What are recommended jobs for the captain?

[LordBlade]

As I understand it, there's some situations where the captain's stats/skills are the main factor. With that in mind, what would be the most useful jobs to focus on as a captain?

[AlexnChaos]

It honestly depends on what your doing really, Piracy, Crew Combat, Trading, Smuggling, they all have different builds that work well, hell you can even build some fairly good all rounder setups if your officers are good as well and you have enough of them

[Gilmoy]

Here's an idea: Go for the unlocks. That will make you custom-build your captain/crew/ship. Do that for enough unlocks, and then you've mastered (or at least apprenticed :) a great swath of the game.

- Ship combat: You want Command and Tactics skills. Start with those skills, then add non-common jobs that have them as primary skills: Commander, Military Officer.

- Exploring: Look at the Explorer template. Take Explorer skill levels, and the Explorer job for card game reroll talents. Seriously considering training an officer as Exo-Scout for good anti-xeno crew combat buffs, because exploring will inevitably lead you into some xeno fights.

- Crew combat: Decide if you want your captain to fight, only mop up, or never fight. If you choose to fight, go all-out on attributes and skills for that, and take fighting jobs to stack extra levels. You can do crew combat perfectly well with a pacifist captain who never joins; just use officers and crew instead.

There are no must-have Captain jobs. Put another way, there are many different niches you can choose to excel at, and each one will suggest a different set of Captain jobs.

One way to look at it is that your Captain + officers give you up to 3*N jobs. However, up to about level 15+, all of your captains and officers should probably be beelining one job at a time to a job rank breakpoint, to take talents available there. (So you beeline for talents. Study the Talents wiki page and make a roadmap.) The obvious example is beeline Doctor to J5 to take T5 Life Saver. Because of this, your captain/officer job ranks will be asymmetrically split: it's normal to be 5/1/1, or even 5/1/<not yet taken>, if you really want that T5 talent ASAP.

Then what you actually have is a subset of maybe 5-8 jobs you'd like to have in your crew, and you distribute these amongst your Captain and officers. So it doesn't matter that much which subset your Captain actually takes; you'll use your other officers to cover the rest, anyways.

In that case, the must-have jobs to cover early on are those that give CYA (cover your assets) Talents, which your common crew won't ever get:

- Doctor skill save
- Stiff Salute, Dubious Nod -- to be a mouse early on, until you can upgrade your ship
- purge Crew Effects! (your crew can purge Ship Effects)
- HP/Morale healing in crew combat

[JonesItUp]

I recommend something that gives skills your crew don't usually cover. For example, it's easy to find crew who are Crew Dogs, Pilots, Gunners, E-Techs, etc. You also start with a doctor, quartermaster, and engineer. Typical starting roles for the captain are Smuggler, Merchant, or diplomat (for negotiate), Military Officer or Commander (for command), Explorer (for explore), Spy (for stealth), and pirate, zealot, or bounty-hunter (for intimidate).

[Trese Brothers]

Originally posted by LordBlade:

As I understand it, there's some situations where the captain's stats/skills are the main factor. With that in mind, what would be the most useful jobs to focus on as a captain?

Depends immensely on your career. A captain can have an officer corp and crew that back them up in whatever you get into. Some great suggestions above!

[Grubnick]

A captain in a healing combat role would not be a bad choice. Officers get an extra gear slot which by itself makes a big difference later in the game when you can get the good gear. Doctor and combat medic are a great combo for an officer to be a combat medic - a crew member will just not have enough doctoring stats to be a good combat medic. For the third job I would look at something not covered by the regular crew, such as command.

Next playthrough I think I'll build a doctor/combat medic with the captain for these reasons. Healing is always useful.

[chris]

I am currently playing as Spy/Mil-Op/Pistoleer.

Since I am playing on normal (still working on completing the story and because I like to win) my captain is part of the away team (slot 2). The three jobs do not synergize particularly well but they all have pistols. So no matter what, the pistol skill will increase. I took the pistoleer for evasion only.
The spy has two really great pistol skills which outshine anything the pistoleer has to offer, one shot which puts you to stealth mode (so no initiative lost for buffing) and one really nasty shot which requires stealth mode.
Beware that the stealth enabling shot makes you retreat one position so you need a talent on your position 3 officer (doctor probably) to retreat as well.
The military officer has one really nice on boarding talent.

[JimmysTheBestCop]

Originally posted by LordBlade:

As I understand it, there's some situations where the captain's stats/skills are the main factor. With that in mind, what would be the most useful jobs to focus on as a captain?

Only you can answer this question. What do you feel like playing? We might be able to offer complimentary jobs but your main job you would probably have to decide what you feel like playing.

If I was going for full crew combat dps master and debuffer I might go Military Officer//Pistoleer/Spy or self sufficient (meaning he can self heal hp and morale) then swordsman instead of pistols.

Or you can go full crew combat buffer/debuffer where it could be Doctor/Military Officer/Bounty Hunter or double up command and go Commander instead of BH.

If your going non crew combat you might want to go Merchant/Smuggler/Diplomat. They can synergize well.

Or you might want to go full space combat combat but not any crew combat so that would be an entirely different build.

[Radiantice]

Personally I am a fan of Smuggler (1st for maximum Attributes) > Sniper (2nd point) > Diplomat (until 8) then get smuggler and sniper to 11 alternating. Taking 5 points in rifle and 10 points in stealth. To maximize critical hits and make you into an acceptable spy as well as trader. Alternatively exo scout is a good choice instead of sniper for a more explorer focused build switching the stealth for explore. The remaining points are dealers choice.

It works really well with a doctor/combat medic/military officer as you 3rd slot and 2 soldiers using shotguns in 1 & 2. Pistollers and swordmans are ok too. This frees up you other officers to max out your non combat roles.