Hi Cliff, I would like to see after the battle some sort of info about casualties in the battle. Every fighter has a pilot, every frigate and cruiser has its own crew and I was just wondering what am I missing to satisfy my needs. THIS IS MEANT PRIMARILY FOR THE CAMPAIGN ! It can be displayed after the battle and again after I finish the whole campaign, so I know, how many officers had to die to win this war. Anybody likes this idea?
for the pure wickedness factor, yes i do 
I SECOND THIS! It will help to know how many men I can check off the “Need to be paid” list 
Half of your troops won’t need any paychecks after the battle… Good for you 
AWWW, lucky, I usualy do really well (at least on single player) so usualy only about 3-8% of my ships get destroyed in the battle. I can’t can’t aford to pay all those worthless redshirts! Oh well, back to plan F: find any solders that we can afford to lose and then sentence them to death by firing squad.
It is something I have thought about now and then. The crew actually become a minor real concern in the campaign game, because crew are generated on controlled worlds at space academies, so you can run out of crew and have it act as a limit of shipbuilding.
So with this in mind, losing crew when a ship is destroyed is a bit of a pain. In theory, I coud track which escape pods made it offscreen, and those crew could be recovered. However, right now that is entirely moot, because no ships target or destroy escape pods anyway.
It would be very cool, in the longer term to model all that though. You could have new orders issuable called ‘Target Escape Pods’, and have them blasted at 
This would all be massively inpractical right now, due to needing to retrofit orders to older challengesm balance new orders, evaluate escape pods like ships… but I’d love to do that one day. (along with crew experience and skills)
Just an idea but,
How about when a ship is destroyed roll of random number to find out how many make it back to base. Say a fighter is destroyed well you more likly will lose the pilot, but say in a frigate, for example you have a crew of 50, and there is 10 escape pods that carry 5 crew each. When that ship is destroyed for each crew member you roll to see if they made it to the escape pod, and then roll once more for the 10 escape pods.
for example my battle-frigate is destroyed it has a crew of 100, 75 of the crew made it to the 20 escape pods. The out of that 20 space pods only 16 made it back. But then again you will need to know how that 75 crew is spread out over the 20 escape pods, and how many crew was in the escape pods that made it back over those that did not make it back.
Might slow down the game, But it might also be done after the battle is over and such. Anyways just my two cents on this subject.
Wow, I’m so excited about the campaign now, this is exactly the kind of detail I imagined.
me likey.
Involved, but could be simpler. such as taking the total crew, subtracting a percentage from it (say, 40%), then out of that 60% left, kill off a few from the journey back. assuming 100 crew members, and 5 members per pod, have between 0 and 12 pods escape.
now that i think about it i realize that this is the same as yours, lonestar, i am very sorry, its 4.30 am and im tired. i think i only improved the destribution. (i.e. for cruiser, 304 crew. 60% is 182.4; round down/up to prevent half people. out of those 182, it would be divvied up amoung 37 escape pods. then have a random amount die. However, too make coding easier, just dont make the one with 2 people in it die.)
A bit late to this, but you could give ships a “pod tractor beam” range, wherein they would pick up any friendly or enemy escape pods that drift nearby. Crew that get picked up by the enemy are killed, but any crew who are aboard your ships or in space or have made it off the map at the end of the battle survive. If a ship that’s carrying another ship’s crew is destroyed, both pods will get launched.
Any enemy crew you pick up are captured, and you might have options with what to do with them: recruit/press gang them into your navy, interrogate them for information (giving you some strategic information about the next attacks or fleet compositions or so on), ransom them back for some money, publicly execute them to reduce enemy morale, or so on. While automatic pod-tractoring is less cool than blasting away at your opponent’s escape pods, it also doesn’t waste valuable firepower, and being able to snatch your escaping crew members from the jaws of explodey death is pretty neat. Ships with actual Tractor Beam modules might use those to snag escape pods at an increased range, if they don’t have any more pressing targets.