In your opinion what is the best race and profession to be

it depends what you want to do. i personally am an inergon, because i find that the more energy you have, the faster you can level and the more missions you can do. however, later in the game drannik is probably the best way to go. NPCs are the primary form of leveling, and drannik get a 40% bonus damage to NPCs. as for professions, i am a biologist, but they are coming out with new professions soon, so i will probably be changing.

Inergons are good, they're what I started with, but I found that my tech was lagging behind so I switched to Vygoid. They're definitely good if you want to be strong for your level. I think Miner and Excavator are some of the best professions, but I personally go for simply gaining power, so if you're into something more specific then you'll want something different. Sorry Vekno, but I'm going to say Biologist is one of the worst professions, if not the worst; that extra population may slow some people down, but not enough, you're better off putting enough attack/defense that it would really hamper your own chance for invading.

yeah, ive been considering a change, i just chose biologist because i though population would affect production (like in some other games) but im waiting for the new professions before i change. if i could go with anything i would go with excavator, but im not sure in inergons can do that one.

I agree with you and would be drannik if not for the only one choice of profession which I don't like. I really like bring a builder. 50% off upkeep is a lot. It's saving me 556.2M and I am no where near top of what I can installed.

Yeah, but unless you have a low amount of mining you should get more from Miner than you would save from builder.

I started out with a vygoid, it really helps to get your rank/ship strength ratio really good. But after about rank 100 I couldn't fit a good number of modules on anymore. So I changed to sillix at about rank 135. I use fixer on sillix for the awesome hull bonus, but if you are short on money use builder. On Vygoid I used builder so I could afford the modules I researched.

I started out as Vygoid only changed to Hacker and spy among the Vygoid profession.

I then opened up the Genetarr Race and changed to it. I find the Mind influence on NPC's to be a very very nice addition and very beneficial and adding the Fixer bonus to my hull has made me even tougher. I truly keep my ship balanced and have no problem doing anything I want from Missions to NPC hunting to PvPing once in a while.

But from what I've seen of the original races and professions I do think Vygoid (Builder or Excavator) are probably the best for new people that don't necessarily want to be big PvP'ers and if you do like PvP they are still strong enough to be effective.

Human miner originally just switched to Vygoid Excavator.

Research + artifacts = win

I am planning on getting my research further ahead of my level to allow me to level slightly more efficiently and in line with my rank... although I'm maxing out on research fairly easily now.

I started out as an Inergon Physicyst, but I'm really not relying on my shield tech all that much yet. Decided to switch over to explorer for the scanning bonus. Recently I did a scan blitz with rank 3 tachyons, and I went from 200 to 300 planets scanned.

I was energon Builder at first, but swapped to Vygoid Builder, which is working for me better now since my daily upkeep is over 200 mil, just think if I wasn't getting that -50% bonus.

Nice, I started as the same thing, though I switched to Vygoid Miner; I have enough Mining that it's more worth it for me than Builder.

Is there a magic number that makes this true? When is builder better than miner and when it miner better than builder?!?

It's kind of hard to say, you've just gotta crunch the numbers on your minerals and stuff. It's more likely to be true at higher levels, when you're more often getting the higher minerals, and only if you have a good amount of mining, I have 4341 M/h right now. But, it also depends on your upkeep, which depends on your tech, so if you have a lot of research you might be better off. I would only be getting 3946 M/h without Miner, so I'm getting about 395 extra M/h, over a day (the amount of time for paying upkeep) that's 9480 minerals. My upkeep is 493.5 million, so divide that and you get that my average minerals would need to be worth 52K to make it worth it. I don't know if that's true for me or not, but at some point it will be, and my upkeep usually isn't that high, but I guess it usually isn't really worth it. I've never crunched the numbers before like this. But yeah, that's how you'd figure it out, and then somehow figure out the average worth of your minerals, perhaps get a shipment and divide how much you got for them by how many there were.

It is actually easy to find out. If 10% of your mining output (for 1 day) is higher than half of your upkeep, then miner is a better profession for you.

Some reasons I could think for choosing miner over builder is that you might want to get more exotic matter or that builder is not available for your race.

I am currently rank 206 with an upkeep of about 400 million and have an artifact production of about 2000 per hour. If I was an excavator I would get another 200 points per hour which would be another 175,000,000 per day or so. If I was a builder I would save 200,000,000 a day. So depending on your situation you could actually get more from being a builder, especially if you have some really expensive tech.

Vygoid Excavator helped me a lot with ship growth (more ship bot etc, and better use of space through techs), once I had many techs and switched to energy build, I became Inergon Builder to reduce upkeep and repair costs (of all that high tech) and enhance the efficiency of the engineers I put in. Inergon and Human looks similar from an XP gain perspective, but having more actions results in similar XP gain to human but you can do more hits to NPC, and do more mission completions to progress. I favor Builder over (human) Miner, as tech increases Builder wins out, esp. if you want to repair a lot.

I'd say use whatever matches where you put most of your rank points and can be multipurpose. I imagine most ppl do decks, but:
- generally good for beginner or tech/ship growth phase; Vygoid Excavator
- most rank points into decks; Sillix Builder.
- most rank points into engineers, high reactor tech; Inergon Builder (good late game also for ranking faster)
- most rank points into attack, or purely NPC hunting; Drannik Builder (note that the effective total XP increase from kill bonus from this is about 10%-12% at best, and probably lower than that since damage isn't linear; recommended over inergon/human for XP gain only if you put lots of points into attack).
- Genetarr, useful against boss NPC, more of a team ability but unique; interesting but nothing special for personal growth since lowering NPC attack basically just saves on repairs.


Note on builder vs miner: +10% mining is generally linear in value, but tech cost is exponential, so eventually builder always becomes more useful, and also reduces repair cost by 50% as a side effect which could have more value if you are hunting NPC a lot.

Not quite; the increase to your maximum only applies when you level up or use an energy filler. Most people will be getting most of their energy independent of these times, which Inergon doesn't help with but Humans do. Thus, Humans give you a 10% bonus to experience, but Inergons give less, possibly much less, depending on how much you put into energy. Inergons make up for that with the bonus of doing more things, as you mentioned, but they wouldn't level up quite as fast.

Yeah that's a good point; nearly all my energy is from ranking up due to putting it all into engineers (in some cases ranking up multiple times at once from high energy, high xp ratio missions, and xp buffs). Most people wait for charging; in that case you're right, the human bonus makes more sense. I am typically 75% or more into the next rank after ranking.

Right now I am a Vygoid hacker which makes for the best amount of research possible if you are willing to put into the time that it takes to Hack alot of people. I have thought about changing my race to Aerlen because it has the biggest perk for a default race with 30% defense but can never get myself to relinquish that 20% extra research. Vygoid Excavator definately rounds out the best of all worlds in my opinion. Drannik definitely has its perk after you reach level 185 and finish the missions.

Right now I am working on unlocking the Zolazin race. 40% cloak will allow me to continue hacking people while freeing up space for defense. The wiki only lists two professions for Zolazin as Fixer and Hacker and either one of those would be fine for my style.