Hi, is there a difference between a, let's say "+5% common captain" and a "+5% legendary captain"?
You can "train" all of them to lvl 100% in the end so IMO it would be smarter to level up a common crew member cause you get those much more often when you roll.
Am I getting something wrong?
Cheers

I would not suggest training legendary crew members. WASTE OF TIME.
What you could do is when you get crews train and sell them but only if you already have one of them. If you already have 125% captains on your main ship then no use keeping more captains around unless you want to make another ship. Collect common for starters and then work your way up to the others.

JN_29 said:
I would not suggest training legendary crew members. WASTE OF TIME.
What you could do is when you get crews train and sell them but only if you already have one of them. If you already have 125% captains on your main ship then no use keeping more captains around unless you want to make another ship. Collect common for starters and then work your way up to the others.

Training legendary crew members IS NOT waste of time, believe me. I'm sorry to say it, but you are wrong. Level up and sell the common and rare crew members, keep all ultra rare and legendary crew members. Pick one ultra rare crew member(with a skin you like) and train him with all the rest of the same category, forever. For the legendary crew members, wait until you get a high end one (I'll post the values below) and train him until a certain point.

So, here are the max % of most of the crew member types:

Captain - 115% - The goal here would be having 8x with at least 14.375% for starters. After you manage to get at least that, you can aim higher, for example 7x with 16,43%.
Def     - 125% = You can start by having 3x but aim for 2x.
Att     - 125% = 3x but aim for 2x.
Cargo   - 120% = 3x but aim for 2x.

I have no information about the max crew buffs for Mechanics and Prospectors. I even asked James in a support ticket, but I was never answered, still waiting on it tho.
Knowing all that, keep in mind you keep 1 ultra rare crew member, which you'll train 
endlessly, meaning he'll compensate for the rest of the legendary crew members in time.
A good, high end, crew member would have the max starting value in % of it's kind, or close to it(if you don't wanna wait). These are the starting values(or really close ones):

Captain: 7.5 - 11.3
Cargo: 22.5 - 37.1
Def: 22.5 - 33.8
Att: 22.5 - 33.8
Mechanic: 6 - 9
Prospector: 8.3 - 12.5

In same rare occasions you might get even higher ones, but don't count on it.
For the past few months, this is pretty much all I've been doing - searching for new crew members every day, level them up by making drops, party drops and hourly offerings. This, and fighting leviathans for a leviathan pilot pod.

Thanks for all the infos, I am learning a lot but I have a couple of further questions.

1.  When I train a legendary with an other legendary it gets raised by something like 0,7% or so. Are you telling me that lets say you start with a legendary at 10% you would have to level up 180 legendaries and then use them to train your one legendary to get to 100%? Or even more to get to 120% or so? Wouldn't that take literally years??
   
2. My initial question did not get answered. How is a common crew member different than a legendary one? Is the max % of a legendary crew member higher? 
   
3. Regarding your max value list. Oh wait... Is 115% captain the combined percentage of ALL captains in that ship? If so that would answer my question from 1.  So it would mean I could have 1 captain with 100% and a second one with 15% for example?   If 3. is true, why would I have to wait for a high staring % if i can train them up as much as I want? Just to save time and gems, right? So I do not have to train as much.
   
4. How do drop level up crew members? I never did any drops so far. 
   
5. Why did you not mention Gunners at all? Are they nor worth it? They give a big boost to a lvl 86 noob like me. 
   
6. Why do you suggest a concrete number of a specific crew type? Isn't just the % important? 

Thanks so much for all the infos!

Hey, I'm happy to help :)

1. The lower the crew members stats are, the bigger the raise is. Over time, you get diminished returns, like Benji explained that a lot of times for the drones. I stopped keeping tabs on the drones improvements, but I still do for the crew members. And yes, it would take years to make one crew member with really high stats, especially with diminishing returns, therefore I explained what you should aim for at start, which in it's own way will take at least a few months.

2. There is no maximum values of crew members, I believe, it's just about the diminishing returns you get from training them. You start to notice it way faster in common and rare crew members. But in general the total % of the max buff of a certain crew members type is the same, it really doesn't matter how you make it - legendary, ultra rare, rare or even common crew members, you can have your own mix that adds to that %.

3. It's probably way more than 115%, the idea is to have at least 115% in total of that type, in this case captains, so you'd benefit the most of having them on board. Yes, so you can waste less crew members to improve the stats of the better ones, which would save you time and gems in general.

4. When you do party drops, and someone opens the crates, you receive certain amount of xp for that - the more they open, the more you get.

5. Gunners are Att - Attack.

6. The % is important, but the less crew members you have on board, the more space you'll be able to spare for more drones, which would make your ship even more powerful in the end, in terms of taking down guardians/leviathans.

This has been an enlightening thread. Readers might also be interested in this post and the others in its thread: goldfire.me/forums/thread/5db2945234d9bf79ec50db18/best-way-to-improve-crew/post/5db2fbef9e39da6efb523ef5

I want to point out that the values listed above are the "listed" values, not the "effective" values. A 10% cargo hand, for example, would increase your cargo by 12.5% because a cargo hand's effective value is 25% higher than it's listed value. So the "listed cap" on cargo hands is 120%, but the maximum effective (actual) increase to cargo with cargo hands alone is (120%)*(1 + (25%)) = 150%. That's 2.5 times your baseline value.

Now, my game theory with this is that the crew members post their values lower than they actually are so that they won't be sued or fired for rounding errors. In another thread (https://goldfire.me/forums/thread/5cdf3116283b44319f05db7b/wrong-crew-stats--bug-/post/5ce2490b36bbb90b8a0c3d3c), Lisimba provides a more reasonable sounding explanation that instead of each crew member having different effective and listed values, ships can also be penalized for being understaffed. The percentages of each crew of a certain type are summed together and added to a value below 100% before being multiplied with the "nominal" unlisted stat of a hypothetical "well-staffed" exocraft. It isn't very intuitive to extend this model to captains, but it still should be possible. My main problem with this model though, besides how captains complicate it, is that the stats boost promised by part upgrades in the hangar is assumes that your ship is completely unstaffed, not nominally well staffed. Otherwise, it could possibly promise a greater increase than it would give to understaffed ships, which would make people mad. But it still suggests that a ship with no crew is considered to be baseline or nominal. But that's just my theory. A game theory.

Also, I'm so happy to hear that ultra rare crew aren't useless in the long run. I previously thought that first thread said Pennybags regretted training an ultra rare, but apparently I misread that. And the stuff about diminishing returns is very interesting and useful.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I'm sort of glad that not all of the game's mechanics are perfectly transparent. Half of the fun of this game is doing science and math to figure them out yourself. Studying mechanics will be simple enough, but the prospectors will require lots and lots of testing and establishing probability distributions and confidence intervals and I just can't wait for all that fun!

@GOD_ELECTRO Awesome, thanks a lot that helped a lot. So, to sum it up, I will just keep (or wait) for crew members with the starting values of your second table and aim to get the crew numbers of your first table to in the long run get the percentages you also suggest in the first table. Sounds like a good approach. :)


Still not 100% sure I understand the difference in the crew rarity. To me it would also be a good approach to raise common crew members. They cost less and you find them much more often which saves you even more gems. I guess in the end it then comes down to the diminishing returns you mentioned.


@C92643 Thanks for that, I will surely have a look at the post as well.


Cheers

I don't get it. All these figures of starting values don't compute to me. All I know is once the crew reach maximum of 5* If I want to increase any particular 1 I have to train them with another crew of the same tier as in like for like. You don't expect me to sacrifice a legendary to train another legendary when the net gain is negligible  I have 4 legendary gunners @ 23.5% 22.5% x3  so what you are saying is I should only keep those and 1 more ultra rare which would give me the 115% or near so and just upgrade the ultra rare one until it gives that set of 5 115%?   . Then you are also going to be short on crew space as some of the bonuses are tiny. Like legendary captain @ 5* is 10% theres no way I would sacrifice to level as its an insta loss. And I couldn't put 11 of them on the ship as well as all the others. So I am a little confused how I am supposed to facilitate all the crew to getr max % out of them?

@Zookeeperz Most players, including myself, are not at the point of hiring dozens upon dozens of crew members. When you hire dozens of crew members, some of them will probably be at or near God_Electro's suggested starting values. I also agree, it is unthinkable for most players, including myself, to sacrifice a legendary crew member, which may be worth 200 gems, for a 1% increase in their trainee. Once you have upgraded parts as much and evolved as many drones as God_Electro has, this is a quite reasonable way to improve your ship's stats and strength. This is some super advanced info, and I'm grateful to hear some of it. Nobody has to follow this advice, but it's not bad advice if you want to ascend into the very top bunch of players and are willing to put in the work.