Research recruits are typically scientists, as they have the best bonuses to researching. You can use any quality of recruit, but the higher quality will perform better. With that said, I generally used purple and saved my gold recruits for healing wingmen or bounty dispatches. While you are building up your recruits, it is recommended to stick to stacking t2 and t1 chips together. T3 microchips require a specific puller to guarantee keeping them. It is a sad day when a T3 microchip is lost on a gamble.
Chips Available
When you are looking for microchips for research, it will be under the “assistance & dispatch” section. You can find t1 microchips in the Trading Post or while you are out farming. We will discuss farming in the “Microchip Farming” section. T2 and t3 microchips can be found on the Trading Post as well, or you can develop them in the development section.
Recruit research development runs slightly different than other development. #1 has the specific chips to save on ship, weapon, engineering, and electronic research. While #2 has the specific chips to save on recruit and production research. The generic chips, much lower bonuses, are just below and labeled “Generic Improvements to Research & Production.” We always suggest the specific because t2r5 specific will give you a 9.5% saving on time or material cost … while the t2r5 generic only gives you a 2.1% bonus.
How to Chip
So now that you know where to obtain or develop the chips, let’s talk about how to chip. There are two different methods. The first method I am going to discuss is for pilots who are beginners or free-to-play and do not have many recruits. This is possible because, unlike production, you can reuse recruits in multiple researches. With production, once that recruit starts work, he/she is unavailable for any other work until it is complete. The second method will cover pilots who have many scientists and want to optimize their savings in specific researches. This also becomes very important in late research where the costs are astronomical.
Method #1
You will need 3 recruits to chip for method 1. You will be setting them up to do 2 different researches.
- Recruit #1: Ship/Weapon
- t2r5/t1r4 Ship Research Material Saving
- t2r5/t1r4 Ship Research Efficiency Bonus
- t2r5/t1r4 Weapon Research Material Saving
- t2r5/t1r4 Weapon Research Efficiency Bonus
- Recruit #2: Engineering/Electronics
- t2r5/t1r4 Engineering Research Material Saving
- t2r5/t1r4 Engineering Research Efficiency Bonus
- t2r5/t1r4 Electronics Research Material Saving
- t2r5/t1r4 Electronics Research Efficiency Bonus
- Recruit #3: Production/Recruits
- t2r5/t1r4 Production Research Material Saving
- t2r5/t1r4 Production Research Efficiency Bonus
- t2r5/t1r4 Recruit Research Material Saving
- t2r5/t1r4 Recruit Research Efficiency Bonus
Make sense? You have 8 slots, you stack the two chips to get the t2r5 bonus and the t1r4 bonus. You cannot stack two of the same tier, but you can stack one of each tier. You’ll see this clearer in the next method.
Method #2
With this method, you will need a total of 6 recruits. Hence why it is better for pilots who already have several scientists or they are working on late-game research. To save typing, I will be typing “research specific” instead of writing out six different recruits. They will all be chipped the same, with the only difference being “research specific.” Therefore, if you are chipping for production research, the “research specific” will be “Production Research Material Saving” or “Production Research Efficiency Bonus.”
- Research Specific Chipping
- t3r*/t2r5/t1r4 Research Specific Material Saving
- t3r*/t2r5/t1r4 Research Specific Efficiency Bonus
- t3r* (OR) t2r5 Research Material Saving (t3 is better, t2 will work)
- t3r* (OR) t2r5 Research Efficiency Bonus
Now, if you are not worried about the time saving (thinking late-game researches that are very costly), then remove the last Research Efficiency Bonus and stack two tiers of the Research Material Saving.
Let me show you an example:
In this example, my recruit is chipped as:
- t3r3/t2r5/t1r4 Ship Research Material Saving
- t2r2 Ship Research Efficiency Bonus
- t3r1/t2r5/t1r4 Research Material Saving
- t2r2 Research Efficiency Bonus
You can see here that my focus was on lowering the cost of ship research as much as I possibly could, because I was researching capital ships. Ship researches at the t3r4 and t3r5 levels become extremely costly, so I did not care about shortening the time. I needed time between each research to gather more resources to start the next research.
This is covered in depth in my classes that I have held for our members. Okay, let’s go back to the main recruit page to talk about another type of recruit use.