Overview
Drawing heavily from material in Aethos’s “The Complete Merchant Handbook” and Noct’s Tips & Tricks posts about promoting crew to officers and patrolling, I plan to set up a ship that can support any play style that you care to try.
Officers
You’ll notice that some characters have numbers in [x] beside their skills. That is the total skill they would provide to the ship if you promoted them to officers. It consists of any skill they have from a profession plus a natural ability bonus up to +6. You can get solid skills for your ship much earlier in the game if you start by going through your starting crew and as many recruits as you can get from the spice halls in the first few months looking for people with high natural abilities disregarding the profession that they’re in.
Look for people with high, preferably +6, bonuses in repair, doctor, command, and intimidate. Ignore their starting profession and give them engineer/mechanic 1, doctor/combat medic 1, military officer/commander 1, and pirate/quartermaster 1 respectively. I’d play one of the big ships except you can’t even modify them to be freighters. They don’t have large slots for cargo bays. But I’d really like to make my officers: engineer/mechanic, doctor/combat medic, military officer/commander, pirate/quartermaster, and find another guy with a bonus to tactics and make him a navigator.)
Wait to promote them until they’re level 2. Then put their second level into their new primary profession and assign the automatic skill sucess talent. You want to give the military officer Stiff Salute for his first talent. Be sure to replace crewmen that you promote. They won’t be putting levels or talents into their original occupation.
Later in the game, I might give these people levels in their third profession, or I might replace them with officers from contacts (especially if they’ve developed some irritating trait).
This officer structure will support any kind of game you want to play. They’ve got the ship under control which leaves the captain free to do whatever he likes. But your first job is always to be a trader, so I start with merchant 1. Then I get diplomat 1. I get smuggler 1 when I feel like I need Hideaway. Then go back and get merchant up to 8. With merchant 8/diplomat 1, I go for smuggler 11. Finally, put levels in diplomat.
Every rank my negotiation skill goes up and I have long list of talents based on my negotiation skill. Your first talent pick has to be Market Confidant. You won’t believe all the contacts. Follow that with the diplomat talent Winning Compromise to increase mission rewards. Then get Known Trader to make those high level trade permits less expensive.
This is very close to the character that Aethos recommends.
When you upgrade to a top tier ship, you get two more officer selections. A spy and an explorer seem a likely choice. Alternatively, you could make a couple of super-soldiers for your boarding party. I like spy 1/combat medic 5/mechanic 5 then put every level into combat medic. Mechanic 5 offers Thrown Wrench. Combat Medic 5 Bio-agent Bomb. You can use two talents in a boarding action. Or you could choose the middle road and make a combat medic and a spy/explorer/bounty hunter 1 whose skills you can expand at leisure.
Crew
At the beginning of each game, go through and fire all your crewmen who are: spice addicts, rigidly law-abiding, merciless, highbrow (unless you intend to promote them to officers), or any other trait that negatively impacts morale or spicing. Keeping these guys around will cost you time and money!
This is how I organize the crew on any ship. The first thing I do every game is go to the crew screen, filter for officers, and give them all blue stars. Then I filter for fighters and give them all green stars. Then I filter for no star and go through the body of the crew. I look at each one and if I decide there’s no reason to fire her, I give her a gold star. If I’m thinking about promoting her to an officer, I give her a red star. That way I can always see the crew that I want to get rid of or am not sure of by filtering for no stars. That marking and then filtering by stars system has great potential to be useful.
New crewmen that you hire may turn out to have negative traits too, and sometimes people evolve negative traits. After the first six months or so, it’s a judgement call you need to make on a case-by-case basis. You don’t want negative traits around, but you don’t want to fire high-level crewmen that you can’t immediately replace either. What to do? Well, how secure a position are you in?
When you expand your barracks, you get six more crewmen. Don’t fill it up. Experience is distributed across your crew, and it’s much better to have a few high level guys than it is to have a lot of low level ones. Hire one more navigator, a spy, and an explorer when one becomes available. No, an exo-scout is not an acceptable substitute.
At the beginning of the game put everybody’s talent into automatic skill successes except one of each type of crewmen. Have one crew dog get Failsafe Protocols and one pilot get Evasive Maneuvers and one e-tech get Signature Jammer and one navigator get Fast Escape (the extra navigator you get when you expand your barracks can get Efficient Route, but he probably ought to get the free tactics check). As your crew levels and their skills increase, you can retrain them to get rid of these automatic successes and get more useful abilities. (On their stats screen, you hit the button at the top labeled ‘talents.’ On the right sidebar will be a button saying ‘retrain.’) Don’t neglect talents that let you discover people’s traits and find out rumors. That information might just be important.
Gunners don’t really matter till later in the game. At 5th level they get Supremacy of Firepower which is great for patrolling. Four of those will do nicely. At 8th level they get a similar ability for the blockading card game. You’ll want four of those. But at first level…I’m not going to use any of those talents for a very long time. I get two bombardments, a boarding assault, and a targeting lock because I’ll want those someday.
Your fighting team is distinct from the rest of the crew in a number of ways. For one thing, you need them but they contribute nothing to the ship. If I were going to run a scout cutter again, I’d make the combat team 2 exo-scouts, a combat medic, and a zealot just so they would do something useful for the ship. But I think the best combat team looks more like two soldiers, a combat medic, and a swordsman. I use two swordsmen until I can get a medic. I hear a lot of people use their ship’s doctor as a combat medic. I would much rather risk losing a soldier or a swordsman than losing my only doctor.
Try to upgrade your Weapons Locker to 4 before you engage in any crew combat. (From the stats screen, hit the button at the top labled ‘equipment.’ You can scroll through the whole crew on that screen.) Spies who intend to take Sly Move get the stealth armor instead, but everyone else gets plated.
Ship
During character creation assign ship to priority 3 and get a galtic freighter. It’s the best ship for trading.
Aethos wants you to replace those luxury suites with another cargo bay, but I like being able to carry multiple passangers and do several missions at once (and I really don’t want to sacrifice a small slot). I just upgrade the three cargo bays you start with one-by-one.
Leave the mass dampener. All the other small slots are yours to do with as you wish. I put on a small fuel tank, a pilot assist, a scanner array, a defensive matrix, and leave the nav assist and the mass dampener. The first upgrades you want to do are adding another officer cabin and then bumping the barracks up from 3 to 4. None of that is terribly expensive, so it should have done in the first few months.
Then you can take off the cargo bays and replace them with a battle prow, a reinforced hull, a combat hospital, and turn it into a freighter-of-war! I’m carrying a full load of woop xxx! No, that’s lunacy. Use your big cargo hold to make the money to buy a bigger ship.
Combat
As a trader, you should avoid combat whenever possible. It’s bad for business- until you get the talents in place to make it work for you. There are a list of talents specifically designed for avoiding fights. My military officer has been giving enemies Stiff Salutes since level 2, spies and pirates have Faked Signature, and there are many more to consider.
The end-all beat-all is the navigator’s 11th level talent Skip off the Void. Yes, it damages your engine, but it causes a lot less damage to your ship than most combats do. Once you have two navigators with Skip off the Void it becomes possible to simply avoid all combat all the time. As soon as you use the 2nd one, look for a base where you can repair. I once had a high-level navigator when I did the story mission where that bounty hunter is trying to take Valencia from you. During that episode, you are guaranteed two really tough fights- unless you have Skip off the Void. Then that bounty hunter might as well try hunting a cloud.
When forced into ship combat, I always do the same thing. First turn- escape, fire the torpedoes, Evasive Maneuvers. Second turn (if I failed to escape)- escape, fire the torpedoes, Fast Getaway. Third turn I’m getting worried. If I still can’t get away, they probably have a Targetting Lock or some other talent that’s holding me. I might do a Failsafe Protocols to try to free myself from it, or a pilot maneuver with a bonus to escape. Doing some instant field repairs would be a good idea, but I never take talents like that because I’m supposed to escape from combats. Do what you can. Try not to think about the repair bill.
Always remember you can surrender. Depending on the enemy’s level of hostility, they might not even take your cargo. When you move through hostile territory, keep an empty hold so you know that you can surrender without any consequences.
The Philosophy of Trading
or Why the Golden Calf is Better.
Never carry more than one type of good in your hold.
Fill it all with one thing from one country, and then sell it all in one place. There are a whole list of reasons for that, but the big one is that bases will buy as much you have in your hold paying full price for each unit long after their actual demand is satisfied. If you sell them just a little, you’ll dull the demand which will lower the price if decide to come back with more. So you make much more money selling a full hold of 75 tons than you would by making 3 sales of 25 tons. Much more! And with a 100 ton hold, you make even more.
High-level trade goods like capital ship weapons and power generators aren’t available in big enough quantities for you to actually fill your hold with them, but the same principle applies. Gather as much as you can and sell it all in one go.
If you get the merchant talent Jettison Cargo, you might want to set aside 10 tons of your cargo hold to get one ton each of ten cheap trade goods that you can jettison to avoid a fight without sacrificing your main resource. But I never get that talent. My captain always wants many more talents than he can actually get.
Never buy a good unless you know exactly where you’re going to sell it.
The strictures of trade law and demand make it terribly difficult to find a place to make the sale and sometimes these things will take you by surprise. So be sure about where you’re going or don’t buy it.
Consider each sale a unique event.
Supply and demand, once depleted, take a long time to regenerate. There’s no money in doing regular rounds (at least not in one system. Going through several systems and gathering power generators is a great way to make money). You’re only going to sell that good to that market once and then go look for another market.
Make a plan.
Match up the bases in your home system. You’re going to run from that refinery to that industrial colony once with polymer ingots and once with that metal and again with that other metal. Then you’re never going to run from that refinery to that industrial base ever again. If the refinery still has a supply, you can match it up again but remember to get a full hold or don’t bother.
Remember your sales.
Once you do a particular trade run, you don’t want to repeat it until the stock and demand has had a chance to regenerate. So remember what runs you’ve done with what goods and try to keep a sense of how long it has been. Err on the side of caution. Don’t load up unless you’re sure you can sell it for a profit.
If you’ve never tried starting with House Thulun, you should. I haven’t explored the others much, but what I’ve seen suggests that none of them have the same domestic trading possibilities.
May your business ventures be lucrative.