It would be rather nice to be able to change the percentage chance a particular companion appears in your boarding crew.

As you may or may not know, the percentages add up to 200%. The first mate is 100%, the sum of all the rest is another 100% (this is why you almost never see a battle with just your first mate).

There is also a few where you get no companion, some where you get only your first mate, and some where a particular companion is always required. Those battles are exceptions to the rule.

What if you could adjust the percentages, provided the percentage was always 100%?

Several limits would need to be made:

1) No percentage, except the first mate, could be 100%. The reason being that some battles require 3 companions. If only one other companion, beside your first mate, had 100% and the rest had 0%, how could you get a third companion? If you set 1 at 99%, 1 at 1%, and the rest at 0%, you will usually get your top two companions in a fight that requires two, and you will always get your top three for fights that require 3.

2) Companions set at 0% are effectively forgotten. Should a companion die in battle, the system would check only the companions which have a percentage greater than 0% to determine if you have enough for battle, and remind you if you don't. The nice thing about that is you can then pick which companion should appear next, by transferring the percentage from the fallen companion to the replacement.

3) Alternately, the system may require at least your best 16 companions to have at least 1%.

4) Percentages would be transferred between two companions to simplify the process.

The advantage of this is you can then effectively ignore unwanted companions. Now, the game design may be such that if you don't promote lower companions you run the risk of getting a poor companion in battle, but when it seems that the game already ignores its own 1%, giving out 1% companions far more often then once every 100 battles...

Max DeGroot on Feb 8, 2013 wrote:

It would be rather nice to be able to change the percentage chance a particular companion appears in your boarding crew.

As you may or may not know, the percentages add up to 200%. The first mate is 100%, the sum of all the rest is another 100% (this is why you almost never see a battle with just your first mate).

There is also a few where you get no companion, some where you get only your first mate, and some where a particular companion is always required. Those battles are exceptions to the rule.

What if you could adjust the percentages, provided the percentage was always 100%?

Several limits would need to be made:

1) No percentage, except the first mate, could be 100%. The reason being that some battles require 3 companions. If only one other companion, beside your first mate, had 100% and the rest had 0%, how could you get a third companion? If you set 1 at 99%, 1 at 1%, and the rest at 0%, you will usually get your top two companions in a fight that requires two, and you will always get your top three for fights that require 3.

2) Companions set at 0% are effectively forgotten. Should a companion die in battle, the system would check only the companions which have a percentage greater than 0% to determine if you have enough for battle, and remind you if you don't. The nice thing about that is you can then pick which companion should appear next, by transferring the percentage from the fallen companion to the replacement.

3) Alternately, the system may require at least your best 16 companions to have at least 1%.

4) Percentages would be transferred between two companions to simplify the process.

The advantage of this is you can then effectively ignore unwanted companions. Now, the game design may be such that if you don't promote lower companions you run the risk of getting a poor companion in battle, but when it seems that the game already ignores its own 1%, giving out 1% companions far more often then once every 100 battles...

The percentages represent the chance of those companions showing up.

The First Mate always shows up in battles that have companions, they DO have a true "100%" chance themselves. The rest theoretically do add up to 100% as well, but KI rounds the numbers for ease of understanding. You wouldnt add up the first mates chances with the others (ie no such thing here as 200%).

You see 1% but it could actually be .1% (point 1). Its not zero, so they do not reflect it as zero in the game. They used to but it caused even more confusion when companions that said zero percent would make it into battle (because there is NO true zero % companions).

All the percentages we see are rounded, not exact, so it would probably be pretty difficult to reflect the companion percentages in a manner truly reflecting a total of "100%".