I've been thinking about Daves, Dave behavior and Dave on Dave combat. I think many of the difficulties of free-roaming VIs could be solved with a new block that I have been thinking of as a "muster point"
Think of a muster point as an un-enhancable, namable docking block. You put them in rooms and along corridors, and they define a sort of dave-docking field. You can connect them using the "c" and "v" keys. Connecting two muster point blocks defines a (unimpeded straight-line) travel path for Daves to follow.
Muster points can also be associated with controllable blocks, so a Dave can find his duty station.
You signal general quarters, and all your Daves head for their assigned systems. Rather than simply teleporting there, or following a complex processor eating visual-mapping algorithm, Daves execute a simple binary search algorithm to find the quickest path to their duty station. Once there, the Dave avatar remains standing or sitting at the last muster point before the control block, thus he is "at his station". This will be important in a moment.
Boarding parties:
During Dave on Dave combat, muster points become control points. 2 Daves of different factions cannot occupy the same muster point. If a Dave sees a hostile Dave in a connected control point, He will fire at the hostile Dave. This will allow Daves to have gunfights without burning through the walls to shoot Daves in adjacent rooms. Here's the point of a boarding party though. A dave can't operate his station and defend himself at the same time. As you kill or distract a Dave, his station stops operating. That disables a turret, or ships navigation, or whatever other system. If a boarding party member can get to the core, he can begin a hack attempt. A hack attempt might take 30 seconds with a 1 in 4 chance of success. On successful hacking, the ship is re-factioned to match the boarding party, along with any docked structures. The boarding party is re-designated as the "crew", while any remaining members of the original crew are now "the boarding party", and may try to retake the ship by eliminating the other Daves and re-hacking the core. Once the ship is re-factioned to match the raiders, either they, or their home ship has access to the command blocks, and secure programming hooks of the ship entity, including uploading arbitrary code to any Bobby modules, or even triggering a core-overheat.
Aid, Rest, and Recovery:
But why, aside from repelling boarders, would you want your Daves walking around at all? Why not just chain them to their work-stations and leave them there? I suggest that Daves could easily be susceptible to injury, illness, fatigue and inexperience, that can degrade their efficiency. Degradation of efficiency is supplied by random 1 tick second pauses are sprinkled through their subroutines as they are processed, possibly with printed comments of discomfort. While in combat, Daves might be randomly injured as peripheral damage to a strike to the ship, such as the random exploding console effect. Injury would increase inefficiency. being awake for too long would increase fatigue, which would increase inefficiency. Contagious ilness might infect crew members, decreasing efficiency, and jumping between crew members randomly. Fatigue and a little injury could be recovered in a "bed" station, necessitating disconnection from a duty station. Similarly an NPC in a medical duty station could heal other NPCs of damage and illness. Inexperience inefficiency might affect newly spawned Daves. Time in workstation would slowly remove inexperience, but it could be further removed, by socializing in a "pub" duty station with other more experienced crew.
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Disclaimer: I am not in the employ of any game company. These ideas are not provided in exchange for or expectation of any compensation whether monetary or non-monetary. (... Although a mention in the credits would be nice) I provide these ideas solely in the hope that I might strike on an answer that the game developer may be struggling with, and thus nudge the final product towards the sort of game I would like to play.
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