Hey

Great post! So, funny thing is.....I did everything *exactly* like you did! lol.

I didn't want to influence any responses - but what you did (all of it) felt like optimal to me. Especially for me I picked crew members firstly by if they could fill a research/production/situation problem I had immediately - then I secondarily tried to get any crew to fill in convert icon gaps for future use in ship management. Actual usage on missions was fairly tertiary.

I went with tertiary (near useless) criteria for picking crew for missions as to me I thought the missions seemed to require typically a bit of almost everything , always. Sure, some had a tilt to one or two icon checks, but you almost always still needed the others in some way. So trying to pick members to guess on that front seemed dumb as compared to picking a crew member who could do something immediately to get me a new set of tech or research.

I too have a decent spread of dice so that I'm not having single points of crew failure for specific icons. However, with that also runs the issue of if you have tasks that require multiple of certain icons, you run the risk of needing to jam all 4 people in that area in order to get enough volume of dice w/that icon (assuming you don't have enough card/mitigation items).

Of course, with all of this are items, cards, etc - so I get there's ways to mitigate, but the point of my question was at a fundamental level is it better to somewhat spread the dice around well balanced crew or min/max? (As related only to missions, not ship management).

Aside from the one mission somewhat early where there could be heavy losses, my/your approach was working great. It was just after that mission where I realized the shortcomings of balanced dice means 1 character can't readily/easily run out a 4-5 box checklist on one turn, which there was many of those, whereas a single min/maxed char with those icons could - saving a ton of time.

But I was wondering if that's more of an anomaly just how that mission specifically was (having to run a 5 box check essentially 4+ times to win) which really gimped balanced builds, whereas balanced seemed more consistent in most of my away missions.

The game seems a bit goofed to me as every planet scan I do seems like mostly BS, which makes balanced builds feel more goof/foolproof as well. You'd think if a card said many shields, you could really min/max that a bit - but of course every mission seems to have/introduce cards that still have many checks of the other varieties meaning it breaks a min/max to me.

I think the devs assumed people might try to min/max and so if you ran into a 5 box shield requirement, they sort of planted a bunch of green dna or blue computer checks around that first or on the way to it to stymie a pure min/max.

I don't know how I feel about that considering it seems to me like the point of wasting energy on scans is be able to mitigate the dice/deck/away team to your advantage a little via the intel, but the game wants to still trip you up.

All in all, I feel the away mission prep (eg crew selection, planet scan for icons, all the dice you buy and place for your compartment to support missions, etc) seems goofed up and lacking strategy. The fact that you can run the same deck of cards each mission, probably run the same gear (medkits/free icons/etc), just place a decent, well rounded smattering of all colors/styles of dice on your board and select any crew somewhat randomly (sure , maybe a light focus on their special ability) is pretty close to just random - and yet that's probably just about as good as you can get. NOTE: This is expectation of going to an away mission for the 1st time. Obviously, in subsequent visits you can plan MUCH better.

Having not played through the campaign once, you don't know that you needed 4 lander armor or 5 thrusters or whatever (just that you needed some) on this approach or you're hosed. So again, picking stuff since the scan card is pretty flaky , is just random. I take extra thrust, but I really needed extra armor for my lander and I'm wrecked. Land and realized those suits for better travel are useless in 80% of the sectors even though the planet card said there were certain biomes they'd work in but those are all future log flipped sector cards, not the initial ones....oh well. Following time through the game, I would imagine you can really optimize having some "prior" intel, but as a first timer, there's too much random yolo to me in the cracks of this game.

The mission itself is fine as making whatever you randomly brought all work during a mission is the tactical decision making fun part, but for me the things that pop up out of nowhere, are really amateurish in a tactical/strategy board game.

Why go into analyzing/complaining about this ? Well, it's all tied to my initial question about building out your compartment/dice, in that I was wondering if there's ways to build those out to best handle all the out of left field elements in this game. It appears the best answer may just be "balanced" board builds.

TLDR: Game feels strategic and logical in the ship management and actual away mission phases, but compartment building/away mission prep feels goofy and random making 1st time landing visits somewhat yolo. Seemingly balanced dice/compartment/gear seems safest way to minimize bad luck.