Cosmoteer update 0.15.0 is now available for "preview" and testing! This is a pretty major update that adds crew squads, roles, and per-job priority customization. Here's basically how it works:
Crew are organized into "squads" of 2 or 6, where every crew bunk or quarters is a squad. If you want, you can manually move individual crew between squads by going into the crew U.I., selecting the "Crew" tab, selecting the individual crew, and right-clicking on the bunk or quarters you want to move them to. Currently there's not much reason to actually do this unless your ship isn't full on crew, but in the future this will likely be more useful.
Your ship also has one or more "roles" for its crew. Each squad is assigned a role for the entire squad, which you can do in the crew U.I. in the "Squads" tab by selecting the bunk/quarters and then clicking the button for the desired role. Each role can have a custom name, shirt color (which is also the color of their bedsheets!), and set of job priorities. You can create up to 20 roles per ship.
To customize the name, color, or job priorities for a role, click the little "hamburger" menu button in the corner of the big role button and select "Edit Role". This will open up a window allowing you to customize the role. To customize the role's job priorities, click on the "Job Priorities" tab, which will allow you to set the priority of each job for each ship part. Each job can be set to a priority between 1 and 10, where a higher priority number will take precedence over a lower priority number (i.e., crew will do a 10 job before doing a 1 job). You can also click the "no" sign to disable that job completely for that role, so crew with that role will never do that job.
As a side-effect of switching to this new customizable priority system, the A.I. logic that controls the crew has actually been significantly simplified. Before, the A.I. would make complicated calculations to determine the priority of a given task, taking into consideration things like how much power/ammo a part already had. But that's all gone. Now, if a part needs 3 batteries, 3 "supply battery" jobs will be created, each with the same 1-10 priority (whatever priority you set that job to). Please let me know how you feel about this simplification and whether you feel it has a negative or positive impact.
Additionally, when choosing which crew are assigned to which job, the underlying algorithm now chooses crew based on the distance of their home bunk/quarters to the job location, not based on the distance of where the crew happen to be at the time as it previously worked. In theory this should help keep crew stay closer to their home quarters, pulling them back when they wander off to do a farther-away job. (In practice I'm not sure how well this is working, so please let me know what you think.)
If a crew's home bunk/quarters is destroyed, the individual crew that used to be part of that squad will retain their role (and thus any custom priorities) but will wander around the ship randomly until they find a nearby job to do.
I'm calling this update a "preview" instead of a "release candidate" because I'm not quite done with it yet. While the core squads/roles/priorities are in place and working, there are a lot of missing "quality of life" features that I think the final 0.15.0 update needs, such as copy/paste of roles, reverting to defaults, and saving default roles for new ships. Please let me know what additional QoL/convenience features you would like!
Also, the 0.15.0 update will not have the feature where you can assign squads to specific parts/weapons as was discussed previously on this forum. I am still planning to do that, I just didn't have time to get it done for 0.15.0, so most likely that will be in 0.15.1. (I think this is actually an even more important feature than priority customization, but from a coding standpoint it was better to get the priority customization done first.)
Enjoy! Please let me know about your feedback and any bugs you find!
Download Cosmoteer 0.14.15_preview1 or auto-update via the "Unstable" branch on steam.
P.S. This update does unfortunately break most existing mods due to the priority changes, though upgrading mods shouldn't be very difficult, and I'm planning to make a mod upgrader before the stable release.