There is a difference. If you put an AI against an NPC, you'd expect the AI to loose all other things being equal. Man vs machine stuff. Otherwise nobody would live in space, and that's without even mentioning the nano-plague.Deus Siddis wrote:That's true for drones, but you said you wanted to hire (human, aka NPC) pilots and manage (living) crew, which logically means exactly that. There's no advantage to having other people in your ship or fleet of ships if you manage them exactly like upgrades and they behave exactly like drones.Having auto-escorts at the same level of functionality of NPCs makes very little sense.
So, saying they're people makes it more believable when they're at equal footing against NPCs.