With the release of 3.23 I had hoped that many things would have been fixed from previous patches, and quite a few things were; In 3.22, remote turrets on the A2 had a persistent issue where pips, distance, delta, and other targeting information was broken/missing in remote turrets, as detailed here: https://issue-council.robertsspaceindustries.com/projects/STAR-CITIZEN/issues/STARC-97211 (this was an extremely frustrating bug to deal with) There was a persistent issue that has been in as long as I can remember (maybe since the A2 was released) where having the copilot seat occupied (seat that controlled the centerline defensive PDCs on all hercules) disabled countermeasures for the pilot. This was also fixed in 3.23, so now the copilot seat can be properly used. The turret UI was completely reworked to an (albeit incomplete) better state. Instead of turrets being forced with a fixed assist, they were given the option between manual gimbal, auto gimbal (including precision mode), or fixed modes, which all had varying fire rates associated with it, with auto gimbal taking the place of the old fixed assist. You may wonder --- "Why is VCR only talking about the A2, does he not fly other multi-crew ships?" The answer is, I have almost exclusively flown the A2 in combat during previous patches for several reasons; Multi-crew ships across the board, like the hammerhead, redeemer, etc, on average have a hilariously low amount of countermeasures for the amount of missile spam they are subjected to on a regular basis. The huge exception to this are the Hercules ships, which have an enormous amount of countermeasures in comparison, which makes them well suited for long drawn out combat, as they can regularly pre-flare missiles and generally don't have to worry about constantly re-arming countermeasures every time a cutlass pulls up with 48 taskforces. The A2 has not just better firepower than many other multi-crew ships, but also better turret convergence, meaning it is significantly easier to have all your guns focused on a single target in combat --- whereas something like the hammerhead, while it has high DPS on paper, struggles to have all its guns focused on a target in front of it (except at specific, tight angles) Until 3.23, the A2 had astoundingly good maneuverability in combat. I regularly referred to it as the "Crusader Light Fighter", as it had a significantly better trichord acceleration than many ships (~15G). For these reasons many other multi-crew ships weren't really viable in combat versus top level players, as other options just fell short in various ways. And it is for many of these reasons, and many others that multi-crew is just in a very bad state in 3.23. Why Multi-Crew sucks in 3.23 I want to be clear that my complaints listed below are purely for the 3.23 LIVE experience in PU, and normal AC. This post does not cover engineering, which I think is doing many things right, but also still needs plenty of work. @YogiKlatt-CIG originally stated that he wanted turrets to feel good, and I think that was a good goal to have. At baseline, the turret changes to how gimbal mode works is a fantastic idea, and will potentially yield good results given the correct balancing. In my opinion, the things causing the largest issues with the viability of multi-crew in 3.23 are as follows; Weapon Spread Weapon spread is a ridiculous way to balance ship weapons in order to force ships to move closer to one another. This is because fighters and turrets both have the same balance on the weapons they use, no matter the platform they are placed on. So what can happen is you have a situation where both ships are using the same weapon, but because of the mechanics of weapon spread the fighter can sit out at maximum (or close to maximum) range and land all shots on an enemy like an A2, whereas if the turrets are using guns that have significant weapon spread, it will result in almost zero shots landing versus the fighter, regardless of the accuracy of the gunners. --- A better solution to this would be damage falloff, which so many games utilize to limit damage/viability of weapons at extremely long ranges Countermeasures This is an issue that has plagued multi-crew for a very long time, and the primary reason I have used almost exclusively the A2 in the past. The lack of countermeasures on large ships other than the hercules is extremely egregious. A hammerhead shouldn't have the same number of flares/chaff as a fighter, it not only makes no sense logically, it also makes no sense in terms of game balance to have that few countermeasures on a ship designed to be a defensive centerpiece in combat. The same goes for many other multi-crew ships like the redeemer, constellation, Carrack, 890, and almost any large ship I can think of with the exception of the Hercules and the Hull C. Please make a balance pass on countermeasures for all ships. Networking This is a two fold issue, as one of my concerns is a more generalized issue due to server desync/lag when under load, and the second is an issue specific to multi-crew ships. When servers are under load, countermeasure launches get proportionally delayed. A good way to check the delay of countermeasures is to drop chaff (J) and count the seconds until the cloud actually appears. That is the delay of your flares to register every time you hit H. This results in missiles, torpedoes, etc seemingly ignoring any kind of countermeasure, no matter how many are dropped. This effectively nullifies your countermeasures no matter how many you have. There is a very specific kind of networking desync that occurs between gunners and the pilot of a ship. When turret gunners are firing at a target and scoring hits, their rounds really feel like they are firing relative to the ship pilots networking, so when a turret gunner feels like they score a hit, as far as the server is concerned, they didn't if the pilot can't see it. This issue was extremely obvious several patches back (maybe 3.16 or 3.17, I'm not sure) when sometimes the turret movements would get desynced for the pilots POV, and it would result in the turrets doing 0 damage to targets, even if the gunners thought they were landing shots. This desync or networking issue is extremely frustrating to deal with, as it means regardless of how accurate gunners are, it basically feels like a coin flip on whether or not the network decides you landed a shot vs a small target. This is an issue that is prevalent in games like Arma3 as well where a vehicle is "local" to the driver (though not hardly as noticeable compared to a high speed space combat game like SC) Other Ships/Fighters Performance vs Multi-Crew Pip wiggling and back-strafing is just as bad if not worse in mastermodes, and because of this turrets suffer. master modes originally set out to fix many things, such as insane max speed combat, back-strafing, pip wiggling, etc. But as far as I can tell, it has fixed almost none of those things aside from the insane top speed combat fighter balls zipping off into space. The F7AII's side strafe acceleration (and general acceleration) is insanely unbalanced, and I'm hoping this is being looked at, but aside from this, the ability of fighters to pip wiggle harder than in previous patches results in not only the auto-gimbal mode on the turret being completely useless, (as the fixed assist was in previous patches due to forcing aim towards the pip), but also the fixed/manual modes as well, because even if a shot is scored against a ship that is pip wiggling, you still have to deal with the coin flip of the netcode to decide whether you actually scored a hit or not. The A2's maneuverability and acceleration has been significantly nerfed from previous patches, and to be fair it absolutely should have been. The pure ability of an A2 to out-accelerate ships like the scorpius in previous patches was astounding, however master-modes set out to fix issues with back-strafing, and it is extremely disappointing when a fighter can back-strafe an A2 with an unboosted reverse strafe faster than the A2 can catch up to it in a forward acceleration with full boost in atmosphere (or in space). What can be done to fix these issues? As far as pure turret balance is concerned, should have some kind buff to being in them versus a fighter with equal firepower. Right now there is virtually none other than the HP pool of the ship itself. Turrets need to have some or all of these changes to make them more viable: Significantly tightened weapon spread (perhaps long range can come at the cost of damage falloff instead) Longer range, muzzle velocity, or damage when a weapon is equipped to a turret versus a ship (right now the only upside is increase capacitor size usually, which isn't enough) Ballistics should also have increase ammo on turrets (maybe proportional to turret size), however I can understand if ballistics have similar ammo to fighters since ideally with engineering we could eventually reload ballistic cannons. More countermeasures for multi-crew and large ships across the board. Fixed desync between gunners and pilot, or have gunners clientside machines determine their "hit" separate from the pilot of the ship. This is one of the largest issues that needs to be fixed with multi-crew in my opinion. Fixed countermeasure desync issues for all ships when the server is under load I'll continue to try to champion multi-crew gameplay as the promise of what it has to offer is what drew me into SC in the first place, and I hope that it gets to be in a better place in the PU sooner than later. If you didn't want or bother to read this enormous block of text, I completely understand, the TLDR is that multi-crew sucks, turrets need to be buffed, and net-code needs to be fixed. Edit: turret HP on manned turrets is also hilariously low and needs to be increased, but character limit prevented me from going into detail on this.