unless theyre important political prisoners you are trying to haul home for trial or something.
i'm not so concerned with seeing every crew member on a ship, as long as theyre reasonably abstracted. in X3, you could HAIL capital ships and talk to different people on them. So I always assumed that once you had a larger ship yourself, that it had some sort of crew and you were just the captain.
I think the best game in this genre that I have ever played -- though it was not in space -- was the old Carrier Command game.
What I liked about it (on a ship level) was the ability to control various ships systems, manage damage control prioraties, fire the cannons and launch cruise missiles at different types of targets, deploy different types of craft and countermeasures, manage your stores, etc.
What I liked about it on a campaign level was your interaction with islands, the managing and harvesting of resources and managing of supply chains, and limited ability to order goods based on what islands you had linked into your supply chain.
X3 offers exactly the kind of campaign level play that I enjoy. Its pretty sweet. it offers SOME of the ship features I want to see, so I guess its treating me pretty well at the moment. I havent been able to afford a cap-ship yet, but i think it has potential. maybe there are mods or scripts for it that juice up the cap-ship play a little bit.
I THOUGHT 3000AD was going to offer the whole package when it was first announced. my original thought was "holy shit, carrier command in space!"..... but we all know how that turned out, even 10 games later (or however many versions of the same game that theyve made)