Human resources: crew management
Last updated
Last updated
In Influence, your crew is the entity that acts on your behalf and carries out all operations for you. Crew composition, location, and readiness are essential to optimise efficiency. This guide... is not about this 🙃 . What I mean, is that I will not explain here how to best choose a crew composition, or discuss distances and travel times. Instead, I will focus on explaining the user interface and the possibilities, to enable you to set up and manage multiple crews once you find your strategy.
Everything in this guide happens on the surface, in habitats. It may or may not be applicable to ships.
Welcome to the game! When first logging into the client, you are offered the option to buy some crewmates. Purchase a few, and close the window.
Click on the Start Crew button on the top left corner of your screen. A window opens, that will assist you with the creation of your first crewmate. Enjoy the story while selecting the class and the traits. Choose the appearance and name of your crewmate, and click on Recruit. If you have available crewmate tokens from your previous purchase it will consume one, otherwise clicking on the button will result in a purchase. Wait a few seconds until you get a confirmation, and select Go to Crew.
You are now presented with the Crew Details window, and you can see that your new crewmate has been assigned as captain of a crew of up to five members. You can add more members by clicking on the empty seats. Explore different paths of the story, or decide to skip it and choose your traits manually. As already mentioned I will not dive into crewmates in this guide, but you can check the wiki page for a quick recap on classes. You do not need to complete your crew now, and you will always be able to change the composition later (you may need to recruit additional crewmates).
There is some more useful information in the Crew Details, such as its current location, rations level, and past activity. Take the opportunity to change your team's name if you wish to.
Crews are assigned to a home base, where they return after each activity. This base can either be habitat, or a ship. The starting habitat that has been selected by default for your creation is likely to be overcrowded, let's move to a better location. A benefit of living in a low-population habitat is that actions taken by your crew will be granted a speed bonus.
In the menu docked to the right side of the screen, select Lot Search. Expand the Buildings section, and select only Habitat. Center the map on your current location by clicking on the habitat name just above your crewmates portraits in the top left corner. You should now see a pink hexagons on the map. Select one at random, and open its Station Manifest from the right-side menu (just above Lot Search). Ensure that the population is well under the cap, and move your crew to that location with the Station Crew icon next to the lot preview in the bottom left corner.
In the top left corner in the crew summary area, you can find your crew's current status. A crew will usually alternate between two states:
Idle: the crew is ready to perform actions.
Busy: the crew is currently working on actions or traveling between the base and a work location. In this state, it cannot be given any orders. The timer next to the status indicates how long is left before the crew returns to being idle.
In early-access, a third status may appear, which is Not Yet Launched. These crews are prevented from taking any action, for not meeting the early-access requirements. Wait until public access!
Having multiple crews is a good way to work around the busy timer and be able to submit more actions. There are two main ways of creating an additional crew:
Split the current crew: open the Crew Details window by clicking on a portait in the crew summary area, and click on the Split crew button. Drag some of the crewmates from the top crew to the bottom crew and click on Save Changes once satisfied with the new arrangement.
Create a new crew from a habitat: select an available habitat on the asteroid surface, and click on the Recruit Crewmate (Start New Crew) icon next to the lot preview. This will trigger the crew creation just like for the first one.
To exchange your crewmates between crews, you first need to move both crews to the same location (re-station them as explained above). Then, from the Crew Details window, open the Manage Crew page. Click on Crew Exchange, select your second crew, then transfer the crewmates and Save Changes.
The Manage Crew window also allows you to reorder your crewmates, including changing who is the captain.
To switch between your different crews, open the menu in the top right corner and navigate to My Crews. Then, select the crew you want to switch to, and either click on the Play button in the center of the screen or close the crew list using the X button.
One important thing to know when playing with multiple crews, is that only the SWAY balance is shared. Everything else, from asteroid administration to building control and access to the resources inside, is tied to the crew. The permissions system allows explicit sharing between your crews, but in a similar way as to any other crew. The fact that the same wallet hosts multiple crews does not imply that everything is shared between them by default.
Don't panick! No matter what happens, your crewmates will never die. However, their rations will decrease over time and will need to be replenished. After about a week, the crew will have gone through half of their food, and will enter rationing. In rationing mode, an efficiency penalty on actions will be applied, up to -75%. In order to refill the food reserves of your crew, you first need to have food available in an inventory that your crew can access (not covered in this guide). Go to the Crew Details page and click on the Add Rations button. Select the source inventory and the desired food quantity, and click on Transfer.
