Suggestion: Hire an AI Crew

I would love to see more life on a ship, even if they were just cosmetic. If they can actually fire cannons, set sails and do repairs it turns into a huge issue.

It would be nigh on impossible to balance vs. players. If they were even remotely as good as players, most people will just take an NPC crew and cruise around in a galleon broadsiding everything they can find.

If you made them not as good as players, there would be constant complaints about them and nobody would use it, which would mean wasted dev time. Not to mention an entire new system in the game that would require dev time to maintain, balance and monitor for abuse.

@nos37 said in Suggestion: Hire an AI Crew:

If you own a ship, you can hire crew to fill up the available player slots.

• They stay on the ship
• They do not captain or steer

Now that we have PvE and Guilds, and soon "Fast-Travel," what's the next big thing to add to the game?
How often do you watch update trailers or spotlights for Sea of Thieves and the ship cosmetics are always for the Galleon? If you play solo, you'll never get to experience galleon gameplay.

The AI could start off as brain-dead skeletons. They manage the sails, follow orders given via the captain's wheel, and try their best to repair, bail, and keep the ship afloat. Later down the road, if the AI becomes more advanced and complex, randomly generated pirates (from the pirate generator) could be used.

I think its probably better that instead of having the option to hire an AI Crew, you have the choice of turning on or off AI Crew that will only fill the spot of an actual player crew until said player crew join in (ie. on a galleon, 3 AI Crew can join in if you are alone, 2 if another player is in the crew, and so on)

Also, as with @Guildar9194 's feedback:

AI crew would be OP:

• They can, in theory, bail faster/more efficiently than players.
• They can aim cannons better than players.
• They can repair quicker than players (Remember; Players may fail a repair if waves rock the ship. An AI player does not have to move a mouse around).

Plus, I don't think player ships have a navigation mesh matched to them, thus not giving the AI any way of actually navigating the player's ships.

We can simply Tweak the AI to be less efficient than players:

• They bail 40% slower and are unable to use Pro-bilge strats
• They have a nerfed Skeleton AI: They shoot 50% slower than regular player and are not effective past a certain distance
• They repair 40% slower and are still affected by cannon shots which will push them off their repair animation.
• And just like any other enemy entity - They have basic skeleton AI for sword/gun fights, can be killed and will not heal themselves unless out of danger.
• They also does not respawn instantly when killed - being given a cooldown on respawns but they can be revived just like a regular player if they are down.

With that in place, at least it will give ships with less players some fighting chance rather than being extremely disadvantaged from a lack of crewmates, either from them leaving the game at the most unfortunate time or if one crew is in a brig because griefers.

try their best to repair, bail, and keep the ship afloat

Basically a skeleton ship….with one pirate who boards the other ships while there ship auto heals.

@nos37 Get friends who play! daily.

Add me bro. ill sail with ya sometime. I am mostly a AM-PST & weekends pirate.

Li_JRATT_Li on the box.

Ive met a few new people here and have had good times sailing with them lately.
Whatever you do.. dont do open crew.. lol. Thats a rough exp.

And i like the AI idea.. like if u had the skeletons on a skele ship helping you out on a larger ship.. But it just couldnt work here.

@d3adst1ck said in Suggestion: Hire an AI Crew:

@siegnard said in Suggestion: Hire an AI Crew:

We can simply Tweak the AI to be less efficient than players:

• They bail 40% slower and are unable to use Pro-bilge strats
• They have a nerfed Skeleton AI: They shoot 50% slower than regular player and are not effective past a certain distance
• They repair 40% slower and are still affected by cannon shots which will push them off their repair animation.
• And just like any other enemy entity - They have basic skeleton AI for sword/gun fights, can be killed and will not heal themselves unless out of danger.
• They also does not respawn instantly when killed - being given a cooldown on respawns but they can be revived just like a regular player if they are down.

With that in place, at least it will give ships with less players some fighting chance rather than being extremely disadvantaged from a lack of crewmates, either from them leaving the game at the most unfortunate time or if one crew is in a brig because griefers.

They'd definitely have to be pretty weak, but there are a host of other side issues that current AI doesn't handle like using ship resources (or do they just have infinite?), repairing interactables (helm/mast/capstan), using interactables other than cannons (if you want them to manage sails, which has it's own problems), and changing stealth gameplay completely by always having an entity on ship that reacts to other crews. The skeletons on skeleton ships are pretty simple in comparison since they just walk around, shoot and fire cannons at everything - which you sometimes don't want your crew to be doing.

Also not sure what kind of impact always on AI would have on server performance, since all other AI despawns if you get out of range, but that could be minor.

As for your concern:

• its either them having unlimited resources, or they will automatically take resources straight from the barrel when using them. They won't have an inventory of their own and won't try to go back and forth from the resource barrels. Also they cannot use storage crates.

• as for sail management, you don't have to think too hard. It can just be made so that if you are interacting with a sail, an npc will automatically join in on it, making it faster for you to raise and rotate sails.

• for stealth, I'll admit that it might be an issue, but you can just make it so that any hiding emotes will not aggro any npc crews

• and you can't really help it if the npc crew decides to do some things you don't want them to be doing. In the end, they are just a temporary replacement to fill in the gap of a missing crewmate. You'll either have to live with it or just toggle off having npc crewmate in your ship.

@d3adst1ck said in Suggestion: Hire an AI Crew:

@siegnard said in Suggestion: Hire an AI Crew:

• for stealth, I'll admit that it might be an issue, but you can just make it so that any hiding emotes will not aggro any npc crews

That won't matter much because if they're always on the boat, they're going to shoot at anyone who boards before they have a chance to emote.

Yeah, unfortunately this would be the compromise that will happen if this suggestion is implemented.

I don't really have any good idea to help with this part of the issue sadly. maybe someone else have a better solution?

The game is designed as a 2-4 player game. Only reason for solo option is the wave of complaints they'd receive without it.

I'd vote this up if the AI crew performance was vastly inferior to the performance of a brand new player.

Or maybe the trick is that AI does a mediocre job adjusting sails on your galleon and bailing, but then can't engage in combat.