People Management

[LordJames]

Here are some suggestions to increase the challenge and depth of people management in the game. I apologize in advance if you have already considered / plan to implement these ideas.
1. Success or failure in a mission should be greatly influenced by the skills of the staff so that effort put into the people management is worthwhile
2. Staff would gain or lose stars for skills used in a mission depending on the success or failure of their area of responsibility.
3. Staff would lose skill stars for inactivity (not on missions)
4. Staff would gain skill stars when sent to training
5. Advanced training should include specific training areas. For example rocketry training course at MIT (expensive) or at a local college (cheap) with corresponding results
6. The gain in skill stars should be influenced by a hidden potential factor. This +/- % would be applied to gain in skills through training / missions. This replicates real life people management, you hire based on interviews and resume (in game skill stars) but it is only during work experience do you find out if the employee can learn new tasks well (gain or loss in skill stars through training / missions X potential %)
7. Need performance evaluation for staff after each mission. This would help identify what went wrong / right and point to further training or mission experience needed to boost performance next time
8. Need ability to fire during season
9. Need ability to remove staff from assignment before R&D is complete 100%. This would help in budgeting because you could allocate expensive resources to the highest priority mission instead of leaving them to research the last 5% of an obsolete component
10. For the Available Candidates screen, need a larger pool to choose from. Also need ability to sort on skill to assist hiring decision
11. On Available Personnel screen, need ability to hire multiple candidates without having to repeatedly going back to the R&D assignment screen
Hope this helps a little. This could be a great game that pays honour to the pioneers of the space program!

[CowboyRonin]

I think many of these are very valuable suggestions. However, a couple have me a little puzzled, because you can do them now (at least as of .73).

9) You can remove a person from a project by clicking on the small X in the upper-right hand corner of their portrait when assigned to a research team (it's kind of hard to see; if you hover of it, it will turn green, which is easier to see). You can also click on the portrait itself, which will let you replace the person. The default is replacing them with an available researcher; if no researchers are available, you will get a message and then a list of all researchers, with the assignment image showing where they are currently assigned. I already do what you are suggesting and either strip the team that is about to max out, or replace my high-skill folks with lower skill personnel.

11) You can also do this now (and in .73, you have to - you can only hire once per season per personnel group). I can hire as many as are available at one time, just keep clicking on them and then click Hire Recruits when I have everyone I want on the right side. It will show the combined seasonal salary in a pop-up when you click Hire.

Without a lot of real documentation, it's easy to miss things in the game. I hope this helps, and doesn't detract from the very important items that I have not addressed (some of which have been discussed in other places, and some have not).

[Nacho84]

Hello corvid,

Thank you for the feedback. Unfortunately I don't have the time to answer all forums posts, but rest assured I read them all.

Your points are all valid. Please, bare in mind that the implementation for personnel is not complete yet, so many of the things you mentioned (like improving skills, being able to fire personnel, etc) are all in the works, so stay tuned for future game patches.

Cheers,

[CV60]

One more idea for people management-Consider giving the SET staff a rating for leadership or management. The person placed in the first slot on any R&D project is the project "leader" and can apply his management modifier (positive or negative) to the remainder of the staff. An additional idea is to have the manager, when in the management slot, take a slight hit in his technical stats as they are spending time doing management. This gives the player more decisions to make in hiring and building a team.

[CowboyRonin]

Suggestion logged and sent to the developers.

[denisonh]

Not sure that I agree. Being a project leader is not all management and being responsible for technical outputs puts a premium on understanding what the team is doing as it relates to the technical output.

A project leader who is technically competent and know how to lead both lead and manage can be extremely effective.

ORIGINAL: CV60

One more idea for people management-Consider giving the SET staff a rating for leadership or management. The person placed in the first slot on any R&D project is the project "leader" and can apply his management modifier (positive or negative) to the remainder of the staff. An additional idea is to have the manager, when in the management slot, take a slight hit in his technical stats as they are spending time doing management. This gives the player more decisions to make in hiring and building a team.