Update 29.10.0: Command Intrinsic Feedback Megathread (Read First Post!)

[2ndPersonPlural]

Love the personalities of the crew, love the customizability, and they're much more useful than I expected.  Showing how long they've been on the crew is a great touch, and I look forward to eventually seeing "contract length: 1 year" on the people I hired today.  I'm using the tactical menu more than ever before.

A few points:

• Pilots and gunners have no way to deal with crewships, or mission objectives like radiators.  Maybe let us assign a gunner to the forward artillery, direct the pilot to aim at crewships, and waypoint objectives for them to fire at?  (Doing this through the tactical screen so we can stay in a different location would be nice.  This would especially help with the pulse relay skirmishes.)
• Three intrinsics levels are taken up by competency points.  This was disappointing.
• Engineers don't seem to use the forge.  Maybe one of the competency point intrinsic levels could be replaced with that ability, and we could get the point elsewhere?  There's not much engineering to do when you cut out half the role.
• Every time I leave the ship to board an objective and check in on my tactical menu, the pilot has come to a dead stop a dead stop in front of an obstacle.  This doesn't seem to happen when I'm on the railjack or in archwing; the piloting is ok then.
• After you train a crew member, you can't tell what points you gave them.  Maybe make those dots look different like you did for the avionics grid upgrades.

[Gentleman_Bird]

Seems like every crew role except Pilot works fine, but it would be nice if there was an Artillery Gunner role. Either have the gunner target high-priority targets such as Crew Ships, or have the player pilot mark targets for the artillery gunner.

[Padreic]

I can certainly understand why crew AI is not as effective as a real person in a mission.  That's one stumbling block to playing solo, and one that can be minimized by iterating over the weaknesses of the AI and the structure of the missions, but will never go away.  I can accept that.  But in order to even use crew to play solo, you have to invest in the Command intrinsic, which means you have less intrinsic points to invest in the other trees.  As someone who didn't want to play Railjack at all before because of the forced grouping, this puts me at a massive disadvantage.  I don't even start with enough intrinsic points to get Command 5, which is what I'd need to have all three crew unlocked.  Plus with the tiny amount of intrinsic points left over from getting Command 4, my other intrinsics are at garbage level, making me take yet another hit to my effectiveness.

So as a "new" Railjack player, I:

• Have to deal with crew AI that's inferior (to people playing in groups),
• Can't play solo with a full ship of AI crew, because I can't afford Command 5 with the starting points and,
• Have fewer intrinsic points to spend on the other intrinsics

It seems like DE really doesn't want us to play Railjack solo at all, honestly.  And I'd be fine with not playing it, if they weren't also making it a content-gate into everything new.  As things stand, I can't get the new mods, new sentinel, new stance, new weapon, or farm for the newly unvaulted primes or arcanes (aside from Eidolons).  Going forward, I won't be able to do Queenpins, get their weapons, and I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if Sevagoth wasn't also gated behind Railjack.

My request to DE is therefore this: either be serious about letting us play solo, or turn RJ back into the content island it was and let me ignore it without ruining a ton of other content.

[Gullim92]

After a lengthy, sweaty session I'm glad to report the command intrinsic is surprisingly great! On to the feedback:

 

• Please allow players to take over turrets without having to re-assign the gunner NPCs, similar to how players can take over the pilot seat without having to re-assign the pilot NPC
• Please consider allowing pilot/gunner NPCs to target mission objectives like reactors and such, mainly the ones that require an away crew (ie: Grineer missile silo). This would be a great improvement for solo players
• Consider making it so pilot NPCs will focus on maintaining their aim towards enemy crewships when a player is using the forward artillery, allowing us to use it more effectively instead of having to fight against the pilot or re-assign him temporarily and keep the ship at a standstill. Alternatively, consider letting NPCs use the forward artillery and let the player mark what specific target to shoot at. This also applies to the slingshot, please have pilot NPCs change direction according to the player's aim when inside the slingshot
• A small quality of life change, consider allowing NPCs to assign a secondary role, for example if I take the pilot seat away from a pilot NPC, let him automatically assume a gunnery role, or another role set by the player in the crew menu
• Please let gunner NPCs talk from their seats similar to how the pilot can, it's a shame to have these personalities aboard and only being able to listen to the pilot, plus we could use more voices to cut between Cy's constant warnings.
• Personally I haven't used the engineer role for NPCs, but hearing that engineer NPCs cannot use the forge is highly discouraging, it's quite literally half the job of the engineer, please consider a way to change this.
• As for liches, I haven't personally used them but since they can only take the defender role they sound quite useless. I'm sure its old feedback by now but please consider letting liches take other roles.
• I don't know what R10 for command is planned to be, but I would love to see more necramech integration somehow, such as allowing necramechs to act on their own both within and outside the railjack. Necramechs could take the current position of liches, being a defensive powerhouse that cannot take other roles.

 

That is all for now! Again, great job on the command intrinsic, I'm legitimately loving it so far.

[Zeddypanda]

I'm one objective away from completing this mission, and I'm softlocked. I had an electrical hazard last mission that had its effect stay permanently even after fixing it and switching missions, so because of this, I can't unassign my pilot. There's a weak spot I have to hit with forward artillery, Cy made a point of telling the pilot to like the shot up. The pilot refuses to do so, and when I try to aim the ship manually and fire it myself, the pilot will hop back in and yank the ship away at the last moment.

Even without the electrical hazard bug, this is still clunky. Pilots need to prioritize lining up forward artillery targets, especially when they're the objective.

[SnuggleBuckets]

Could you let Pilot AI be able to strafe with the Railjack?
That way players could use the Archwing slingshot & Forward Artillery more reliably.
(They should also use dodging-sprinting, and keep a healthy distance from more dangerous targets that can instant kill the Railjack)

I think the limit of only 3 crew member where Tenno take the space of the others is a bit limiting (especially under current limitations of AI listed above, them not really crafting in forge, using artillery or that you have to either assign repair or defender, when those feel like they should come packaged together with the same AI)

Hopefully Necramechs will be more available outside RJ & open worlds, and have an autopilot ability, and liches have a bit more relevancy besides defender (do they qualify for "on call"?)

Oh, and as someone else said already, please allow secondary roles to be able to assign to crew members, so that they'll prioritise one thing, then do the other if the first has nothing to do (like 1:pilot 2:gunner, or 1:defender 2:engineer)

Edited March 20, 2021 by SnuggleBuckets

[Mic.ph]

Hey, DE!

About the new Crew UI's Lich: may I suggest to at least show each lich's abilities? Simply for players to choose the lich they want as a crew.

Right now, when selecting a lich as a crew:

• Players wouldn't know what the lich abilities are, just the weapon.
• Also, liches without ephemeras don't have any hints.
• And for those liches with ephemeras, some players may not be very familiar with it yet (new players) or they simply forgot (returning players).

Attaching a photo with the proposed lich abilities placement.

 

✌️

[Ashveris]

I played for a couple of hours with crewmates and they are very good but i cant shake it that they are limited in potential. Maybe instead of having set amount of points go give them via command instead they can train (gain xp) and command can give them boost to xp. Like you have good pilot but they dont have good gunnery skill so you could mann guns with them and they will get better. They will feel more alive then instead of the part of the ship which you'll swap when you roll better from ticker.

[Zilotz]

Please remove cooldown for on-call intrinsic if crew member was despawned without taking damage and make cooldown scale from how much damage the crew member taken(cooldown would be logical if crew member needs to heal).

 

[krrysis.]

2 hours ago, Gullim92 said:

• A small quality of life change, consider allowing NPCs to assign a secondary role, for example if I take the pilot seat away from a pilot NPC, let him automatically assume a gunnery role, or another role set by the player in the crew menu

I like the idea of having secondary roles, for example if I assign a role to pilot and pilot is being useless then if i'm taking over i dont just want pilot to roam around the ship waiting for me to empty pilot seat, i want them to assume a defender role / 2ndary gunner role. roles that can be a 2nd priority if first role is unavailable.

[ShadowTalons]

Went into a mission and tested a few things what i wanted to test was crew AI with some weapons and general feel.

Crew:

-1 Pilot/gunner with Kuva Kohm

-1 Engineer Kuva Tonkor

and 1 Kuva lich with Kuva Kohm

First tested normal dogfight and everything was good, it was a bit annoying the Pilot assigned to gunner did not enter the Forward artillery but not a big issue. \

Second Test hangar right after, the Engineer got stuck in a gun headless (literally in Observe Headless) so was out but saw them shoot prior tonkor is good shooting.

The pilot took over when i assigned them which was nice as I entered the facility. Did the objective and was waiting for the pilot or the Engineer Gunner to shoot the Radiator. Returned to ship jumped on pilot to do it myself and then jumped off noticed Pilot did not return to seat unless reassigned.

Feedback points:

-Pilots should check if pilot seat is empty and return to it without reassigning to pilot just as a big QOL, the defaulting to Defender was nice. Fixed Feedback after seeing they do jump back on seat after longer delay.

-AI weapon usage I know this may be connected to Wukongs twin and spectres but can the Kohm fire more than 3 shots, there were plenty of targets they fired 3 times and reloaded not exactly ideal for a big capacity weapon.

-Biggest one the crew is supposed to allow solo play and they should target Radiators it broke the flow having to return to shoot the radiator then reassign pilot and then again leave to enter the facility.

 

Edited March 22, 2021 by ShadowTalons

[PepsilonEagle]

24 hours seems like a really long time to cycle out a pool of only 6 potential hires when you want to be fishing for one with a good stat roll.

[Cyberius_001]

I've gotta second everyone's disappointment in the Pilot's AI. As someone who had soloed a large chunk of intrinsics, not running Gian Point, I expected Command to improve the experience. Instead, I can no longer hold an entire run of dome charges, nobody makes me more dome charges, I can't make dome charges because they require mining asteroids in mission and none of the crew do that. To top things off, I'm never pointed at a crewship while in forward artillery, and when I kick the pilot to line up the shot, they're back and flying away just as the dome charge finishes charging...

I'd like to see crew be more capable than they are currently, and would be much happier with any one of the following

• Pilots prioritize pointing at important targets, so Tenno can operate the forward artillery
• Pilots and gunners can cooperate to take out radiators, etc.
• Pilots take up the role of ensuring that an engineer can forge anything needed by the player, which now includes grabbing tiny bits of titanium for dome charges
• Engineers take responsibility for supplying crewmates with the proper resources to keep Tenno in the fight. There's more to filling the engineering role than fixing holes in the ship

In my opinion, Command is supposed to enable the player to stay in the game, and free the player from having to take care of all the parts of a railjack operation. For my first dip into Command, I'm just not feeling it, and would rather just have the ship to myself.

[BloodKitten]

NPC pilots could use extra commands, like, move to secondary objective, move to bonus areas, if on big gun, align with crew ship or objectives needing the big gun, and also, loot. (attempt to go for loot that is around)

editing.

AI crew dos not target objectives, as example, in grineer skermish, you still have to go out and shoot the exposed things yourself, making the AI crew just kinda pointless.

Edited March 20, 2021 by BloodKitten

[Alymbic]

Honestly actually quite happy with most of the Command Intrinsic stuff, but I really feel the on-call crewman duration is too short of the work thats put into it. Tune it down if needed, but please remove the timer and just leave the 10min respawn timer in case it gets killed off in mission. Its really just tedious in longer missions to remember to hit the button 7 minutes after it despawns each time.

[T_erry]

If you have a goal other than to eliminate fighters and crewships, 
the pilot is head for that destination first, so they leave the battlefield for the elimination of the fighter and crewships.
If there are any fighters and crewships left to be killed, I hope the pilot will fly near by the battlefield for the elimination.

 

In eliminating special targets, the Reiljek crew needs to destroy the core exposed to the outside.
I want to have the system that when the core is exposed, the pilot will move to the point where it can strike, and the gunner will destroy the target.

[ClemPrimeR]

I've noticed that the helmet of Perrin Sequence Crew Members has energy that is not effected by a player changing the energy colour. Also, the helmet has a metallic material that can not be changed too.

[ajingom]

I would like to suggest a feature that AI automatically stops the pilot ability when someone enters the slingshot chamber or artillery chamber. If there is an AI commanded to act as a pilot, the AI will randomly move the railjack when I enter the artillery chamber to shoot the crewship. That is why it is impossible to shoot properly.

[loop8000]

18 hours ago, Katinka said:

You can.  Go to the Drydock, get on your Railjack, use the navigation terminal near the pilot's chair.  Launching missions from Navigation in your Orbiter only ever put you in your own ship if there were no existing squads to join.

Not quite. I have launched via the method you just said to try that myself before reading your post, and it made me join someone else because there was an open spot in their mission.

[Steel_Rook]

So far so good. AI crews are working better than I expected, honestly. However, there are issues and avenues still to explore. Here are a few suggestions:

A fourth slot: Give us a four crew slot locked to just the "Defender" role where we can assign non-Crew combatants without sacrificing a Crew slot. This would include Kuva Liches (obviously), Corpus Queenpins (when those show up), Clem or even just a Warframe Spectre. This fourth crew member would have no access to any of the ship's functions, but would only exist to fight intruders.

Space waypoints: Let players on the Helm or Turrets place waypoints outside the ship. I understand that this is technically difficult due to the "portal" technology used to draw the ship exterior, but it's not unsolvable. This is important because...

Crew directions: Let players order the Pilot to fly to/near a space waypoint. Let players order the Gunner(s) to target a specific waypointed enemy ship. This should give us slightly more direct control over our AI crew.

Forward Artillery: When a player mounts the Forward Artillery, have the Pilot abandon the Helm. When a player is inside the Forward Artillery and no other player is at the Helm, allow the Forward Artillery player to rotate the Railjack as though sitting at the Helm. This should both help players fire the Forward Artillery without the AI Pilot throwing them off-course and in general help players more easily use the Forward Artillery when alone on the ship.

 

Additionally, I have quite a few comments and suggestions regarding the Crew UI and the crew themselves. They are as follows:

Crew customisation camera: While customising my crew, the camera focuses on their chest and face. I can't see their feet, which makes it hard to customise their shin braces or even get a good look of the whole model. Pull the camera back to the same zoom/position as when customising a Warframe. Show me the entire character model.

Crew models: Many of the AI Crew models look undetailed and janky. Cephalon Suda Crew look mostly OK, but Steel Meridian and Perrin Sequence don't look good. They have fairly poor shaders and their colour detailing is a low-res colour mask which fails to match any of their outfit contours. This may work when they're NPCs in Syndicate missions, but it looks really off when viewed up-close. Either improve their character models or give us alternate crew skins.

Crew Attachments/Syandana: When selecting Attachments or a Syandana for the crew, the list of options is populated with just the items I already own. The only way to equip Market items is to back out of the Crew menu, leave my Dojo, buy an item from the Market console on my Orbiter, then return and put it on. I can only preview said items on my Warframe, so I've no way to tell if it would look good on a Crew Member with their character scale, mounting point and colour scheme.

Crew weapons: I'd like to have an option to display my crew's weapons on their person, both in the customisation UI an when they aren't using them. I tint weapons in a contrasting colour from the character carrying them as part of my standardised colour scheme. Not being able to display weapons on my crew ends up making them look simpler and duller as a result.

 

Crew ability points: And finally, a few words on crew ability points. While I like the system fine as it is, I would really like to have some way to "level up" my crew. Perhaps let them gain experience and earn additional points the longer I use them. This doesn't necessarily have to be enough to max out all of their five qualification categories, but I'd like to have more than 3 total. At least 5-6 total would be nice. Perhaps crew get 1 point for free and can earn an additional 1 point from levelling up per crew skill point Intrinsic?

[Darkuhn]

I like the Command intrinsic so far. But in my opinion the Defender and Engineer role should be combined so you have enougth crewmates to fill every possible Role when you are playing solo.

What i also noticed is that the Crew has no problems dealing with Corpus boarders even in the Veil missions, but they get constantly whiped out by Grineer boarders. Even the Liches dont stand a chance against Veil Grineer Boarders. I'd like to see a change to the Endurance stat to provide an additional Damagereduction/Armor bonus. as the provided bonuses aren't helping that much with the survivability of the crew.

The Gunners/Engineers and Pilots are Great tho. I found my self using 2 Gunners and Engineer while playing Solo as the Gunners are so good when paired with MK III Pusars that they anihilate all spawning Fighters in seconds. They are even a great help wehn dealing with Ramsleds as they kill them almost everytime before they can reach the Railjack.

The Engineer keeps the Ship intact and reepairs Hazards quite quckly, but sadly isnt using the forges to replenish Doom Charges/Ordnance Ammo/Energy which would also be a great help.

[brimiste]

Seems and feel nice on a first mission, but are they contributing at the team XP gains? It seems like the things AI gunners killed does not give any XP...

[garbenzine]

To put a very fine point on it, you could change Command intrinsics to nine ranks of absolutely nothing, while making rank 10 "the player can fire the artillery from the pilot's seat" and I would be perfectly delighted with the spec.

[Stalker_says_hello]

10 hours ago, 2ndPersonPlural said:

Love the personalities of the crew, love the customizability, and they're much more useful than I expected.  Showing how long they've been on the crew is a great touch, and I look forward to eventually seeing "contract length: 1 year" on the people I hired today.  I'm using the tactical menu more than ever before.

A few points:

• Pilots and gunners have no way to deal with crewships, or mission objectives like radiators.  Maybe let us assign a gunner to the forward artillery, direct the pilot to aim at crewships, and waypoint objectives for them to fire at?  (Doing this through the tactical screen so we can stay in a different location would be nice.  This would especially help with the pulse relay skirmishes.)
• Three intrinsics levels are taken up by competency points.  This was disappointing.
• Engineers don't seem to use the forge.  Maybe one of the competency point intrinsic levels could be replaced with that ability, and we could get the point elsewhere?  There's not much engineering to do when you cut out half the role.
• Every time I leave the ship to board an objective and check in on my tactical menu, the pilot has come to a dead stop a dead stop in front of an obstacle.  This doesn't seem to happen when I'm on the railjack or in archwing; the piloting is ok then.
• After you train a crew member, you can't tell what points you gave them.  Maybe make those dots look different like you did for the avionics grid upgrades.

Pretty sure they said the intrinsic points for command is place holders cause they don't want people maxing crewmate skills yet. 

[Stalker_says_hello]

9 hours ago, Gullim92 said:

After a lengthy, sweaty session I'm glad to report the command intrinsic is surprisingly great! On to the feedback:

 

• Please allow players to take over turrets without having to re-assign the gunner NPCs, similar to how players can take over the pilot seat without having to re-assign the pilot NPC
• Please consider allowing pilot/gunner NPCs to target mission objectives like reactors and such, mainly the ones that require an away crew (ie: Grineer missile silo). This would be a great improvement for solo players
• Consider making it so pilot NPCs will focus on maintaining their aim towards enemy crewships when a player is using the forward artillery, allowing us to use it more effectively instead of having to fight against the pilot or re-assign him temporarily and keep the ship at a standstill. Alternatively, consider letting NPCs use the forward artillery and let the player mark what specific target to shoot at. This also applies to the slingshot, please have pilot NPCs change direction according to the player's aim when inside the slingshot
• A small quality of life change, consider allowing NPCs to assign a secondary role, for example if I take the pilot seat away from a pilot NPC, let him automatically assume a gunnery role, or another role set by the player in the crew menu
• Please let gunner NPCs talk from their seats similar to how the pilot can, it's a shame to have these personalities aboard and only being able to listen to the pilot, plus we could use more voices to cut between Cy's constant warnings.
• Personally I haven't used the engineer role for NPCs, but hearing that engineer NPCs cannot use the forge is highly discouraging, it's quite literally half the job of the engineer, please consider a way to change this.
• As for liches, I haven't personally used them but since they can only take the defender role they sound quite useless. I'm sure its old feedback by now but please consider letting liches take other roles.
• I don't know what R10 for command is planned to be, but I would love to see more necramech integration somehow, such as allowing necramechs to act on their own both within and outside the railjack. Necramechs could take the current position of liches, being a defensive powerhouse that cannot take other roles.

 

That is all for now! Again, great job on the command intrinsic, I'm legitimately loving it so far.

Auto driven necramech for defender sounds great. Let liches do all roles perfect.