Why put staff on bridge/engine room instead of dodge/gun rooms?

Question

What's the purpose of having red shirts on the bridge other than a better response to boarding parties? Would you ever staff them in the bridge instead of one of the gun rooms?

Likewise, is there ever a reason to put extra engineers in the engine room instead of the dodge room?

Answer 1

Bridge and engine rooms boost all the other rooms.

For example, a weapon room with no people in the bridge will function at 50% its maximum capacity, which I assume means that the weapon recharges half as fast as it otherwise would. The bridge contributes 25%, the engine room contributes 25%. Thus one person contributes about 6.25% to each room.

This adds up to quite a lot when you have a lot of rooms. The small boost is also cheaper than getting most room upgrades. However, make sure that you have at least one staff in the small rooms first, because the rooms would not function without staff.

One tactic is to constantly keep your bridge and engine room staffed, so that the dodge and shield generator constantly regenerate the shields fast enough to prevent invaders from teleporting in.

Answer 2

Not sure about the bridge. My assumption was that having crew in the bridge would boost command recharge times, though I've yet to confirm this. As for the engine room, having engineers in there speeds up the shield recharge rate. Further, I also noticed during the final battles that having multiple engineers in the engine room (along with a fully upgraded ship that includes a shield booster room) gave a small, but significant boost to shield threshold. Having this basically stopped boarding parties from teleporting to my ship following an enemy attack. I would cycle between dodge and shield boost to ensure that my shields were always fully intact prior to an incoming attack. This made the end game battles extremely easy (on normal difficulty).

Answer 3

After playing for a few more hours, the answer is clear to me now:

• Always put staff in your rooms first
• Each room has a limit of 2 staff, and you'll hit this limit very quickly
• Personally, I prefer to keep the Dodge room fully staffed at all times and have 1 extra engy who can roam the ship making repairs. AFAIK you do not need staff to stay in the engine room or bridge for any reason.