Subset Games Forum

For the longest time, I have used my starting crew of three for the weapons, helm, and engines. Here's a question, though. Which is more important: engines or shields? Which one has more benefit from manning the station?

I'd go with shields.

Depends on what the enemy has.

If they have a drone, lasers, and beam weapons, you probably want a guy on shields.

If they have missiles and bombs, you probably want a guy on engines.

When I play the Bulwark (Rock Cruiser A), I put someone on helm, engines, and shields. And the first crew member I gain goes on weapons. Weapons trains faster than others (you start with missiles so ammo is a concern, but I always manage to find some non-ammo weapon eventually; last run I ran out of missiles, and had two Ion Blast II's, and managed to pin down shields, weapons, and O2 until I suffocated my opponents...). Otherwise, I never seem to have anyone that's any good with shields, which trains dirt slow (at least, for me).

Thanks for the information. Right now I'm doing a run with the Stealth cruiser and no shields, but I'll keep your information in mind for later playthroughs. Thanks.

Engines.
Manning engines can give 5, 7 or 10%. Effectively, a leveld engine-officier gives +5% dodge.
That's the value of 2 engine levels (later on).

20% faster shield doesn't really compare to that, imho.

Manning priority for me is Helm (duh), Engines, Weapons, Shield, Cloak (aka, the repair-duty guy sits there to get it quickly back online )

Keep in mind that for getting experience in Piloting and Engines your ship needs to successfully evade a projectile. So the more evasion you have (guy on engines) the quicker he and your captain get experience and the quicker you get even more evasion!

Manning shields is only useful if the enemy is attacking fast enough that recharge time is a problem. Thus they're most useful in asteroid fields and against anti-ship drones. Otherwise, typically enough time will elapse between the enemy's volleys for your shields to naturally recover on their own.

In my opinion the only reason you'd pick someone manning shields over engines is to have someone there to repair the shield right away if it gets damaged somehow. On the Rock Cruiser type A, for example, the shield room is quite far from the others and the rock crew members are slow, so if the shields get damaged it can take a while to get someone up there to fix them. Other than that I'd rather have engines for reasons stated above followed by weapons because faster weapon charge time = more likely to disable THEIR weapons before they can shoot you.

I've sometimes been known when short on crew to have someone man weapons until the first volley is fired (in the hopes of taking out their weapons first), then quickly move them over to shields so they can be there to repair them if they get damaged.