Please see this external guide https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3120616748 for more in-depth analysis on crew
Crew
Last modified by Manoeuvring with Difficulty on 2024/01/25 08:21
Crew management is an important aspect of improving your fleet's capabilities. The ships crew consists of 3 different types of NPCs:
- The Captain (relief pilot when you're not personally commanding)
- Service Crew
- Marines
Stations only require a Manager crew and optionally additional workforce (see Station Building And Management).
Each ship has a limited capacity to accommodate crew members. On a ship, the captain is by far the most important crew member: their ability affects the quality of the ship actions the most. A good Captain is capable of more maneuvers, fights and trades better, and unlocks new standard behaviors for their ship. The Service Crew are no less important for a good ship: they improve the ship's capabilities: controlling, aiming, trading.. and repairing! Everything gets better with a skilled Crew! The overall quality of the ship's crew is improved with the number of crew members and experience level of each crew member.
Anyone can fill the role of a Captain (if you only believe in yourself). Anyone you employ, whether it's through the shipyard, through buying via the ship upgrade interface or through direct recruitment on a station, can be deployed in any position (captain, service crew, marines, managers). This means, for example, you can use a marine as a service crew or an engineer as a captain or manager, whether temporary or eventually permanent.
Skills
The quality of employees is summarized in capability groups. These abilities are displayed with a star rating of 0 to 5 stars. If you open the details of a single crew member you will find an overview with their individual skill groups:
- Piloting
- Morale
- Management
- Engineering
- Boarding
How well an NPC does their task(s) depends on those abilities. While the Captain's ability to pilot is very important, the Marines benefit most from the ability to board.
Title | Ability | Management | Piloting | Boarding | Engineering | Morale |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pilot/Captain |
| * |
|
| * |
Manager | * |
|
|
| * |
Service Crew |
|
|
| * | * |
Marine |
|
| * |
| * |
All NPCs work better with higher morale!
Training the crew or Marines
Learning by Doing
Everyone gets better the longer they survive! While marines best enhance their main attribute "boarding" on real boarding operations, "normal" crewmembers learn from usual ship actions. However, surviving a fight improves their skill across many areas!
See X4 3.1x NPC SkillExperience training - a short overview for a more detailed explanation of how NPC training happens, with external links to videos
Digital seminars
To be done
Guide written by Bernd, translated to German by Oliver and re-translated from German to English by anonymous, cleaned up by Sao t'Lp
Terraforming
(main page Terraforming)
Crew can have their levels increased either en masse (for low crew levels) or individually (for high crew levels) provided certain terraforming projects are completed.