Synergistic Jobs

[tenbsmith]

The skills and talents in different ST2 jobs overlap. I'm interested in successful combinations of captain officer jobs with an eye towards a creating a crew highly capable in certain types of missions/activities.

For example:
Captain--Merchant
Officer--Spy
Officer--Smuggler
Officer--Doctor
Might be good at legal and illegal trading as well as spying.

How many different activities can you successful support at what level of difficulty?

[fallen]

tenbsmith - awesome thread! Lots of great combos exist. With the right set of Officers, you can do a lot of things decently. With the right set of officers, you can completely dominate a smaller set of activities. Excited to see what folks post!

[grävling]

First of all you need to decide if you want to stick similar talents in the same person, or in different people. If you make an engineer/mechanic, they can both boost repair skills, and they both have talents that give discounts based on the repair skill, so that's a nice thing to do. The downside is that when that officer dies, you are in a larger hole than if you have some other people on your ship who know how to repair things. So have a mechanic handy to promote to officer when that happens.

When it comes to doctoring and commanding -- if you stick them into different people then you will spread your command points around, which means when your commander, or one of your commanders is killed you don't have the problem that nobody is obeying any orders -- and indeed they may be mutinying -- while everybody is dying of minor injuries at the same time. very depressing.

[Cory Trese]

IMO, the only time you want to stack jobs of the same bonus type on a single Officer is for combat. This is where you are bringing 4 characters in and it excludes the other jobs on the boat.

However, for ship based jobs there are substantial benefits to cross training. As grävling says, if you had a Doctor+Combat Medic and she died, that would cripple your ship's medical capacity.

Better to have a Doctor-Commander and Pirate-Combat Medic so that you have backups in case of fatal accidents.

[grävling]

Cory Trese don't you stack engineer and mechanic?

[fallen]

I do. Engineer + Mechanic is a combo I use on almost every ship. Makes all of those 10% + Skill Talents so much more powerful.

What I love most is how different we all play

[grävling]

Well, I can tell people that the new Doctors you can hire from the Chaesis Doctor contact are very nice to have. Or rather, its very nice to have a doctor who didn't start life as an e-tech or a crewdog or some other profession you find a waste on your doctor .... For my next trick I am going to see if Doctor is the sort of skill that you don't need in an officer at all -- like negotiator, you can just recruit a handful of them and see how that works out.

[Cory Trese]

The skill based Talent results definitely make stacking optimal on lower difficulties. I consider it a good strategy, but a risky one.

[bobc]

When stacking jobs one of the things I'll consider is how many talents I want from each job.  If I'm going to play a merchant with a sideline in exploration I'll combine Explorer with Commander, taking the Commanders 's skill save then spending the majority of talents on Explorer, but leveling the two jobs reasonably evenly to benefit from the skills.

[ntsheep]

I try to pick jobs for officers that go with any good starting bonus skills. I have had Crew Dogs that start out with 6 points in Doctor. I don't mind turning them into my main doctor. It's fun trying to see what combos you can come up with for jobs. It's a tough learning curve at the moment, but the reward is worth it I think.

[John Robinson]

Captain Merchant (Negotiate Skills).   Officer (Doctor + Diplomat) has worked well for me.

Add (Pistoleer + Combat medic), provides more healing skills and frees up negotiation skill points for Doctor/Diplomat

[xdesperado]

On smaller ships stacking jobs with overlapping skills on your officers can allow you to free up space for more specialist types.
Example Navigator/Smuggler/Bounty Hunter gives a lot of Nav skill so you likely need a lot fewer enlisted navigators to hit the sweet spot on ship crewing.
However as has been pointed out it also runs the risk of your super navigation officer getting killed and suddenly leaving you under staffed.
On larger ships it tends to be easier to spread out jobs more evenly between your officers and still make the space for your enlisted specialists.
Also I prefer to keep enlisted combat specialists for boarding/away missions with generally only a Pistoleer/Combat medic/exo scout officer as the officer in charge.
Prefer only sending in other officers in an emergency.

[tonkatsu]

Apr 21, 2017 15:37:35 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

IMO, the only time you want to stack jobs of the same bonus type on a single Officer is for combat. This is where you are bringing 4 characters in and it excludes the other jobs on the boat.

However, for ship based jobs there are substantial benefits to cross training. As grävling says, if you had a Doctor+Combat Medic and she died, that would cripple your ship's medical capacity.

Better to have a Doctor-Commander and Pirate-Combat Medic so that you have backups in case of fatal accidents.

I am having a bit of trouble understanding when job stacking is effective in terms of maximising the benefit from a high skill rating. As I understand it skills are split into 3 groups with Combat skills and personnel skills specific to the character while ship ops skills simply contribute to a pooled rating figure from the skill set of the entire crew.

My confusion is with certain talents whose effectiveness depends on an attribute or a skill rating:

I understand that combining pistoleer and military commander works because the pistols skill is an individual one for that character used in combat, the pistols skill is directly related to damage dealt and both jobs pump up that skill.

I also understand that Merchant/diplomat and doctor/commander works well because on talents such as steady hands (commander) and known trader (negotiate) the effectiveness of the talent depends on the owner of the talent's individual personnel skill.

I don't understand however if there is a point stacking spy and electronics tech jobs together. Both have skills leveraged against electronics which is a ship ops skill. If this is the case there seems little point in having a dedicated spy when the job can just be assigned as a second or 3rd role to any officer and electronics boosted by dedicated etechs from the crew.

TL:DR are ship ops leveraged skills referencing individual or ship pool ratings?

Many Thanks!

[fallen]

tonkatsu - hopefully the WIKI page can shed some light on it -
startraders.gamepedia.com/Skill_Pools

In short, Ship Skills are Pooled and used for ship operations.

But they are also used for Talents. Whenever a Skill is used in a Talent, regardless of what type of Skill it is, it uses the individual skill unless it is specifically mentioned.

For example, Skip Off the Void Talent specifically mentions "the entire crew's Navigation Skill". It literally may be the only one.

[grävling]

tonkatsu I think you may be looking at this backwards. The idea is not to find combinations of officer jobs to stack so they can support each other. I think that engineer+mechanic support each other very well, and it is silly to have combat jobs combined in the same officer that boost different weapons -- so stick bounty hunter on your rifle using soldiers, and not your pistol using spies -- but otherwise it is a bad idea to stack things. The benefit you get from having a some more points of commander in an officer has two commander increasing jobs is tiny compared to the devestation you suffer when that officer dies in combat and suddently you have almost no commander points at all. So I want my doctor and my comander to be separate people, for exactly this reason.