Warning: Wall of text ahead!It's a complicated idea, but I can see this working. It would COMPLETELY change battles for a start, since you would have to pay attention to the well-being of your crew, instead of spamming attacks or cooling. The likelihood of a crew member being injured would most likely be based on factors such as resistance, raw damage dealt, or, more importantly, damage to a specific area (e.g heat damage or cooling damage). As this system could be used to potentially knock out critical functions of an enemy mech, almost all top players' mechs will be poorly optimized to work with a crew system. This would encourage new mech builds that work better with crews and maybe some currently underused weapons may become invaluable to some builds. Mech builds solely based on damaging a particular area may become the powerful builds around.
This particular suggestion is unique in that it is an original idea that adds another layer of strategy and planning to every battles. Players who invest into making their mech optimized for this system will create new and innovative builds using parts that have not been widely used for years, or ones that have been ignored by top players entirely owing to their lack of usefulness in the current system. The basic designs that are used by top players currently will be useless, and a possibility is that each player will create a unique design to both protect against damage to critical areas of their mech, and to deal as much damage as possible to critical areas on their opponent's mech. Weapons with high damage to areas such as max heat damage or cooling damage will be incorporated into builds that specialise in those specific areas.
One specific type of build I can see greatly benefiting from a system like this is energy builds; Current energy builds are only viable if they can deal as much energy damage as possible in a short amount of time. All recently added mythical energy weapons deal around 70-80 energy damage, since the huge bonus damage from draining the opponent's energy to 0 is the only way current energies can win at rank 1. New energies under the crew system might focus on max energy damage to prevent their opponent using their weapons.
Physical builds could either be buffed or nerfed by either targeting the Mech Controller (structural damage to the mech) or to a less critical crew member. A way to nerf currently overpowered physical mech builds (especially the new shotgun/shredder/nova build) would be for non-ammo physical weapons to target non-critical crew, while ones that do require ammo would target more critical areas, as these weapons' ammo requirement leaves less space for other modules.
As for heat builds (currently an overpowered damage class in my opinion), the intense heat generated by using so many heat weapons could require an upgrade using the Crew XP you mentioned, to allow the Heat Operator to work in hotter conditions (heat-resistant suit maybe?
). Not buying this upgrade could cause a noticeable drop in the amount of heat reduction from cooling, even though the Heat Operator may not be directly damaged by the opponent. Frequent cooldowns to keep your mech's heat low could be a way around this. Negligence to your mech and crew WILL damage them both, and this goes for other parts of the mech and crew as well.
Since you mention a Repair Man to load in kits, here's an interesting idea: you cannot use kits until turn 10, and you can upgrade the RM to use kits earlier, at the cost of a LOT of Crew XP. Kits are overused in rank 1 matches (+12 resistance instantly at the start of a battle doesn't exactly make for an interesting game, but they're universally used and make for long, uninteresting battles). Perhaps having to pay extra for the privilege of using a kit 5 rounds earlier on turn 5 (eliminating turn 1 kits) would discourage kit play in
every battle.
As for the crew health kits you mention, I'll need to introduce a new stat into your suggestion to expand upon your idea for these kits, and that stat is Crew HP. Instead of immediately being incapable of performing a job after taking
any damage, they should be able to take
some non-severe damage,
if they are upgraded. Crew HP Kits could partially restore crew members' health. To prevent kit spam, they would follow the round 10 rule as do regular kits, and would prioritise the most damaged crew members first, getting them up to full HP before moving on to the next injured crew member, and repeating until it runs out of healing power. They should cost Crew XP when buying them in the shop.
The idea of levelling each crew member to have more experience in their own specific occupation is quite interesting, and this could be a critical gameplay element. You would need to carefully distribute Crew XP among your crew members, to get each to their optimal level for your mech build. Each new level would allow them to perform their job quicker, more effectively, and even unlock new abilities withing their area of expertise (e.g Heat Operator increasing cooldown of heat capacity, or Repair Man increasing kit effectiveness, once sufficiently levelled up). Each new level would be exponentially more expensive than the last, but investing into crew levels could be the difference between life or death in the heat of a battle.
If you've made it to the end, Polarz, great suggestion! It would be nice if you included some of these ideas into your post.
