Tips to (power)level the crew

[Hissatsu]

Greetings.

New to the forum, decided i'd share some knowledge i didnt find on wikis about how to get your skills up faster.

Weapons:
This is common knowledge, find a weak enemy (that cannot deal damage to you) and fire at him, each shot gives you one skill point (1 pixel of the bar). So the faster your weapon fires, the better.

Shield:
Your shield skill gets 1 skill point each time one blue shield "blob" recharges while in combat. It means, whenever you fight an enemy, when it does not put you in danger, lower your shield energy by one point and put it back every time your shields are full. This way your shields will regenerate constantly and so you will get your shields skill up much faster. You dont have to have the usual "harmless" enemy to do it, you can do it on any enemy - for example, you have enemy with weak beam but missiles - you will aim to take down his weapons or his vessel fast, but still, while fighting, you can keep your shields regenerating just for sake of getting shields skill up. Also, you get more points by starting combat with shields down and raising them as soon as it starts, so that you gain skill points for initial shield as well (you cannot get hit first several seconds while weapons charge so its okay, even with offensive drone by the time he fires first time you've already gained at least 1 shield)

Melee:
Your melee skill goes up by successfully killing or blowing up stuff. This means, if you have an enemy ship with a medbay, you should aim to kill most of its crew, preferably leave one weak man, but try to leave his hull intact, then let your assault guys wreck his systems. His crew member will try to stop you, get hit and run back to the medbay - while your guys get to kill systems and gain skill points. Best scenario possible - keep medbay locked down with ion damage - he will stay there forever while you get to destroy each system on his ship (well, while hull holds)

Pilot/Engine:
They gain skill when you dodge. I didnt' calculate yet wether it is proportional to the dodge chance (aka, will you gain more skill points if your engines are worser), it seems that it is not. Therefore, you'll need best engines possible and max power to them to level up your pilot and engine guys. The hit/miss is calculated right before the projectile hits the target room, so you can pause game, temporarily boost power to engines, unpause right before each projectile hits (for example, taking down power from drones or o2/medbay or even shields) in order to maximise skill gain.

[ultramoose]

I'll add my collected... we'll say theories lol.
the pilot/engine skill is just like the others. ie, non-proportional. however, the point earned from the dodge will go to both the pilot and the engine crewmate(is crewmate a word? i think im making it up lol).

For powerlevelling weapons, i like ion blast IIs if you can find them, they recharge very very fast.
In general for powerlevelling, the best thing you can find is a situation where you can control whether or not you are stalemating. It doesn't matter if the control is a stalemate or defeat or jumping, so long as the change is in your control. A great way to force this to happen is to upgrade your shields to 3 bubbles really early on. this will let you at the very least survive any onslaught up to sector 4 or 5, and thus produce stalemates, where your weapons guy can keep firing, your pilot and engineer can keep dodging, and your shield guy can keep...recharging the shields.

As for repairs, if you have some kind of damaging bomb, you can explode systemless rooms of your ship and repair them, while near a store and in a suuuuure stalemate. in general repair is the only skill worth mastering as a secondary, in most cases. however it is much better to level up one repair guy at a time, if you are powerlevelling, and thus in control of the situation. if you can do enough damage to yourself to skill up everyone on your crew then amazing, and very handy. but its a priority to do it individually.

melee skill is another beast, and pretty much i have nothing to add.

[samjones]

You can power level repair by keeping a fire going in your ship. It's probably a little more dangerous than these other suggestions, though.

[Gorlom]

You can power level repair by keeping a fire going in your ship. It's probably a little more dangerous than these other suggestions, though.

Indeed. fires damages hull too whenever it damages subsystem. each level of repair requires 18 points. hull max is 30 and you probably took a bit of damage getting that fire onto the ship in the first place.

getting a full level is probably too much risk to be worth it.

[actionhero112]

It kind of sucks though, because the game has no save/load function all of these strategies are rather wasted. The benefits of having a leveled crew member, while helpful, will not prevent the game from screwing you if it really wants to. And these strategies take time, extraordinary amounts of time that can immediately be spent for naught upon the game killing you. Plus your crew levels throughout the sector anyways.

Also don't keep a fire going in your own ship, you'll take hull damage. Better to just use bombs, sure it takes missiles, but at least you aren't deliberately damaging your hull.

[Gorlom]

It kind of sucks though, because the game has no save/load function all of these strategies are rather wasted. The benefits of having a leveled crew member, while helpful, will not prevent the game from screwing you if it really wants to. And these strategies take time, extraordinary amounts of time that can immediately be spent for naught upon the game killing you. Plus your crew levels throughout the sector anyways.

Also don't keep a fire going in your own ship, you'll take hull damage. Better to just use bombs, sure it takes missiles, but at least you aren't deliberately damaging your hull.

I don't quite understand how bombs would be any good? are you talking about the small bomb weapon? Their info says they only deal system damage and no hull damage but doesn't it damage the hull if it damages the system? I understood it to mean that it doesn't damage hull if it hits systemless rooms. (HAve I misunderstood that part?)
Second post in this threads even suggest bombing systemless rooms which I don't understand the point of at all. If there is no system there is nothing to repair? Hull breaches and putting out fires doesn't give repair experience.

[zarakon]

I kind of wish there was a limit on how much XP your crew could get in one fight to prevent this powerleveling.

In a game where patience, efficiency, and thoroughness are virtues, doing things that fit those virtues should be fun. Putting the game in the background on autofire for half an hour is not much fun.

[Gorlom]

I kind of wish there was a limit on how much XP your crew could get in one fight to prevent this powerleveling.

In a game where patience, efficiency, and thoroughness are virtues, doing things that fit those virtues should be fun. Putting the game in the background on autofire for half an hour is not much fun.

The game isn't balanced around it.
You should be able to get your crew to max rank in their respective fields without abusing the game like this.
You can play the game well enough without power leveling. You don't need to do it just because it is possible.

[zarakon]

You don't need to do it just because it is possible.

You don't NEED to make any particular good decisions. Powerleveling is an optimal choice with no tradeoff other than tedium, and tedium is never a good tradeoff in the design of a game like this.

[Gorlom]

You don't need to do it just because it is possible.

You don't NEED to make any particular good decisions. Powerleveling is an optimal choice with no tradeoff other than tedium, and tedium is never a good tradeoff in the design of a game like this.

well it's not an intended feature. Last i heard Matthew was looking into some way to get the enemy to realize the player was farming and jump away if a stalemate lasted for too long. Not really sure what happened to that.

Still don't understand why you are complaining about it though. If you don't like it don't do it. It's not like this is a multiplayer game and other people doing it affects you.