Is it better to train lower rarity crew as they are easier to find and cheaper to obtain, or is it better to only get high rarity crew and train them instead?

From my limited experience you want high rarity crew, but since they are by definition rare, you will probably hire some lower rarity crew as well.

The good thing is, selling a 5-star crew member brings back the money you had to pay to hire. So you can start with low ranked crew members and work your way up.

Rerolling crew members to hire costs 5 gems. That's not that much but quickly accumulates if you do it repeatedly. If you accept, for instance, only legendary crew members, you will waste lots and lots of gems.

How many gems you are willing to waste by rerolling is ultimately a personal decision and may depend on how quickly you can earn them, which will become easier the higher your level gets.

My personal strategy is to accept any crew member that is better than the worst I currently have for that job. And I keep a kadre of prospectors on stand-by only for team races. Unneeded crew members are sold. And I don't hire mechanics anymore because they only help you save credits (I think, anyone please correct me if I'm wrong) of which I have more than enough.

EDIT: I corrected "train" to "hire" (in italics above), which was what I meant in the first place. Pennybags may have refered to this sentence in its prior form with his very good advice to "not train lesser rarities".

Don’t train lesser rarities. Captain is the hardest to acquire and I did get frustrated and trained a rare. It helped along the way but in the end was many (many) gems wasted. My final crew includes a number of highly trained ultra’s.

That said, crew training is insanely expensive — end-game stuff. I hired captains and gunners until no more would fit (31) and then as advised sold lesser rarities as better became available. Maybe only started training when the cost of a new member was comparable to the cost to upgrade the weakest ship part? The increase is so very small.

What would be the best way to spend gems for a relatively new player? I've gotten 6 of each drone and I've been evolving them as I level them up. I see people running multiple cockpits, so is it safe to assime I should be getting those instead of other parts? Can't quite figure out what to do at this stage.

I wouldn't get cockpits instead of other parts but addtionally to other parts. While they are ultimately superior to every other part* they are also extremely expensive, and for their price you can get a much bigger stat boost out of non-cockpit parts.

My plan in the earlier phase of my game was to increase the general power of my ship py adding and upgrading parts. I went for attack mainly and a lot of drones to defeat guardians quickly. 9 is the maximum number of guardians per nest, so I wanted to reach or surpass this. Note that the gunner crew member type also helps with attack, but as he increases your power by a percentage you get more out of him if your base value is already high, or so I understood the mechanic at least.

With my current design I reduced the amount of drones per type from 11 to 9 and replaced the now empty drone bays with crew cabins and my overall attack value went up.


*Because they can't be destroyed - as long as they don't fall off - and because they have four functions (increase attack, increase cargo, house a crew member, house a drone) instead of at most two as with every other part type.

Note: I made a correction in my post above.

quickly: You're on the right track... 6 is good, 8 is plenty until much later when other priorities are met -- like very few 1x parts, some captains and gunners to increase DPS, and yeah get pilot pods as soon as you can stomach the grind. Upgrading 2x drone bays is an excellent use of gems. Pilot pods hold more per-tile than cargo so, get enough cargo to help you achieve your goals but try to replace those with pods.