Overview
A short guide to crew recruiting
A quick guide to crew recruiting
This is meant to be a fast read. If you want detailed information, please consult the star traders wiki.
Officers:
Officers are where you should care about stats. Officers are what you should use in crew combat. Officers can also be used for specialist roles so you can save crew space.
1) The best crew you will ever have is your captain. Depending on what talents you are going to use or if you will make them heavy combat, your captain should be Template A B for Skills and Attributes. Play the game on normal to get a basic idea of what your favorite thing to do is. Then take note what abilities you are using often and what stat and skills they use. Then build your hard mode captain accordingly.
2) The next best crew are story vignette characters. There are 3 as of the time of this guide that can be recruited. I won’t go into detail on how you get them but I will say 1 of them is really good in combat, 1 of them is really good for dealing with people, and the last one is good for the wilderness and can be stealthy combatant if needed.
3) The third tier is recruiting with talents and from contacts. The reason you recruit from contacts is so you don’t have to waste time leveling up them up if you have a great relationship with your contact. You should always recruit potential officers and specialized crew with talents. Make sure you have military ranks, edicts, and trading passes as they also bump certain classes levels up on recruiting from that faction.
4) The fourth tier is recruiting with talents and from the spice hall. Unless there is a academy graduation or mercenaries rumor, the levels here will be based on era and will typically be low. But you can get these if you want.
5) The fifth tier is anything not using talents.
6) The sixth is conscription with the Quartermaster or Diplomat talent
7) Final tier is just conscripting.
Is conscripting bad? For officers yes. For crew, No. So read on.
========================
General crew:
Although certain specialists are better to have good stats, if they are not officers, you are fine with just having them conscripted.
What is the benefit of conscription?
Conscription allows you to get crew that are high level. If enough time passes in the game, you can get max level crew.
One downside is that they have negative traits. But this is offset by the quartermaster and diplomat if you get their conscription abilities.
Another downside is that they don’t have improved stats but who cares. For example, if you need tons of electronics. You are MUCH better off getting a conscripted level 45 E tech with neg traits removed instead of waiting what is eons trying to level up some improved stat level 25 E tech with whom most of their stats don’t probably factor into anything relevant.
If you see the big picture, having one mediocre level 45 E-tech will provide enough electricity for two level 25 improved E-techs. So you free up space for whatever specialists you want.
=============
In the grand scheme of things, a big ship that relies on alot of crew means you don’t need to be nitpicky on their stats as the influence it has the game is miniscule.
However in crew combat, you rely on 4 people which has a major impact in person to person combat. So this is where being nitpickey matters.