Crew experience levels

[Edward Hamilton (OP)]

Aside from the single "training level" parameter in the Race Details screen, I'm not quite sure how the system for assigning initial crew levels works.  Is there some place I can find a clear explanation of this?

In particular, I'm wondering:

1) If I scrap a ship, the crew points go back into the pool, right? Do they stay there forever, or do they decay/disappear at year end?

2) Is there any way to see how many "crew points" I have?

2) Can I temporarily bump up my training level in order to "re-use" that pool of recently enlarged crew points, or does training level only affect the number of points available from academies?

[Erik L]

Crew experience is not an individual crew-being's experience, but the experience of the crew as a whole. If the crew as a whole has 100 experience, and 50% of the crew is battle casualty, then the experience of the crew is 50 after being replenished. If a ship is scrapped, the crew experience is lost. This is because the crew is treated as a whole rather than individuals.

[sloanjh]

Note that there are two different types of crew experience - crew quality (I forget the exact name) and task force training.  I'm pretty sure that Erik was talking about the task force training one, which is acquired by putting a TG into "train" mode.

I suspect you might be talking about crew quality, which is determined by your academy level and the captains crew training bonus.  Basically, your pool of available crew members all are of the same quality (determined by the academy level).  When a crew is disbanded, then the total quality of the available crew pool expands by the number of points in the disbanded crew.  Since such a crew will normally have been "trained up" above the pool's level, this means that you'll insert more crew members (of lower quality) than are in the disbanded crew into the pool (this is a simplification to avoid having to track and manage different quality crew members in the pool).

Whenever you move the training level up, you cut the number of crew available in the pool in half, so temporarily bumping up is a bad idea.

John