privateers serving a master.

Or a few "scurvy dogs" that end up turning traitor at the wrong moment...

This means someone is going to have build a cantina to go to in order to hire these mercenaries...


must...stop...thinking...of...star...wars

When you have to nerf a few skills we can call you George Lucas and how you are "robbing our childhood"...

Well, if trade ever becomes a part of aetherspace, you will find people hiring out their ships, as trade ships to different merchants, i mean, if you cant actually buy your own, why not hire someone to sail with, and get them to take you around, i mean, you probably wouldn't pay them if they get you killed, but that will be for the merchant and the cap'n to decide.

I'm hiring out myself and whatever other dreadlords decide they want to come, as aetherpirates so to speak. Boarding parties etc

Howabout we pay you more not to board us?

do I get to be a dreadlord yet? I'm getting my gunning skills pretty fine tuned for the amount of skills available..

When you think about it, a full war ship crew needs, the cap'n, three gunners, the empath, and then the boarding crew who swarm across and smush people, or defend against fights, and i'm pretty sure you would be able to taint/flood/infest/forest you ships, so then it's always a good idea to have a mage/drood if your going to go combat. Then the others should be either full warriors, or a mix between warriors and back up guardians/wiccans/droods/mages.

Essentially you need primary crew to man everything (pilot, empath, 3 gunners, ..) a secondary crew to take over when the primary needs rest (be it IC sleep or just a moment without concentration) . The boarding/defender party.

Essentially a good ship would probably take most of a city to man it.

Thus why you should ask Catarin for city funding to fully beef out the CLS Ealhdun and become the leader of the navy that we all know is coming!
Vive La Celestian Light Ship Ealhdun!!

Then we can have our, Royal Celestian Navy, fight it out against the Imperial Magnagoran Armada on the high Aether Seas!

What I find interesting is how will people go about organizing the communication within the crew. It's been said that the crew must work as a single person, which requires sharp commands and their execution. At the same time, crew members must be interchangeable, since ship owners can't possibly sail around with the same team all the time and need to be able to assemble crews from what is "available in the port" at any given time.

The real navy solved the problem by developing a universal command language, that has a specific term for every part of the ship, maneuver and action. Along with a protocol according to which every command must be repeated by the executor to confirm that the command was heard, understood correctly, and is currently being executed.

So will Lusternia develop something similar? What might it look like if the answer is yes? Are things like that already in the making?

Earlier in the Avaerin when Shorlen was commander we were having fun with some rudimentary things like that. Before leaving dock, he asked over SHIPT something like "All stations, report" and we'd respond to the effect of "Empathic grid, ready" or "Turret, locked." Everyone reported in, he announced that the Avaerin was launching, then did so. Then either asked where we were going or noted a general course/heading/direction/intended-target, then he started off and running. When we stopped at a vortex to siphon power, every so often the commander said "Collector, report" and the person locked to the collector would respond with how much power we'd gotten up to. The turret people generally tried to also communicate amongst themselves with what to target, calling the name of it out on SHIPT. If there were too many coming, that the turrets couldn't deal with and the empathic grid wasn't able to heal quickly enough, one of the turrets would call to the commander to move. Alternatively, if the commander was fleeing around and didn't need to, the turrets would say to hold on. In the group of people at the turrets, generally one acted as the leader to do the calling out and such. Then when we docked, the commander would announce that we were indeed docked and it was time for shore leave.

Twas fun!

Edit: Oh, but one thing that actually inhibits communication a bit is making everyone who's locked in see the navigation map thing. It's good in a way, in case your pilot has to run and you need someone to take over who can then know where things are ... but it's virtually impossible to make comments while the ship is moving. Hopefully, perhaps, we'll get an option to config the navigation map view on or off ..

Maybe with that MAPSHOW option in Config?

This is important actually. The fact that everyone locked into the ship can see the map is INSANELY spammy. ESPECIALLY when they have a giant map like Elryn. It makes communication pretty much impossible, and I'm a very fast reader. (And it was making Athana seasick, heh.) There needs to be some way to avoid that, and even then the captain won't be able to hear -anything- if he's moving. My monitor is pretty big as well btw.

There's a MAPSHOW option in Config?

*whimper* If so, why didn't I find that out before just spending about the whole last month in-game out on various voyages and going crazy?

mapshow config doesn't stop the spam

in fact it doesn't do much at all

I still think if your out for 4 or more days without eating any fruit containing food, you should get scurvy! Methinks like drunkiness, the more your out in Aether the less Aethersick you should be, so at the start people are falling over, and vommiting, since they're aethersick, though it's like, if you move around too much, you can get aethersick, and it goes away if you stay still... maybe?

I think that's taking realism a bit to far actually.

That was a wilderness option on Achaea (I think)...it's never applied here before yesterday, I guess.

EDIT: Argh, I hate this new forum layout, keep accidentally deleting posts instead of editing them 'cause the button moved.

Anyway. I don't think the beasties are actually giving -any- karma or experience...think I'll bug that just in case.