Talk:Strategy/@comment-26488456-20150612020537/@comment-144.24.20.233-20150618115317

I've been thinking about this as well

I'm particularly interested in whether it is worth *not* using some of the free crew to speed up getting other criew.

ie Do people think the alogorithm to spawn new crew is based giving you a new free crew member after x amount of time (and which crew member is generated is based on which one you've been without) or do you think it is independent.

I think it's one of the following options:

Option 1)

Imagine the alogorithm they use is (and this is purely hypothetical) "new crew member every 30 hours". To decide which one they give you they look to see if you have any, and then give you a free one of the one you have been without longest. So if you had an Agent, and you used the Manager yesterday and the Engineer the day before then it would give you an Engineer.

Option 2)

Crew member creation is on an internal timer (and likely each one on a separate timer rather than a shared timer). If you don't have a free crew member when that timer expires you get one, if you haven't used it, bad luck you don't get another.

I know it says that you're more likely to get free crew when you win, but that's just not the behaviour I've observed - ie winning lots of races does not speed up getting crew. It might be a really low threshold though.

As you can kind of see from my option 1 and option 2 though - it would be good to know because it will drive different behaviour in the game.

So for instance - I have not used my engineer for weeks - in the hope that it will mean that the free manager and agent will come up more regularly.

But... the agent and manager seem to come up more or less every 3 days (slightly different times in the day, but more or less every 3 days). So I get 1 daily race with (free) manager, 1 daily race with (free) agent and then 1 daily race without either.

So I'm wondering if I "might as well" use the engineer because you gain/lose nothing.

I'm still actively farming so I'm not currently willing to forego either free manager or free agent to see if not claiming them will speed things up (or if it will stick to giving me the agent every 3 days) - which I guess would be the way to check.

I'm about to use my engineer to help me through PoV - so I'll try to pay attention to see how quickly I get another free engineer.

Does anyone else have any theories on how crew (re)generation might work?

As I say, my current best guess is that each crew member is on an independant timer. When that timer expires you get a new one crew member in the appropriate shape if you don't already have it. An alternate theory is that the timer restarts after you use it - but in that case I wouldn't keep so strictly to my new manager/agent being ready to use every 3 days (well unless the timer is more or less exactly 48 hours).