new to crew, what the "best" start

[Crenshaw]

Hi,

i unlocked crew and i confused a little, what are the "best/useful" strategy at the beginning
some tips or hints?

thx

[rob_s_cat2]

there are at least 3 options available, all of which involve trying to get the first mastery points:

- concentrate on getting crew skill levels, at the beginning this will be slow, but escalates very rapidly;
- concentrate on trying to get acumen, as this affects all other skills. this is slightly faster than the first option, but doesn't escalate as quickly if you're not an active player;
- concentrate on getting more sleeves to get crew mastery points quickly. the main disadvantage of this is that you'll get the sleeves anyway through either of the other two methods, but it does have the advantage of being the quickest start.

[Crenshaw]

hm, ok, so i should change between the stats (eng, acu...) and retire and use the second crewmember to make fast some ranks/lvls?

[rob_s_cat2]

that is one aspect of it, along with using prestiges to regain sleeves when the timer to the next sleeve is uneconomical. there's another, eventually more powerful aspect to it, too, and that is the crew section of the warp upgrades. when just starting with crew, though, you might not have enough income to realistically concentrate on this, so in order to be able to do so, acumen/ingenuity for the researcher and later the xeno phenomenologist are good to begin getting set up for some advances in ingenuity to help speed up the transition to warp benefitting crew regularly.

[Crenshaw]

should i push one stat to reach the second crew slot? (at the moment i synth all red mats to infinite, so i had some time)

[rob_s_cat2]

personally, i haven't been so much going for optimal as experimentinig to try to narrow down the source of a particularly annoying bug in the weapons and graphics, but getting your warp speed up and warp material income as well is basically your top priority, so anything you can do to do that is going to benefit everything else due to just how much warp improves everything in its scope of upgrades

[Crenshaw]

what does crew rank dcaling delay +1?

[rob_s_cat2]

the crew rankings are the base of the quadratic function known as triangular numbers. for each level of ranking delay, this number is shifted, so that rather than needing 1+2+3+4 levels to reach rank 4, if you have one delay level, you only need 1 (delay) +1+2+3, or 7. in practice this means that you will always be gaining an extra rank at triangular number +1 levels. the formula for triangular numbers is f(n)=n*(n+1)/2, the delay works to shift 0.

[Crenshaw]

thx