FTL Analysis: Crew Overview and Experience

Crew can only be performing one action at a time, and the only component the player has explicit input on is which room is their current destination. You can't tell them 'attack this enemy'. You can only order them into a room with enemy crew in it, at which point they'll start fighting. In turn, your crew -and enemy crew- have a strict hierarchy of action priority they always follow. It goes like this:

Fighting->firefighting->closing breaches->repairing (Sub)Systems->manning (Sub)Systems->idle

That is, if there are enemy crew in a room, fighting them will always consume crew attention first, if there are no enemy crew but there's a fire they will endeavor to put it out, then close breaches, then perform general repairs, then provide manning bonuses, then idle around doing nothing. (The last occurring if either the room has no manning bonus, or another crewmember is already manning the room)

Also note that this hierarchy only applies when crew are aboard their own ship. When boarding enemy vessels, the hierarchy is instead:

Fighting crew->attacking (Sub)Systems->idling

All that stuff with fighting fires and closing breaches just won't happen. Crew will gladly stand around, burning to death, if there's nothing to attack in their current room and they're aboard an enemy ship. Which is very silly, but appreciated from a gameplay perspective to; you by default don't want your crew fighting fires or repairing breaches in the enemy ship.

These hierarchies are important to understand when planning your actions, and also point to certain key implications in general. For example, Rockmen are particularly effective boarders in conjunction with Fire Beams, Fire Beam Drones, and Fire Bombs, since you can set a fire, teleport your Rockmen into the fire, and the result is that the enemy can't fight the fire because they're busy fighting your Rockmen. Since the fire will in turn be causing System damage, not to mention killing the enemy crew if they're not Rockmen themselves, this is a pretty powerful combination that can be used to destroy arbitrary Systems with little recourse. You can even target a Medical Bay with this combination, where normally boarding is very difficult in the face of a Medical Bay.

Conversely, the fact that crew always prioritize fighting other crew instead of attacking rooms means it's not terribly practical to use crew to disable Systems. Most enemy ships are, like your own ships, designed so every room is accessible from every other room, and the AI heavily prioritizes fending off boarders, to the point that they will abandon Piloting if there's not enough other crew to fend off your crew, even if it's simply that the other crew are busy getting healed in the Medical Bay. Furthermore, most enemy ships aren't very large, and the larger ones tend to have their crew spread across the ship. As such, you will almost never be able to do even a single point of (Sub)System damage before enemy crew shows up and interrupts the attempt. (Some Rock ships are large enough, and Rockman crew are slow enough, that you can sometimes do damage with Mantis boarders before they arrive, but that's about it) So often if you're able to use crew to do System damage, it's probably a moot point because what's actually happened is you've killed the entire enemy crew; unless they have a Cloning Bay or are the Rebel Flagship, you've already won.

Also note that System Repair Drones obey the normal hierarchy, just minus the ability to fight or man rooms. As such, they will actually fight fires, close breaches, and repair rooms even while enemies are actively in the room. This can be useful if you've got regular crew fending off the boarders.

Moving on, another universal crew mechanic is that of experience. Basically, crew get better at doing crew things by doing crew things. Slowly. And not very much better. As for specifics...

Piloting
+5 Evasion
+7 Evasion
+10 Evasion
15 experience needed per rank.

The grey icon is for base performance, the green for when crew have gained a level, and the gold for when they've gained their second and final level. All crew skills are organized this way.

Crew gains 1 Piloting experience point for each individual shot the ship dodges while they're manning Piloting. This includes that if you eg dodge all three shots from a Burst Laser II's single volley, it's worth 3 experience even though it was one weapon's singular firing action.

Asteroids are a partial exception: if you're currently fighting an enemy ship, asteroids missing the ship is worth experience, but once the enemy ship is dead or has surrendered, asteroids stop giving experience. This is clearly intended to prevent infinite grinding, but it's only a partial solution: firstly, if eg you get 2 Shield bubbles up and encounter an enemy with nothing but low-end Beam offenses in an asteroid field, you can sit there indefinitely with no fear of damage. Secondly, you can always just grind against an enemy not equipped to penetrate your Shields, such as an enemy with just a Basic Laser and a Mini Beam when you have 2 Shield bubbles. This requires a certain amount of strategic luck, but isn't that hard to arrange semi-consistently in most ships. This can literally be done with the game running in the background if you like. It's... not a well-considered design.

This also means that even with the Piloting Subsystem maxed, it's a really bad idea to not have someone in Piloting, as upgrading the Piloting Subsystem doesn't cause you to somehow hold onto crew-derived evasion bonuses. That is, having a maxed-out pilot abandon Piloting, where Piloting is at level 2, does not result in you losing 50% of your total evasion, but more than 50% of it, because you lose the entirety of what the crewmember was providing, not half of it. So you can drop from eg 30 evasion to 10.

Also note that dodges that occur while cloaked will not credit your crew experience, bizarrely.

Anyway, the primary implication of this skill is that it's disproportionately important to get Engines upgraded early, so you can get more dodges to generate more Piloting experience to have even more evasion.

Engines
+5 Evasion/1.10% FTL charge rate
+7 Evasion/1.17% FTL charge rate
+10 Evasion./1.25% FTL charge rate
15 experience needed per rank.

Experience gain is identical to Piloting, except the crew needs to be manning Engines instead of Piloting.

Also, though the game itself never suggests this is a mechanic, having Engines manned accelerates your FTL Jump's charge rate, more so with more Engines experience. The effect is small enough it's easy to overlook, but usually if you actually care about FTL charge rate every second counts, so it's important to keep Engines manned with your best Engines guy. Don't be quick to run them off to repair stuff if you're currently trying to run away from a ship; have your Weapons or Shield person handle that if you can, or at least run someone in to Engines if eg your Engines person is an Engi and everyone else is a Mantis.

Like Piloting, the primary implication of this skill is that it's important to upgrade Engines early so you can get experience that boosts your evasion still further. Conveniently, Engines is pretty cheap to upgrade initially -at the earliest levels, more than half the cost will be from upgrading your Reactor to power your Engines!

Weapons
Weapons charge in 90% normal time.
Weapons charge in 85% normal time.
Weapons charge in 80% normal time.
65 experience needed per rank.

Crew gains 1 experience point every time a weapon expends its charge while they're manning the Weapons System. This is true even if the attack misses or otherwise has no effect, but conversely multi-shot and charging weapons don't provide experience per-shot, just per-volley.

Notably, this means it's overall more advantageous to have multiple fast-charging weapons in the early game and switch to slow-charging weapons later. Going from 90% of base charge time to 80% of base charge time doesn't sound like much, but it adds up over time, not to mention makes it more likely you'll eg knock out enemy Weapons before something particularly problematic fires.

It also means you can grind indefinitely by firing attacks at an enemy who can't get through your Shield while your own attacks are incapable of doing Hull damage and incapable of killing crew. (eg firing a Burst Laser I at an enemy ship that has two Shield bubbles) Yeah. Crew experience is not tightly-designed.

Anyway, Weapons experience mechanics is one of those subtle factors that heavily impacts ship quality; ships that start with multiple weapons and/or fast-charging weapons tend to be better than ships that start with few and/or slow-charging weapons, even if the latter is on paper better for the long haul, because the former will get somebody with maxed Weapons fast, while the latter may never manage to reach the first level-up.

Among other points, while the game itself frames it as manning Weapons being a 10/15/20% boost to charge rate, what it's actually doing is shaving off 10/15/20% of the charge time. The difference is that the latter, at maxed training, results in 25% more shots compared to not manning, not 20% more. Weapons skill matters, and indeed is one of the most significant skills to have maxed.

Shields
Shields charge 10% faster.
Shields charge 20% faster.
Shields charge 30% faster.
55 experience needed per rank.

Each time a Shield bubble is popped while crew is manning the System, the crewmember gets 1 point of experience.

This does not include Ion damage hitting the Shield bubble, and indeed until the System is no longer Ionized crew won't be able to man the Shield System and thus won't be able to gain Shields experience in general. (Which means how often you encounter Ion weapons subtly impacts how quickly your crew builds Shield experience, jankily enough)

Zoltan Supershields taking hits also doesn't count at all for Shield experience. Have I mentioned Supershields are bizarrely terrible? There's a shocking amount of little decisions like this that further undermine them.

Lastly, asteroids work just like with Piloting and Engines; while you're fighting an enemy, they give experience, but once the enemy is dead or has surrendered they stop providing experience.

Like Weapons, the values don't sound like much, but they add up. This is also one of the more straightforward cases of FTL making details matter in a frustrating way; the difference of a second can be the difference between a flawless victory (Because your Shield recharged just in time to catch an incoming laser shot) and a catastrophe. (Because your Shield recharged juuuust slightly too slow to catch the shot, and said shot happened to be aimed at a crucial System, and happened to roll breach and fire chances, and things snowballed from there) This particular example is also hampered by the fact that playing 'honestly' (ie not grinding to max experience on a non-threat in Sector 1) leaves Shield experience gain rates heavily in the hands of the RNG; how often did you dodge? How many enemy ships generated with beams, missiles, or bombs? How many generated with Ion weapons? Were they tilted toward heavily burst-fire weapons, or to such like the Heavy Laser I? So having a shot barely slip through because your Shield crew hasn't gained a level yet is liable to be down to the collective RNG giving you less experience opportunities, rather than because your decisions were incorrect play. Not ideal.

Anyway, you always want somebody with max Shield skill if you can manage it. Simple.

Repair
Default repair rate.
Repair 10% faster.
Repair 20% faster.
18 experience needed per rank.

Crew get 1 experience point for each (Sub)System damage they undo. This only applies to whoever is considered to have done the final bit of repairs; if a Mantis slaves away forever trying to get the Door Control Subsystem working again, and then an Engi pops in and applies the last bit of paint, the Engi gets full credit and the Mantis none.

Note that closing breaches and putting out fires isn't worth experience, even though they both run off the Repair skill and are thus sped up by gaining ranks. I sort of get the firefighting part, as you could grind an infinite amount of free experience by never quite putting out a fire in an empty room... but why breaches?

Repair skill is probably the most glaringly flawed of the crew experience types. On the one hand, it's actually pretty important, because in FTL the difference of a second can be crucial. Ideally you'll have multiple crewmembers with maxed Repairs...

... but getting good Repair skill without deliberately engaging in exploitive behaviors (eg using bombs to damage your own Systems, or letting enemy boarders do some damage before driving them off, rinsing and repeating until you have as much Repair skill as you want) is not worth pursuing because most of the time System damage means an equivalent amount of Hull damage, and you should always be endeavoring to minimize Hull damage taken. Indeed, if an enemy only ever targeted Systems with their weapons (They won't) and never 'wasted' damage against weak or damaged Systems (ie no firing a 2-damage weapon against a System that's at level 1. Also: they won't) your ship would be destroyed before you had managed to get a single crew member from 0 experience to max -even if that crewmember was a Human.

This isn't even touching on the fact that in real play most of your repairs are going to be a mad rush to get key Systems back online, and so you won't even be able to force experience to get dumped onto a single crewmember so they can actually reach their next experience level. It's entirely possible to end a run with nobody gaining even a single rank of experience even though enough you've done enough total repairs two people could've been maxed.

In practice, if you've got somebody maxed, they probably were bought maxed from a Store or came pre-maxed when you acquired them from an event, and indeed the events that provide super-crew are often very valuable specifically for the fact that this includes Repair skill being maxed, purely due to this jank.

Repair experience really needed different foundations in repair mechanics, or needed to do something like have more tiers of experience that require fewer points to reach.

Combat
Default damage to enemy crew.
Kill enemy crew 10% faster.
Kill enemy crew 20% faster.
8 experience needed per rank.

Crew get 1 experience for each point of System damage done, as well as for each enemy crew they kill. Note that Cloning Bays don't let you grind experience: a revived enemy isn't worth experience when killed again. Note that only whoever lands the final blow gets any credit; if your Mantis rips off 98% of an enemy's HP, and then an Engi slaps off the last bit of HP, the Engi will gain experience and the Mantis will not. Yep, this is still a poorly-designed system.

In spite of what you might intuitively expect, cutting through doors isn't affected by Combat skill and doesn't provide experience. This is probably for the best, but it's still not intuitive, and the game doesn't try to explain it anywhere either.

Also, while the game doesn't explicitly let you directly control crew combat, in practice it operates on certain predictable rules and it's possible to manipulate things to your advantage if you understand these rules.

Basically, crew normally assign themselves a position in their destination room starting from the top-left corner and then rotating clockwise from there, and won't update their position unless given new orders or they're able to man the room and no one is currently manning it. They'll also ignore orders to go to their current room, other than the partial exception of 'return to your stations' causing them to move to the exact tile that is their currently-assigned station. (This is important because newly-acquired crew have no station assigned, so 'return to stations' can cause someone to displace someone who has no assigned station because they're standing in the first person's assigned spot)

However, when you pause the game, you are free to issue orders to your crew, and the game cares about the current destination tile for considerations like 'you can't order people into a full room', not the crewmember's actual physical location. Say you have two crew in a 2x2 room, fighting a single enemy: the enemy is a Mantis who ripped into your Human crewmember in the upper left of the room before the other Human could reach them. If you send the injured crewmember out, the uninjured one will remain standing in the upper-right corner, and attempting to send the injured crewmember back in will result in the Mantis refocusing on them, which is undesirable since they're already so injured.

However, you can instead pause the game, order both crew out, and then first order the uninjured crew into the room, followed by issuing the same order to the injured crew. Once you unpause the game, the two crew will immediately swap places, causing the Mantis to change targets.

Understanding this is huge to letting you fend off boarders successfully, allowing you to bring maximum force to bear without getting your crewmembers killed.

Also note that if a room can be manned, the first crew assigned to the room will always go to wherever that room's manning slot is. (Even if manning it is impossible at the time the order is issued) As ships do not have these conform to the upper-left-first model on a consistent basis, this can throw you when assigning crew. Notably, crew only do this on friendly ships; this is why sometimes hostile crew won't precisely match your own crew's positions, because eg the room's manning slot is in the bottom-left and so you sending in two crew results in the left half of the room occupied by your crew while the enemies are occupying the top half.

Anyway, as far as targeting within a room goes, crewmembers first check if an enemy is sharing their slot, and target that individual if this is so. If nobody is sharing their slot, they will instead cycle through all hostiles in the room, shooting one once, then the next, and so on until they loop back to the beginning. Notably, crew attempting to move through a room or cut through a door are not considered to share a tile with hostiles for targeting purposes; say a fight is happening in a 1x2 room, with the Door Control upgraded and/or manned so that boarders have to cut through doors to get out, and four boarders came in, with two of them stopping in the room to fight the crewmember you have in there, and the other two boarders trying to cut through the door that is adjacent to your crewmember's tile. In spite of visually overlapping with your crewmember, the boarders cutting through the door won't ever be targeted by your crewmember so long as the enemies assigned to their tiles stay assigned to those tiles.

Similarly, if every enemy is trying to cut through a door, any crew you have in the room will cycle through all of them, rather than focusing their fire. (Which basically makes it impossible to kill boarders before they teleport back)

Crew combat experience is the only crew experience mechanic that works more or less perfectly; ships that are heavy on boarding actions will tend to end up with multiple crew maxed before the end of the game, while ships that don't do boarding might get one or two ranks of experience across the crew from fending off boarding actions. That makes perfect sense in multiple ways, and the number tuning works well enough. It still has jank, mind, but far less than the other categories.

------------------------------------------------------------

Overall, crew experience is a mechanic whose presence and purpose is unclear. The main implication of Engines/Piloting/Shields/Weapons is that the player should in fact have a designated gunner, designated pilot, designated Engines person, and designated Shields person, so as to build up and leverage the experience gains from being committed to a slot. This is sort of nice for pressuring the player to arrive at the Star Trek thing of having individuals with clearly assigned specific duties or stations, but in terms of a more raw game design consideration this piece is just sort of... there. The impact of each is carefully small, where the game isn't willing to tune itself around the idea that falling behind the crew level curve can be a catastrophe, or anything like that.

Repair experience is particularly janky, where the mechanics and game design are unfriendly to even getting ranks in it at all and the impact of getting ranks is small and difficult to be sure whether it ever really mattered, and species skill basically entirely overrules it; a Human who is a master of Repair is still far worse than an Engi, and a Mantis who is a master of Repair is still going to be an awful choice if you have any non-Mantis options for repairs. If pre-leveled crew weren't a thing, Repair experience would border into being a technicality.

As a bonus, it's probably the most stand-out example of the oddness that blue options never check crew experience level -this seems like a perfect opportunity for the game to have a very Star Trek moment where you tell Officer Repairperson to do Technobabble on The Advanced Device That's Malfunctioning and them having maxed Repair skill means they do it flawlessly, but... for whatever reason, crew experience is simply never a basis for blue options. I'm really puzzled by this; in the general framework of how FTL comports itself, I'd honestly expect crew experience to have been implemented specifically to support blue option usage, rather than being one of the only aspects of your ship loadout that is never relevant to blue options.

As I said just a few paragraphs ago, crew combat experience works well enough. There's elements that could be smoother about it, where eg it'd be nice if the difference between an inexperienced Mantis fighter and an elite one was more consistently meaningful/noticeable, but it serves a clear function and all. The main significant bit of jank is once again the sheer oddness of crew experience having no relevancy to blue options/event mechanics in general; you'd think sending crew in to fight giant alien spiders would be more likely to work out if your crew are all hardened veterans of boarding actions, for example.

Ultimately, though, I'm mostly just puzzled why crew experience is a mechanic at all, given how reluctant the game is to give it heft. Notably, FTL makes the unusual decision to avoid overlap in experience benefits; that is, when an event rewards you one of those 'super-crew' who has max experience in all six categories, this makes them more flexible than other crew, but the experience categories mostly don't intersect to create a whole greater than the sum of their parts. Repair has partial overlap or synergy with the duty stations (In that your Pilot being a master Pilot and master repairperson means they do the Piloting job better and get back to it faster when Piloting gets damaged), and crew combat has an even more roundabout overlap (In that a boarder jumping your gunner will distract them from their job for less time if they're a master of melee combat), but that's about it. As such, this isn't a case where individual improvements are minor but collectively they accumulate into significant bonuses.

The low impact of it as a system overall at least keeps its flaws low-impact as well. If you could grind Shields skill and Weapons skill to the point of doubling charge speed on both, for example, the ability to grind to max skill in each by finding a sufficiently pathetic enemy ship, setting a single Basic Laser to autofire on them, and then walking away while the game is running would be a lot more intrusively problematic. You can still do that, of course, but the benefits are minor enough it's not really in the territory of 'you basically have to do so if you're at all serious about winning'.

On the plus side, whatever the devs were thinking here, they seem to have recognized that this implementation is very flawed, because when they returned to experience in Into The Breach it was given more concrete benefits even as it stuck to a low impact overall. It's also clunky, but much less than FTL's model.

The rest of crew mechanics -like the hierarchy of behavior your crew has- is actually one of FTL's more coherently put-together elements, hampered primarily by the game communicating it fairly poorly, with some secondary jank as far as things like how you can order crew to swap places inside a room but the process of making it happen is convoluted and unintuitive. In terms of keeping controls simple and clear, though, it has only a few edge-case issues, and the hierarchy itself is a sensible setup that largely avoids one of the usual problems with this kind of indirect control over your minions -that in the overwhelming majority of games with such a control scheme, there's at least one major mismatch between what minion/ally priorities work out to vs what a player would default to having them do if they could micromanage their minions or allies more fully.

To provide an example using FTL itself, imagine if crew placed repairing (Sub)Systems at the top of the hierarchy, above even fending off boarders and putting out fires. This would be profoundly awful, particularly in regards to fires, as it would result in crew letting a fire grow worse while ineffectually trying to repair the ongoing damage from said fire. If FTL had given the player the ability to give explicit orders on what to do in a room, the game's internal hierarchy would in fact be what players would default to; yes, there'd be times a player would have crew ignore intruders and focus on repairing the room or the like if they had the ability to do so, but often games with this kind of indirect control scheme end up with the player regularly put in a situation where their minions could trivially solve a situation but won't because the devs gave them a priority system that's a poor fit to the game itself, in exactly the way this hypothetical 'repairs at the top of the hierarchy' scenario would be if applied to FTL.

Another layer for why I personally appreciate this unusually competent handling of autonomous minion behavior is less a raw design optimization point and a bit more abstract: that I've long been unhappy with how strongly games default to minions or allies being perfectly loyal drones that always do exactly as told with any deviations being unambiguous error. For one thing, it's rarely a realistic model; real people put into high-pressure situations do not robotically obey orders from on high. They mishear orders, fail to register them because their attention is consumed by the situation, fail to follow them because even if they would like to obey the order it involves doing something that is very difficult to convince their brain/body to actually do, etc. So for example in FTL it largely feels completely natural that crew prioritize fighting enemy crew above all else; a real person coming under fire from hostiles is liable to default to trying to defend theirself, not stay focused on repairing a doohickey or putting out a fire.

For another, there's an attendant socially unpleasant undertone to this overall trend. It often comes across like creators on some level believe that deviation from what the people in charge are saying to do can only come from either stupidity or rebellion, rather than from making a more informed judgment call by virtue of being right there as things are unfolding, and even if that isn't why game devs do it (Which, honestly, it's very obvious that factors like 'smart AI is actually really hard' are a major part of what produces these results) I've long had the impression that it ends up instilling or reinforcing such thought patterns in players. Games that are turn-based or, as in FTL itself, 'real-time-with-pause' lend themselves particularly readily to this kind of thinking, since the player can take however much time they need to metaphorically (Or literally) zoom in on and scrutinize their underlings' situations and arrive at a considered decision after calmly thinking about things for a while.

And then possibly forget that the situation, if it were real, would be snap decisions made under pressure.

So it's nice that FTL largely sidesteps this issue; I've played other games where it was difficult to push away the 'I'm surrounded by morons' feeling due to how consistently bad the decision-making process of my minions or allies was. For all its flaws, FTL escaping this particular specter is a very pleasant surprise.

... that said, it should be noted this is another example of the odd trend of the advanced edition content having strange missteps that feel like anti-learning somehow happened, as Mind Control and the Ion Intruder Drone introduce regularly-occurring cases of the hierarchy being very poorly matched to the gameplay: the player very obviously does not want their crew killing each other and it's actually pretty bizarre from an in-universe standpoint how they default to trying to murder Mind Controlled friendlies. Similarly, the Ion Intruder Drone isn't an urgent threat whereas the breach produced by its arrival is, where the player absolutely would very reliably order crew to ignore the Drone in favor of repairing the breach if the option were available.

I don't get why this kind of problem pervades the advanced edition content in particular.

Still, even with that jank, FTL is genuinely notable in a positive way on this topic.

------------------------------------------------------------

Next time, we cover the individual species.

See you then.