Introduction
This article will compare the Exode ships with regards to how many colonists they can bring, and discuss how this impacts the game play in the various game scenes.
In total there are 16 ships and their elite versions:
This article will look at crew, officers and passengers, but there are of course other factors to consider when selecting your ship, such as armor /weapons / stealth / cargo space etc
First of all, any ship can bring 3 officers with 2 exceptions:
The Claymore Hyperfighter cannot bring any officers!! This will be a very special play style with 2 crew only, and probably be played for its unique Lone Wolf reward table
A criminal origin (Repentant Pirate) can bring 4 officers. I will have some discussions later on what this extra slot can mean. As an example, on a Kormen with 3 crew and 3 officers, 1 extra slot is 16% expansion, quite a lot. On the other hand, on a Myrmidon, with 3+9, an extra slot gives 8.5% more space, so less important there
On the ordinary crew size we go from 2 up to 9. The Baldie shuttle can be upgraded from 2 to 4 and the Drachian Mantis can be upgraded from 4 to 8 as well, and given the distribution seen below, most commonly is to have 6-7 crew on the ship (plus the officers):
Before we go further in comparing the ships, we need to think about what roles we have for the crew. With roles I do not refer to as defined inside the game, but more broadly - who do we need to do what in each game scene? First let's consider our game scenes where we have some level of clarity (I am excluding space and recolonization for now)
- EVAC
- SCANNING & LANDING
- COLONIZATION
EVAC
In evac we have mandatory jobs that always need to happen, and other tasks that are optional. Mandatory would be repairing hyperdrive and refueling, while optional would be loading cargo, loading passengers, shield defense, combat and finding lost crew members. You can find a good overview of what skills are useful here (but keep in mind that some small changes on skills have been implemented since this page was written but it is more or less ok): https://exodegame.com/wiki/doku.php?id=evacuation-commands
For the mandatory task repair hyperdrive you need skill rolls against: station expertise, mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, cybernetics, cybernetics, cybernetics, spaceships, in total 8 rolls. For loading fuel you need skill rolls against: Awareness, Cybernetics, Station Expertise and Speed, in total 4 rolls. As can be seen from the skill overlap, a good hyperdrive repairer is often good for refueling too, but the issue here is in general that the repair takes a long time (especially if you have to locate this person first). Therefore you often need a second person with ok fuel loader skills as a backup beside the possibility of assigning this task to the whole crew (this zerg variant works ok for large ships with no particular traits supporting the role). In summary you should have 2 crew with fully or partially specialized skills here for a small crew ship, for a larger ship it's sufficient with 1 good hyperdrive repairer. This is also assuming that your goal is to launch with a full fuel tank, but it is of course also possible to launch on half or a quarter tank.
On the optional tasks, my base assumption is that you will come preloaded with full cargo and full passengers. If your goal here is to gain score or obtain special equipment or passengers that you cannot preload, then of course you need to add 1-2 specialized roles here plus combat skills (at least) which may put constraints on how many free roles you have to dedicate to scanning and colonization (i.e. your skill profile of the crew will lock you into certain strengths and weaknesses on later game phases). Beside that, the skill that really matters is discipline.
High Discipline lowers the chance to be away, lowers the time to be found and brought back and also gives the character higher skills in shield defense. I have had EVAC rounds from 0 being away up to 3 being away. 0 is almost only possible with a Repentant Pirate origin (with a very large discipline bonus) and 3 away is almost always a failed launch, especially for ships with small crew (imagine a Kormen with 3 crew and 3 officers, if half is away, you basically have zero progress first 2 minutes, with high risk of someone getting injured by looters). A large crew also increases the possibility that more are away, but at the same time you have more crew you can send out and search. My gut feeling here is that you should at least have 1 crew with high discipline, but preferably 2-3. I recommend spending bonus skill points to increase a few members in discipline if playing a faction with few discipline traits.
In summary this gives us a minimum of 3 highly specialized roles for a minimum EVAC (full pre-loading) but a more specialized launch may need 6 or more (some roles can be overlapped here). A specialized EVAC setup may constrain the selection for later game stages. The other factor here is also how much of your crew you lose. A strong deck should normally come out on 0 or worst case -1. A more normal deck at -1 to -2. Only a very large ship can sustain a -3 crew outcome (Ark 2, Rhino or Myrmidon are good examples).
SCANNING & LANDING
This game scene is expecting rebalancing in the future, so it is hard to make predictions on what roles are mandatory and what is optional. However, a few things can be said about it already. The pilot will most certainly be important, and four activities are implemented already:
This article gives more information around the scanning phase (and what the activities mean): @elindos/exode-upcoming-update-a-huge-step-forward
Piloting and spaceships are important, but a combination of awareness and stealth could be an alternative route to surviving. Either way, one crew member should have a piloting profile.
This also leads me into what we know already for the landing stage. Based on the demo, we can also see that programming, science and planetary expertise play roles as minor skills:
The following table shows other tasks that can be performed while approaching and scanning the planet. Keep in mind that the skill table shows the main skills for the job, there may be individual events that use different skills. For example a Welfare officer using minor heal, will use Medical as primary and spaceship as secondary. I may follow up with a second article describing the difference between the main role skills and the event skills (possibly after the rebalancing is done on this game scene):
It is hard to say what is strictly mandatory, but my current approach here is that the engineer and PrimScan (for landing site) are mandatory, while the rest are optional. The engineer role is more or less the same profile as what is needed for the hyperdrive repair, so should always be available.
The optional roles can be divided into 3 groups:
- Medic and Welfare - highly recommended to land fresh and for good start once landed
- Navigation, Radar (VeilScan), Shield and Weapons - will depend a lot on the qualifications of the pilot what is needed here. I do not think all are needed on every round, but 1-2 should be good to have for increased survivability, either SRT profile or Warfare depending on role
- Scanning for Research, Profit and Habitat are all very useful for colonization, but at this time cannot say they are mandatory. A good thing with scanning is as well that a good scanner can be doing several scans after each other, so the prim-scanner can be used for the other ones too if a slow and stealthy approach to the planet is possible.
In summary the pilot is a new important role. The engineer should overlap with the hyperdrive repairer from EVAC and at least 1 crew being good in SRT. Highly recommended having 1-2 for medic and welfare, but could also use one person for welfare doing both morale boost and healing. In a small crew ship it's possible to let a person do the PrimScan, followed by taking up a defensive role such as a VeilScan officer. In total minimum 4 roles needed here, of which 1 has a clear overlap with EVAC. Having more than 4 crew and officers available here will be a clear advantage to your colony starting conditions, so it is recommended to have a few more at hand.
COLONIZATION
The first colonization topic is our passengers, since it is the first time we will see them in action. Keep in mind that they are less customizable than your crew and officers, so assessing skills is more difficult. Epic and legendary passengers come with solid and determined skills, while common and rare have more variable skills with less or no traits. Loading passengers during EVAC is also possible, but no skill data beyond their types (accountant, child etc) is known at this time.
The largest ship by far is the legendary Columbus with 6 crew, 3 officers and 17 passengers, totaling 26 colonists. 6 crew members should be enough to get it through EVAC and SCANNING/LANDING but it has one major weakness - it is EASILY DETECTED. This brings dangers during planet approach but skilled pilot and crew should be able to survive and land. It will form a very large colony with a lot of activity. Next batch of 4 ships have between 16-19 total population, then another 6 ships with 11-14 population and finally 3 transport ships with 8-10 population. The remaining 2 ships, the Claymore and the Shuttle, will mostly be played for their special reward table and the extra challenge. Claymore is extreme with 2 population in total, while the shuttle can have 7 population, 11 if fully upgraded (2 extra crew and 2 extra passengers).
So what will we do with all these people?
- Exploration roles (Away team) such as: Leader, Comms, Observer, Scout, Guide, Guard, Hunter, Medic, Food Gatherer, Materials Gatherer, Energy Gatherer, Research Gatherer, Pilot, Vehicle Gunner and Navigator
- Administration roles such as Administrator, Assistant, Analyst and Investigator
- Research roles (one leader and 1 assistant role profile for each variant)
a) 11+ variants of research such as wildlife, vegetation, ore, mineral, design (construction, installation, vehicle, module, starship, software, armor, weapon)
b) 1 leader + 0-3 assistants per team
c) Investigate materials or create new designs - Production roles such as Task Master and Worker
- Utility roles such as Colony Guards, Engineers, Programmers, Comms, Colony Pilot
- Welfare roles such as Colony Doctor, Animator, Cook, Speaker
- Leadership roles - these go in the previously mentioned categories, but deserve a special mention. Each team will need a leader, and leaders are often officers (limited to 3 slots) or passengers (currently 3 with leadership traits).
We do not yet know the size limit of teams but I will make some assumptions and stay high with high-level discussion, since team composition in colony play warrants its own article. We can assign roles to either colony or exploration (away teams). If a colonist has more than one role in either colony or exploration, its skill level will have a penalty.
The exploration teams can have different configurations and sizes but based on playing alpha away team challenge, I would use 4-5 team members in hostile territory. At least 2-3 should have combat experience. If it's confirmed to be a more peaceful area/season/planet and fully explored, it may work with a small team of 2-3 people as well.
The administrator team needs different sizes depending on the size of the colony. I assume a small colony will have 1 leader, medium size adds 1-2 helpers while a large colony adds 3 helpers (assistant, analyst and investigator).
Each research team can be 1-4 colonists, but it is unknown how the team size affects quality or time of the project. If a project needs 2-3 colonists, the next decision is the area of research, how many parallel teams and whether we can work non-stop while waiting for away teams to deliver materials to work with. My assumption for now is that a research heavy build may start with 2 teams, while others will do with 1 team.
We do not know much about production teams beyond that we need task masters and workers. I would expect building new things (like a building) will be quite work intensive, maybe 4-5 colonists in total (speculation). It is also unknown how many colonists are needed to manage installations such as biodomes, WHC units, Foodies etc.
The engineer needs to repair any damage to vehicles (driven or autonomous) in the maintenance bay. This role will be similar to the colony doctor, but for equipment (speculating that it may be needed for colony damage and maintenance as well?). The engineer role will be subdivided and further described later on. Based on information we already have, one engineer is mandatory, but if you play with many robots/autonomous vehicles, then more will be needed, maybe 2-3 in total.
If any Comms is used, a person will be needed to manage any Comms equipment if any such is brought /designed, although this may not be needed full time. I think comms will have 3 aspects to consider: 1) Communication with away teams, 2) Check radar for dangers and early warning, 3) Communication out into space. It will need to be seen how work intensive this is, but if you use it for an early warning system, then expect to have one person manning the comms/radar at all times.
For base security at minimum one colony guard is needed, but maybe more for a larger base (one to protect the boss!). I would guess 2-3 colonists doing guard duty (to allow for some sleep also) unless some work can be relieved by security drones or a robot turret or similar. In addition you probably need one doctor and one cook, and possibly someone to keep up the morale. For small colonies there will likely be overlapping roles here, while larger colonies have specialized roles.
CONCLUSIONS
First conclusion I draw from this data is that I need to start thinking about what I want to do with my colony and plan accordingly. How many teams do I want to keep going? What type of teams? Do I want these teams to work in parallel or sequence?
I think the most straight forward setup will be the 1-1-1-1 colony setup. 1 base utility/admin team, 1 production team, 1 science team and 1 away team. Depending a bit on total size, the first group should land on 5 colonists for a medium colony, second group 4 colonists, third group 2 colonists, and finally fourth group with 4 colonists. If we want to make these groups work in parallel and avoid overlapping roles, we need a ship with at least 15 colonists. Only 5 ships have this space: The Colombus, Diplomatic Corvette Amarasia, Archeon Frigate, Ark Life Savior and Myrmidon.
The next group of ships will need some compromises, and cannot do all the work in parallel. I suspect that one way to get around this would be to have the base production/building team double as exploration team and/or have smaller such teams. The ships we are looking at here, Akhen Cannon, Quantum Class Supreme, Black Lotus, Orwell 1, Rhino and Coetus Science Vessel all have some other kind of bonus and we will need to see after play testing if this bonus is worth the smaller colony size (for example extra energy for Akhen, better stealth with Lotus etc.).
The last group of ships is the transport ships, which will create a unique challenge with their small crew and passenger sizes. I believe one way to compensate for this is to go for a robot/autonomous vehicle build, by using their extensive cargo space. A card like the security drone can be loaded into cargo, and work a colony guard or guarding an exploration team:
This will shift the needs of the colony to use more energy and also to have an extra one or two engineers at hand to repair and manage the robots. I expect such bases to have a lot of infrastructure pre-loaded from ships' cargo, thus needing a team to manage this infrastructure (not sure if engineers or production role will have this task). The transport ships have between 8 and 10 colonists with the Kormen starting at 8, Taurus and Mantis at 10. The Mantis can be upgraded to 14, which would put it on par with the next category (quite valuable upgrades!). Kormen has a double fuel tank and the largest cargo space of all to compensate, so really need to get the most out of these benefits for a good colony start (i.e. have to load a lot of fuel and survive in EVAC). It is also the ship that gains the most from the extra officer slot that the Repentant Criminal can provide (I see a Repentant Criminal with Kormen deck as quite interesting to play).
Specialized setups such as 1-2-1-1, 1-1-2-1 or 1-1-1-2 will be quite hard to set up (2 production, research or exploration teams) for any ship beside the Colombus. Early in the colony it will most likely mean to have very few utility roles or stop an activity (for example do no research while 2 exploration teams are out). Production of more robots could be an avenue to gain size but not sure how much research is needed for this.
Leaders will be in short supply and I think this aspect is somewhat overlooked by the players at the moment (since leadership has played quite a limited role in the alpha so far). The colony administrator role will only need Administrator/Planetary though, so can be picked from the administrator skill pool. Taskmasters will need Leadership/Administration/Intimidation while Leadership/Tactical Orders should be good for leading exploration teams (or lead defense of the base). For science leadership both Leadership and Science are primary skills and at the moment Eliza is the only card that has both these traits. The research officer has expertise on research, but we need to see how this compares with the leadership bonus of Eliza when leading a team. It may also be worth putting bonus skill points on leadership for a research officer if needed. The maximum of 6 colonists will have the leadership trait (3 passengers and 3 officers), maybe 7 with Repentant Pirate, so this is the upper limit I see for effective team leadership. At the moment none of the starter packs have cards with leadership, so only available in Alpha Booster cards (epic or legendary officers) or syndicate contract. Of these, the Battle Trained Socialite is the cheapest card available, since it is a contract drop. Admiral Valro is coming out as a strong all around leader with Leadership, Tactical Orders and Intimidation (used for taskmaster). The following pictures show all cards with the leadership trait:
SUMMARY
I hope I managed to provide you with a framework for how to play Exode and plan your deck when starting a new round. The capacity of the ship will put constraints on what your colony can do once you land, so it is helpful to have some guidelines for each activity you are interested in doing while playing the game. I realize that this information will need to be updated once we have the full colonization game play available.
I post this article in EXODE pilots, feel free to re-blog and spread the words if you think other communities are interested in reading in-depth analysis of the EXODE game. Fly safe!
