Deck Conn Crew Roles

Crew in Deck Conn is a campaign resource with a human face. You do not invite friends onto the bridge. You do assign promotions, live with specialists, and write a ship history HQ can read. This page is the working doctrine for that. For the hub overview see Crew. For the amp side of the same decisions see Ship Systems.

Do not promote in the first hour

Getting Started exists so you meet the ship before you meet the medal printer. A first-contact gunner who got lucky is not your new doctrine. Finish a standalone scenario and one real patrol. Log who actually touched sensors, reactor, drive, guns, and damage control. Then stamp a rank.

Stations as a mental model

The store does not publish a full org chart. Command games in this family still behave as if people own buses:

Sensors / plot. They decide whether you are a captain or a rumor. Quiet intercept on the tactics list lives or dies here. Promote this station when a patrol ended with a picture you could trust.

Reactor / auxiliary. They keep the power planner from becoming fiction. Promote them when you spiked weapons or active sensors and still had a plot afterward.

Weapons. Promote them when they disabled the right subsystem — drive or guns for a capture, not hull because it was large.

Defenses / damage control. Promote them when escort-home worked. This is the campaign station. Standalone gloryhounds skip it.

Navigation. Promote them when fuel math survived a second contact. The campaign is full of fights you can win and still lose at the tanks.

If the build later names these people, map the names onto this list. Do not throw the list out for a flavour title.

Promotions are a budget

A promotion is an upgrade that eats future attention. A bridge full of S-tier personalities with a C-tier reactor is how ships get interesting obituaries. Rules:

1. Promote to cover a hole in the last patrol, not to collect ranks.
2. Do not promote two greedy stations in the same yard visit. Weapons plus loud sensors is how you go deaf.
3. If you just captured a prize, damage control and navigation jump the queue.
4. If you just destroyed because you had no choice, sensors jump the queue — you needed a better picture earlier.
5. If you do not know who to promote, promote nobody and run another standalone drill.

Morale without a hidden meter

We will not invent a morale number. Play as if the crew watches capture-or-destroy calls, ignored distress beacons, and brown-outs. A captain who treats people as UI decorations will still “beat” standalone maps and still hate the campaign. That is a review problem and a command problem.

Write one sentence after each patrol: “We rewarded X because Y.” If you cannot finish the sentence, you are gambling.

Training via scenarios

Standalone combat scenarios are crew school. Repeat the same contact until the weapons station hits propulsion on purpose and the reactor station returns the battery spike. Then take that habit into a war patrol. The combat guide is the lesson plan. This page is the gradebook.

What we refuse to fabricate

• Named officer skill trees.
• Romance flags.
• multiplayer roles for a second human.
• A “best crew” screenshot copied from another game.

When Funtime Electrics or MicroProse publishes a manual excerpt with names, Updates will point here. Until then, command stations, not fanfic.

Take the conn, then take care of the people who keep the glass honest.

Screenshots of the CEN-IT briefing terminal address a Captain and name the vessel — CEN Raccoon in one hunt, a Wasp-class corvette tasked to incapacitate or destroy. That text is the fiction of a chain of command. Your promotions should read like the next sentence of that fiction, not like a loot screen. If you cannot explain a rank to HQ in one line, you are not ready to stamp it.