Possible Mod idea

Originally there was a population amount required per facility, but it never quite worked out like you would hope.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

i have a question... how come Life support isn't dependant on crew numbers? a frigate for example... with maxed out techs... you need 50 crew. but full tech crew quarters hold 500. so you have 500 crew but you only need one life support for the ship, which supports 200ish. so you have 500 crew... 300 of wich are in stasis??
this is for stock. don't know how it is in BM. can you make it so all your crew members have to have life support? I assume it has to do with requirments for life support. crew count... ?

and... can you make Space Yard components dependent on crew... say you need 1000 crew to run a space yard comp. you can stack them.. but only if your ship can hold enough crew.
seems silly to have 150 workers on a space yard...

just some thoughts

Interesting idea with the facilities requiring certain pop. but would get messy when you empty planets and such. do the facilities just stop working? or do they get razed...

Its fairly simple to make hull requirements dynamic, with crew requirements based on installed components instead of just some hard-coded semi-random number. This only applies at design time, but its close enough. Look at Gritty Galaxy mod for an example.

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

It gets me to thinking of SE IV.
Perhaps the crew capacity of Living Quarters should be greatly reduced and made even, and then doing as Fyron said and make sips require a certain number of Crew Quarters/Life Support.

This would be a major factor in using boarding parties, as a low tech ship might be stuck with a base of 100 crew, while a higher tech one could have 200-300 crew, making it harder to capture and taking longer for toxin injectors to kill off the crew.

Cerberus

I think since the tech for Crew Quarters is Psychology, it comes down to more along the lines of "What else can we do to cram more people into a smaller space without making them feel like canned produce?"
That is, Crew Quarters not being how many crew a ship will have total, but how many crew can be effectively housed without making them feel like they're stuck in a WWII style Submarine.

And so, those people ships who only have 200 crew have better living conditions/roomier living/recreational spaces and more personal space than a big ship that might have the same amount of space crammed to hold the max capacity of 500 crew.

More for 'flavor' than having any real factor on gameplay.

I do like the idea of stasis pods, although... might be something neat to have added into the game at a later date.
Something like a 5kt component...
"Holds 100 backup crew (+10 per level?) in statis in specially protected compartments. These crew are protected from extreme radiation and other hazards."
e.g., won't be killed off by toxin injector, etc, maybe take 10 seconds in battle fore backup crew to be 'revived'... also cause mayhem for boarding parties when defenders get 'reinforcements' while being boarded... or have a 30 second timer that 'reverses' the effects of the allegience subvertor weapon (backup crew woken up by the computer and control to the bridge terminated, etc).

Or with Organic tech, a ship component version of the one 'population making' facility... Maybe produces 1 crew replacement crew member every 10 seconds, add a minor bonus to defense against boarding parties, hold backup crew, etc, be able to produce 100 crew per turn for ships stuck in the middile of nowhere.

Or maybe robotic backup crew, cannot gain experience, but immune to stuff like toxins or the allegience subvertor.

How about a life support system that is directly dependent on supplies? You have so many CO2 scrubbers and some oxygenerators (new word) to keep the air breathable, but I think its really tied to how much base supplies are you carrying.

When a ship runs out of supplies it should basically kill all the crew-unless you do put them in stasis. Even then what are you eating, breathing and fixing things with?

Hmmm... I like the statis idea. Is that possible to mod in currently? A ship gets caught in a storm and the crew are all killed, the stasis chambers are opened and the ship gets 50 crew that you can use to pilot it back. Make it like the emergence pods so it's a one time use thing.

How could one go about changing it so that a ship needs X crew and then with each componant you add to the needed crew limit? That would definitally make things more interesting and require more ship/station building ideas.

Check with SJs Gritty Galaxy Mod, he does a really good job on component number versus crew requirements.

you can set requirments for pretty much every component.
you can make them dependent on all sorts of things

in my mod i changed things so that ships are dependant on a reactor (Star Trek style...) and crew to man guns, engines, bridge and LOTS (5000) of crew to run Space Yard components. Life Support is also now dependent on number of crew numbers instead of just a base value for each ship.