We are in the middle of implementing enemy ship crew. Most importantly- elaborating what goes on in their simulated alien brains :3
Crew AI has to be pretty intelligent- the crewmembers must prioritize between operating weapons and other modules (in order of importance), extinguishing fires, repairing stuff and healing themselves in medbay.
There’s even more complexity in there than sounds, since the order of module importance will change depending on the situation. The crew AI also has to take account of distance to potential tasks plus check if somebody is already on the task (or moving towards the task).
In addition, ship crewmembers can have skills which boost modules they operate. Crew with good gunnery skill should therefore operate ship weapons, and crew with high intelligence should operate high-tech modules.
Later on, the crew AI must also know how to escape, board the player ship, navigate it and fight player crewmembers (and their murderous pets). Our programmer says it’s almost like building a tiny RTS inside FTL. So we have our work cut out for us :)
For the meantime, there's also some inspiring news. Generous people have donated ~10% of what Shortest Trip needs via our presale/crowdfunding campaign at IndieGoGo and ratings everywhere have been super-positive. For now, the first wave of attention has subsided, and we still need minimally 500 more backers to to keep working on the game full-time.
Below is the overview of our progress so far:
If you haven't checked the campaign out yet, it also features a trailer with overview of upcoming features.
Thank you for your time!
What about a priority list like the one in Rimworld, I don't know what it's going to be the size of the crews, but maybe set priorities that take into account the skill levels of the groups.
Let say, the player can set a rule that states:
"For CREWMEMBER with INT > 8 set TECH BASED STATIONS priority LEVEL 1"
"For CREWMEMBER with GUN < 5 set GUNS priority LEVEL 4"
And so on. So the priorities aren't hardcoded and the player can decide where does each member go.
And also per crewmember priorities tab in case the player wants to micromanage it.