What is the best officer skill tree?

[Neker]

(Fleet and Captain Skill trees)
Hangar (lol sure)
CIC
Tech bay
Navigation
Armory
Engineering

[TRON]

CIC

+12 Attack / Defense / Range

The range on Adamants with guns on +12 Attack is insane :)

It also boosts every ship in fleet.

I find the other skill tree's useless because they only affect the flagship...one ship...

Also if you ever get hacked or boarded heavily, +12 defense makes quick work of any hacking/boarding parties and you can switch back to +12 Attack again.

[steveo110]

Agreed that CIC is awesome, but Tech bay (for fleet) with +40% Dradis (for flagship) is pretty good as well.

I overlooked it initially when using Manticores to scout, but once you have an Artemis/Minotaur on full DEF and +40% its usually turn 1 that things start getting identified... which helps for getting missile barrages in early.

Bonus to tech bay also helps with repelling hacking attempts i believe.

I don't see the point of +marine strength. Best defence against boarding is to kill the heavy radiers before they land. They are always target no.1 for me.

[windfinder21]

Several have advantages:

CIC based tree:

Fleet wide increase to the +/- Postour setting is outstanding. you can outrange the enemy with guns, Fire more missles per volley (with high +attack, 5 guided and 13 torps), and have a very high chance to hit to the point you can tell your ships to focus fire a fighter squadren and there guns can take it out at range. Downside in full attack is the large swing drops your armors damage midigation in to the toilet so any hits you take will be large.

Also in Defence mode it will increase your the strength of your flak field (not as much as another tree), Increase your armors damage reduction percentage (not number 1 but comes in 2nd in the mid to upper 30's percents), increase your dradis range (again not as much as another tree), allow your marines to deal with boarding more easily (not as well as another tree), and makes you harder to hack (again not number 1 at it).

on the caption side the +2 posture range perc and the +40% tilium for a fortified colony there at is massive.

overall the best as its the only one that boost your attack and effective damage over standered none officer lead fleets, AND comes in 2nd best to maybe riveling the other trees in almost every other catigory. only thing is that you have to fiddle with the slider to get the most out of the officer tree. Through in the +40% tilium and it can not be beat (as no one else has something that effects the colonies and increases your stratigic resourses).

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Navigation based tree:

This one is the next one up just becouse it is the ONLY way to increase your ships Speed, Turn rates, and Elevation rates. Fleetwide increase with the caption skills just makeing the flagship itself even more so effected.

Incase you have not looked, the fastest that your ship can manouver is when your Posture setting is at +/- 0 setting, any other setting reduces your navigation subsystem settings. This leads to the tree being the only way to actually make more ships manuver better and beable to more effectivly flip armor facings (I know right now the damage model leaves something to be desired but there you go).

This ALSO makes your ships more manuvrable then any other officer tree when they ARE set to full attack or defence postiure (all others but the CIC tree its from the starting at a increased state, against the CIC tree it also starts at a better position and it can not divert as much power away so the diffrence is just massive).

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Engineering tree:

This effects your damage resistes and subsystem repair. It does have the distintion of keeping your damage resistance up even when full attack. and when full defence it really ups it with the fleet wide part, and the caption skills just make your flagship even more tanky.

In theroy it would make your ships survive longer and it does do that, but not a noticably longer time then a CIC tree in full defence.

Again the big draw to this is the retained damage resistance in the full attack Posture setting.

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Tech bay tree:

Biggest effect is on the range of dradis, but CIC comes in a close 2nd. Once you ID the enemy, you acttually have little need for the improved dradis range so after the first turn or two most of the benifit of the tree drops away. The improved hacking resistance is nice, but the few ships that can actually hack you coupled with they are normally priority targets makes that moot.

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Armory tree:

This effects the marine strength on ships ..... and if your never boarded this never matters.

BUT on the battlestars this also effects the Flak strength as well. Against missles its pointless as any damage kills them it looks like. Against fighters and heavy raiders it can make a diffrence as it could mean the diffrence between some getting though or them all dieing in a rain of fire. It seems to have no effect on the size of the flak feild although that would be nice to add in.

the armory subsystem is Raised up by the Defence Posture, so this makes this the largest increase in this with CIC following just behind. It does not offer enough to make it really stand out though.

I have noticed that one of my ships that was out of position and was clipping a Jupitur flak feild was loosing armor points in one fight, but I have not had the enemy cooperate enough to fly a ship right next to them and see what would happen if the ship was in the middle of a full strength Flak feild and if that would acctually do anything of note.

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Hangar tree:

This one is disapointing.

The posture slider in no way effects the hanger subsystem so this one could be like the navigation tree in that its the only way to effect this system and could be a good thing.

The only thing is, the Hanger subsystem only effects the repair/rearm rate (rearm seems to be the next turn after docked anyway, so I dont see as how this can be any better. Repair rate, I have never seen a damaged squadren repair any points even after 3 turns docked) and the squadren evasion rate. The thing is the jump is very small and my fighters are rarely loosing craft anyway so it comes off as pointless.

If this increased squadren SIZE or damage then maybe it might find more use.

[SA_Cavendish]

Originally posted by steveo110:

Agreed that CIC is awesome, but Tech bay (for fleet) with +40% Dradis (for flagship) is pretty good as well.

I overlooked it initially when using Manticores to scout, but once you have an Artemis/Minotaur on full DEF and +40% its usually turn 1 that things start getting identified... which helps for getting missile barrages in early.

Bonus to tech bay also helps with repelling hacking attempts i believe.

I don't see the point of +marine strength. Best defence against boarding is to kill the heavy radiers before they land. They are always target no.1 for me.

This!

I was looking for comparisons myself for a long while and ultimately came to this conclusion after playing and struggling too hard with the CIC Officer (and all its configurations...) as I saw many people recommended it. Now after finishing on Fleet Admiral, the game and its DLCs, there's no comparison, TEC Officer has no competition.

Not having to worry about hacking and firing an extra 1-2 salvos early on makes some missions feel like playing on Lieutenant difficulty again.

Not to mention the fact that Basestars like to hang back and unless you get a pen and paper you can't possibly know when they will launch missiles so flak is almost always up. That means you almost never get to use your missiles. Even when you know exactly where the enemy lies (after repeated playthroughs) its still a life saver to be able to lock missiles on them and alternate between flak and missiles instead of finishing every mission with full missile reserves.

This and the fact that max difficulty means your only option will ever be 3 x Jupiters makes options pretty slim. The TEC guy saves you both during the Daedalus saga and in a Manticore later down the line.

Edit: Any other officers types are not even worth mentioning on harder difficulties.

[House of Dust]

In case you didn't know - officers can only get nine promotions - that's not enough to buy every upgrade so you'll want to plan ahead.

One of the Engineering skills is a bit... broken? +20 Flagship armour persists between battles and stacks. No idea what it caps out at, but I've got a Minerva with 200+ armour on all facings in my current campaign

[twosnark]

Hmmm Necro of a six year old thread . . .but I am game. :)

For me. . . it's CIC baby. The attack bonus for an *entire fleet* (Common for me to have 6-7 ships) is well worth it. ESPECIALLY early on. Hanger specialization also has it's charms for those fleets that have multiple Atlas's present :)

I agree Marine specialist is not worthwhile - - -better to shoot down the heavy raiders. I will note; The improvement to Flak on a Artemis with the armory buff is nice.

Not sure I agree at all with the Tech specialization. My battlestars sit under a flack wall because I put them (initially) far enough from the base stars that the torps and missiles are not arriving on the same turn. I do this so that I don't have to deal with them until the Raiders and supporting ships are gone. EW is painful. . . but not overly bothersome. The issue in Season 1 is wardrivers. . .which can be shot down with prejuidice. In season 2; Phobes abound. HOWEVER - - - if there are 4 phobes coming at you; that implies you will have a largish fleet. . . one that can gun these thin skinned ships down fairly readily. And if there are 4 phobes - - -that means there are NOT 4 revenants as well- - - so gunning down phobes's is a viable strategy. The key in an EW environment is TWO battlestars. If one loses an armory; you immediately stack the battlestars so that the healthy ship can "cover" the hurting one. Also; putting a squadron or two on defense does wonders for missile defense.

that means there are NOT 4 revenants. Phobes are amenable to be b

Except for the last few missions of S&S; I never run with 3 Jupiters. On Fleet Admiral level; my "favorite" fleets have 1 x Jup II and 2 x Artemis battlestars.

[Neker]

omg necro, btw it was cic lol

[condottiere]

There's no Colonial ship on it's own where you could optimize one aspect, to at a minimum be competitive with the Cylons, all point totals being equal, or greater.

So you're better off with a fleetwide improvement.

[condottiere]

If we could captain each ship with characters, then it would be different.

[SA_Cavendish]

I'm def trying the glitched engineer, if that thing still works it could be OP.

But, just like the CIC is basically worthless now since it only has +7 and the TEC has +6, where the CIC used to be OP at +12 in earlier versions of the game, this might get patched too so I'll try to squeeze my fun until then :)).

I'll be back with my thoughts.

[konzacelt]

I basically run with 6 fleets, one for each officer skill tree. I do this for fun mostly. Running the CIC build on every fleet is obviously quite effective, it just gets stale and boring really fast for me. Building the fleets around the officer skills gives the game some nice tactical flavor I otherwise wouldn't enjoy.

I've tried to optimize my six fleets to match each of the officer skill trees as follows:

• CIC -- Daedalus for the first half of the campaigns, Jupiter for the 2nd half. It's the most logical use for Daedalus because it's not really a moving ship and only has minor guns.
  
  
• Navigation -- Jupiter. Makes this behemoth quite nimble and fast, you can pretty much dodge any torps coming at you. The speed bonus is enough to keep up with Arty's and Minotaurs if you like to stack ships on the frontline. I use all inherently fast ships for this skill tree: Manticores, Rangers, Minotaurs, Arty's, etc.
  
  
• Engineering -- Minerva. Gives this glass cannon some much needed tankyness, and the subsystem repair rate bonus helps a lot with hacks too. I basically slave my Celestra to it the whole battle, and it becomes a remarkably good frontline beast. The Eng bonus slightly toughens up the rest of your fleet, I tend to use other heavy ships in this fleet to give the whole group a general tankyness: Janus, Atlas, Minotaur, etc. This is my favorite officer to play with.
  
  
• Hanger -- Jup2. One might think the Atlas a better fit, but they already have great squadron stats - especially in evasion. The Jup2 is the only Colonial ship that can deploy 4 squadrons, so trying to maximize the captain bonus here. The bonus accuracy and speed for the fighters makes them hard to catch and excellent missile/fighter interceptors. All other ships in this fleet are Atlas (5) -> that's 19 total squadrons, 20 if you replace the Celestra with a Defender.
  
  
• Tech -- Manticore/Orion. The only two Colonial ships with good Dradis range, so adding to their inherent bonus. You can ID almost every Cylon ship in the 2nd round if positioned right. The firewall regen and HP bonus provides better survivability too. Other fleet ships are heavy on missiles and fighters, this fleet doesn't close to gun range much: Janus, Atlas, Adamants, maybe a Jup just in case.
  
  
• Marine -- Minerva. This is probably the least effective skill tree, but can still be interesting to play. Takes advantage of the Minerva's inherent Marine bonus to give the Raptor marines a huge bonus in boarding success with a defensive posture. Flip to offensive posture when firing torps for another nice bonus: easily over 30 torps per salvo if you put torps in both munition slots. Other ships in the fleet are missile and fighter heavy like the Tech fleet, but heavy hitters are useful as well: Janus, Atlas, Arty, Adamants, etc.

Like I mentioned, the fleet comps aren't meant to be the best fleet around. They are just fun ways to utilize all the officer bonuses to make the engagements more interesting and less routine. I find it keeps the game fresh for longer than it normally would if you just used CIC everywhere.

[SA_Cavendish]

Yeah, so I tested the ENG officer, turns out it does glitch but not in a useful way, with repair after each battle turned on you do get a bit of extra health left over from the last flagship you placed your orficer in, but it doesnt save if you repair all. So tech still remains top dog for me.

I should mention I am talking about the hardest difficulty where you are usually overwhelmed by fleets at 14-15k and you cannot afford to target less dangerous targets like wardrivers since for every turn your max fire isnt set on a gunship, well, even your hardest armor melts by half, so every second counts. Here you need all the time you can muster up until flak passively takes out the wardrivers or you can eliminate the armor melting enemy first and then afford to target hacker ships.

I keep playing with Nash (meh) for story missions and since he is a CIC officer at max level I dread it every time. Again if you play less for fun and more for the challenge, TECH and CIC are worlds apart. That extra 4% boost to guns or dmg reduction from the +7 instead of +6 posture is essentially useless.

Also, if you are playing in a more realistic fashion and try to keep your ships alive, most of them will be elite and they get a 40% firewall strenght (which stacks with TEC), a 10% damage reduction (which is better than the ENG 5%...) and a 20% flak damage boost (which makes a +1 to posture from CIC even less impactful on defense), so there really is no reason to give up on the other officer benefits for the CIC one... at least in this game version... Man I miss the +12 posture days :)))