I'm wondering which one is better, engineers or tactical officers. Here is what i'm able to think off


10,000 Engineers :

- Mass NPC Farming, lots of T.O Carriers, Dark Arms Carriers, Blade Harvesters, Rogue Labpods etc~
- Fast Ranking, overall higher production becuase a high ranker can potentially colonise 100s of planets and gain more rank points in the long run.
- Lots of Star Chart Purgers and Temporal Fluxs : if you had lots of energy, you can do these mission 100 times over.
- Fast ranking results in a weaker ship and difficulties getting badges.
- Fast ranking will make you no longer eligible to see certain Elites such as Lazuli Refineries and Fabrication Plants

10,000 Tactical

- Massive PVP battle-edge.
- Potential to inflict up to 2000 damage on a colossal galaxy destroyer (Damage Cap)
- High attack results in minimal upkeep.
- Enemies may underestimate you
- Slow ranking (Not CC plyaer), may take much longer to gain 10,000 Tactical officers than engineers
- Planet Invasion : Potential to invade heavily defended planets.


Which one is better? I'm thinking to get 10,000 Engineers cuase the unlimited starchart purgers and temporal fluxs sound real appealing to me but i don't want to miss out on the NPCs.

get 10000 of both.

Remember the fluxes you need Exotic matter..

Which one first?

I'm going tactical officers because of I don't want to rely on weapons. Cost are going up on them for me.

equal them both 5000 of each

You know you can fight NPCs and have a energy build that lets you slow level, thats what i do. Im doing engineers but I slow rank, giving me more energy which I use on weekly mission , my latest scanning blitz(I now assume i always get a natural exotic now because gotten 1 every scan run for 3 scan runs.), and NPC. Just avoid NPC only do it when its well what you want to do. Just for the drop not the XP.

I have 601 engineers atm... almost 700 Tactical officers. First goal is to get to 1000 of each of them.

not really, if you're smart with the new planets you colonize you can get enough mineral and research production to keep up with your rank.

Go engineers. If you put your energy into fighting npc's you won't be missing out on any.

Again its about style.

I recommend to everyone that starting off, all you should be doing is adding engineers. Let's face it, you cant quite fight out the gate, but soon. So first 5, 10 levels at least? 15? All engineers. Now if you go the way of the small build like I did, obviously i dont have to worry about decks and defense, but still, decks will become necessary. Now, at my rank, its 1 and 4. 1 engineer, 4 tac officers. Except on even ranks, 2 to decks, 1 to engineer, 2 to tac.

Again, that's just me for my style.

Ejjakai

i disagree. i trained 3 players each witha different build (only one was a failure) one was to spend first 5 lvl's on scientists. that way u have a REAL good base of res. then the next 5 lvl's are all attak or defense (attack is what i'd do) thus u can now slaughter those around u and get all 4 dom cannon's install those and u hav eall teh attak u need till rank 50. now then after this go with energy up till 200 and tehn decks to build all the cool stuff u get. it is a more expensive way and only for ppl resetting bc then u have friends who will donate money/ planets to u

i did more scientist in the beginning... probably why i have 1155 of them...

Yea me too, since dan is gonna implement a lock and immunity on built worlds, tac officers don't seem so appealing. Engineers have some obvious benefits. 2.5 ranks points lets you hit the enemy once more~ 2.5 rank points lets you do an extra 2 damage to an enemy. Seems as though Tac Officers are underpowered.

Yeah, but you need to maintain a good balance just to make sure you're actually getting a good energy/experience ratio. Right now, I put all my level-up points into Engineers, and all the rest into Tactical Officers. Lets me keep a steady two levels per day and kill plenty of NPCs.

You forgot base energy contribution that 10k energy will be most useful..

I had gone on heavy tactical officer route for long time til base came out that I found that my energy was sorely lacking (I had just 2,800 energy when base came out) so I aggressively focused on investing into engineers that I nolonger wasted any Rank points into tactical officers. I finally have 7k now but want to hit 10k then switch back to tactical officers. 10k energy makes energy cube, tri matrix and 10 gp far far more valuable than 2k energy pool for example.. It will GREATLY help to level the base up with 10k energy than 2k energy that you wouldn't have enuf to spend into base each rank. with 10k, you will easily have surpluses to spend into base each rank and it does add up a lot..

Keep in mind that 10k tactical officers will be very useful for base wars.

Before base comes out, heavy on tactical route was AWESOME while energy doesn't do much unless you are largely pacifist.. But now with base, I would say that tactical officer = engineer in value means it would be smart to split your rank points into engineers/tactical officers now.

I'm guessing you guys are doing engineers and tac officers because you have all the deck space you need... is that right? How much deck space do you try to get before switching to something else?

The problem with deck space is that after awhile it becomes detrimental in that all it does is add to you dmg cap. Right now, I have 4440 deck space (collossal galaxy destroyer, largest class ship around). And sitting in my cargo hold is 650 ship bots gathering rust. You need to take into account that for most of my GL career I've always had a small ship compared to my rank. But after awhile I just caught up from artifact draws.

well at least they're busy doing something... kinda like Wall-E

For the argument of energy vs. officers:

Energy is always linear. You double it, you double the stuff you can do, and with the same activity, you double the XP that you get. It helps with every single task in the game, and it reduces the time you spend charging between ranks. If you don't put energy in each rank, it will be harder and take longer to rank up between ranks as you increase (you can partially offset by adding generator techs, but not for long).

Attack is non-linear. This depends on NPC rank/type vs. your stats. If your attack is more than 2x NPC defense, you will start to lose efficiency in adding more (if you are > 50% of damage cap). In practice, this only happens with fixed ranked enemies (like flamehawks) at very high attack levels. In most cases, if the enemy is at or around your rank and you have rank appropriate attack (very broad definition), if you double your attack you will do about 2x damage, and you may take about 1/2 the shots to kill it. However, that means the *kill bonus xp ratio only is doubled*. Just shooting stuff gives you 2.1 xp/energy base, the kill bonus typically ranges from 1.0-2.0 and depends entirely on the # of shots vs. the XP awarded for that NPC.


Example: 3.0 xp ratio on npc average, 2x energy vs. 4.0 xp ratio on npc average (1.0 kill bonus portion doubled cause of 2x attack), 1x energy. In the first case you will get total of 6, in the second case only 4. In practice, you can only halve the shots that NPCs take one or two times, when you get to low shot values on matched npcs it becomes harder to reduce it (and thus boost kill bonus XP more). You hit diminishing returns on having more attack power. Energy ROI never declines if doing the same activity.


Decks vs. Energy/Attack:
To the degree that adding these allows you to boost energy and attack power through modules, it's useful. Beyond that is a luxury to an initial energy build, since you can get decks from drops at some future point you will have "wasted" those points when you get shipbots you can't make use of (where the points on decks could have gone to say energy).

If you can afford it, using a fixed number of decks with less, bigger weapons is more efficient. Actually, you always want to install the most space efficient module (a couple of npc drops are better than most techs for this). See the wiki for this, or calculate it yourself. Don't use any combo mods (raising two stats) on a low deck ship; it's a waste of space. You want first max generators, then max weapons. Later you can add moderate hull and some defense (note double def basically halves damage, so if you are really low a single mid tech module can really help vs. yet more hull). Put scanners on for a scan run swapping out other stuff to cargo, then sell them when done.

I understand that there is a point at which deck space is a waste. However, at the "lower" levels, you must put ranks into decks. I'm in the low 70s with most of my points going into decks and I still can't equip all of my stuff that I want to have on at once (although it's finally getting better, and I'm still Sillixx for now!!). And while I've received a handful of daily rewards for deck space and maybe a couple of ship bots, they are currently no where near enough to make the game playable at low level with out ranking up decks.

There is clearly a point where I just don't really need to spend rank points on deck space anymore and can spend it on energy instead, but that time doesn't feel like it's now. Maybe somewhere in the 100-150 range?

As for my original question though... how much deck space do you need to equip everything you would use at one time? Since scan and hack layouts don't seem to use nearly as much gear, I'm guessing it's going to be a maxed combat setup (max guns + full defenses + full hull + full shielding + energy gear all including purchased, npc, and mission items). Scan & cloak items don't seem as critical to have in combat, so the bare minimum with out those would probably be the best to know. Anyone have a rough idea of how much deck space that is?