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Their rank determines the number of abilities they can potentially field, and then your ship's seating determines how many of those you'll be able to use when they're slotted in that seat.
Rank them up to unlock their higher rank slots. Depending on your ship, of course, that'll mostly be useful for ground content.
Cruiser is a class of ship... different ships, even different cruisers, will have different bridge officer (boff) seating. When you open your ship's "stations" tab you'll see your ship's available seats and how many slots each has (the unavailable slots will be light blue with an x through them).
If you float over the bridge 'positions' on the HUD you'll see some slots are a CDR, LCDR, LT or Ens station. If you slot someone in an Ens position you're only going to get to use his first ability, LT - 2, LCDR - 3 and 4 for the CDR.
If you open up your character panel and look at the skills on your bridge officers and what skills they have available for each rank position it helps you determine which bridge officer to place where as it shows what ability they have for each rank.
As to 'why' it's set up like this I'm sure there's a number of reasons; one being it might help keep players from being overpowered as they can't use all abilities like you noted, maybe it lets players have more control over how their ship is set up or in keeping with the TV show, you have junior officers doing certain jobs that don't require a bunch of skills.
Logically, your ship has X amount of hardware and no matter how good your officer is, if all he has is a scanner he can't make a black hole with it, or if all he has is a battery, he can't eject warp plasma with that. It doesn't totally fit: its a game play mechanic to limit you and make you 'build' your ship -- there is no logic that you can't use attack pattern omega 13 or whatever the high level one is called (I haven't played tactical in a while) if you know it because your tactical console (which is what, a comm station to bark commands at underlings?) doesn't support it but does support some lesser variant... but you get the gist of what they were going for I hope. They COULD let you use all your skills on each station, but they didn't.
Picking a ship, the officer stations are one of the first things I look at. Its even more interesting with split stations, like engineer/command or whatever flavors. If you can't seat the combination of skills you want, nothing else will work right either. Consoles are similar but to a lesser degree: there are TONS of universal consoles out there that can fill in MOST of the gaps if you are down a console (common in some carriers) of your preferred type. Other than those 2, you also should look at its general type (science, engineer, tac) and package (eg does it have a 2nd deflector? No? That is a BIG miss on some sci flavored boats!) as well as its movement (is it a slow cow? Not going to work great for a heavy cannon build) and weapon layout (is it loaded with aft weapons but you wanted a dogfighter? Not the right ship!).
a quick look gives you general patterns... fast ships tend to be tactical, and with front weapons, engineer ships tend to be slower, with 4/4 split weapons, science ships tend to be missing a weapon, raiders can seat anything any way you like but tend to have tactical packages, carriers are a mixed bag and tend to have a penalty in their package or layout, half (1 fighter bay) carriers tend to be very nicely arranged but slower than avg movement. Anyone can fly any type; I have an engineer in all raiders who keeps them alive with his shield and MW buttons and tacs in sci ships are (or were once?) more popular than sci captains.
If choose a tactical career, it would be the other way around. Correct.
Which abilities and which traits are good?
Yes, and this is tied to the specific ship you fly -- not every ship is unique in its station layout, but there are a lot of setups on higher tier ships, so exact repeats become farther apart at tiers 5 & 6 making choice of ship critical to getting the skills you want. Sometimes its the smallest thing, like choosing a model with 1 skill off the engineering station and onto the tactical station, that makes the ship work better for you.
Sorry if this was not clear from earlier answers.
It is possible, yes.
If you want to push your damage output, there's about six good space traits you can get on your BOFFs...
1. (roughly equal)
- "Superior Watcher Operative" (+3 crit chance, +3 crit severity) - lockbox/exchange
- "Superior Romulan Operative" (+2 crit chance, +5 crit severity) - fleet embassy BOFF vendor
* Romulan-faction captains can also obtain BOFFs with SRO through several other methods, and some of them come with additional traits as well ("Subterfuge" or "Infiltrator", both of which interact with the decloaking bonus.)
2. (Romulan-faction captains only)
- "Romulan Operative" (+1.5 crit chance, +3.8 crit severity) - found on Tovan Khev and some randomly generated Romulans. Can be increased to SRO by use of an Elite BOFF token.
3. (roughly equal)
- "Engineered Soldier (Space)" (+1 crit chance, +2.5 crit severity, +7.5 All Weapon Damage (cat1)) - Jem'Hadar Vanguard - only comes on the three from the Zen store Gamma bundle
- "Authority of the Founders" (+1 crit chance, +2.5 crit severity, +7.5 All Weapon Damage (cat1)) - only comes on the Weyoun clone BOFF from the Jem'Hadar captain bundle
- "Pirate" (+1.5 Bonus All Damage (cat2)) - racial standard on Nausicaans, also comes on the Hierarchy episode-reward BOFF. (Federation and allied can get 1 Nausicaan via Diplomacy reward vendor.) (Klingon and allied, note that the Hierarchy officer comes with a second trait as well, so is marginally better than Nausicaans.)
* Math here - the cat2 damage bonus from "Pirate" goes into the same pool as crit severity does (they are both "cat2" damage), but Pirate is always on, while crit severity is applied only on crits. So how these behave compared to each other will depend on your crit chance. I am ranking them here as equals, assuming that your crit chance is around 35-40%, which is achievable to most modern builds.
4. (the "better than nothing" box)
- "Photographic Memory" (+1.5% All Damage (cat1)) - racial standard on Cardassians - to the untrained eye, it looks very similar to "Pirate", however the difference between cat1 and cat2 makes this much weaker.
- "Efficient" (increases power levels) - racial standard on Letheans and Hierarchy episode-reward BOFF, also comes on some others
- "Leadership" (increases hull regen) - racial standard on Humans, also comes on some Klingons
- various "K-13 Survivor" traits (increases various stats) - found only on Fleet K-13 vendor BOFFs. (Note that all Humans listed at the vendor also have "Leadership".)
- "Space Warfare Specialist" (increases various stats).
- there are various others as well.
X. (difficult to rank)
- "Kentari Ferocity" - only comes on the Fleet Colony Kentari BOFFs. This is not a persistent passive like the others, so is hard to rank in comparison. It is a stackable, triggered by kills, so can be very situational. Also, the stacking doesn't work properly if you try to use more than one.
- "Subterfuge" and "Infiltrator" - both of these are generally found only on Romulan-faction BOFFs, though there are some rare exceptions. They both interact with the bonus damage period that is granted upon decloaking OR by using the starship trait "She's a Predator". If you're not using a cloaking ship *and* don't have that trait slotted, they do nothing for you. (one increases the Bonus Damage (cat2), the other increases the duration)
What do I do with all these other BOFFs clogging up my inventory? Looks like training manuals sell for a whole lot more than the BOFFs themselves. Are there any abilities that are particularly worth keeping?
Also, looks like you can take BOFFs from your roster and mail them to your other characters, and they go back to being in the inventory. Does this mean I can use a Romulan character to mail Romulan BOFFs to my other characters and bypass the limit?
Those embassy BOFFS are hella expensive, and you won't quickly have a full set.
Second, it's min maxing.
Roughly 80% of all my characters (I have a LOT) are more for style / theme than efficiency.
For example, I was lucky enough to pull an Epic token from the Phoenix box so I got the Bajoran escort. Made a full Bajoran crew, even though for DPS chasers it's a horrible pick.
It works fine, I don't do Elite difficulty Task Force Operations, and I don't need to squeeze out every % Crit Chance that I can, because I find such an approach unfun.
Your mileage may vary of course, some people DO want that and find it fun, fair enough;
But my point is, if you feel you need the absolute best stuff, and all modules at Epic XV for your build to work, then your build might not really work, if you get my meaning.
The game works fine and you can do very well even without the top 1% of the most expensive picks, is my ultimate point.
Well, again, scrap them into manuals, or like you have found out, send them to alts to use for leveling purposes, or just sell them cheap for a couple of EC.
As for the abilities, you should really read some guides as to what sells well - as a rule of thumb, most abilities you get from manuals are worth more as mark 3 than below.
Gravity Well 3 will always sell more than GW 1.
There are exceptions, but not for basic 'trash' BOFF manuals to my knowledge, mostly because a lot of low level skills can straight up be bought cheap from the skill vendor, and people do tend to have a lot of left over BOFFS to make their manuals themselves.
No, because
1. BOFFs are faction locked - yes, even when you choose to side with the Federation for example, sending a Romulan Boff to a Federation character will have them 'refuse' to work.
2. the "good stuff" (Embassy Boffs) are bound to character anyway.
Those or the Watcher BOFFs are the best available for space damage, yes.
Also, if you're Romulan yourself, you can get them cheaper from other sources, and they sometimes have a second space trait as well.
However, you can certainly use other BOFFs for your ground away team.
Sell, mulch into manuals, or use as away team.
No, because they are faction-locked. Romulan BOFFs will only work for Romulan captains. (The Embassy vendor ones are specially coded to bypass this.)
Also... bypass what limit? The Embassy vendor does not limit you on how many you can buy. (It DOES lock you out of buying a particular BOFF *if* you currently have that same BOFF in your candidate storage, but not if they are in your roster.)
I already at this point have every manual possible on the Boffs with the exception of a few lockboxed manuals which will be expensive on the exchange by credits.
I dont worry about the boffs too much. The overall game is carefully blended in terms of balance so that nothing really is broken so to say to borrow a gamer term for something thats powerful.
What I do sometimes is tune a particular ship for a particular section of enemy. For example.. if I want to send a particular ship to fight Klingons all day, that ship will have the necessary anti klingon stuff only. It will not do well against other types of weaponry etc.