• Access: Maintenance, Outer Bridge, Bridge, Tactical Consoles
• Additional Access: None
• Difficulty: Hard
• Supervisors: Captain, Commander, Executive Officer, Head of Personnel
• Duties: Supervise Marines via Squad Leader helmet cams, alert them to dangers and ensure they get supplies
• Quote: Alpha Leader, xenos incoming!

You are the Overwatch Officer, the eye in the sky that keeps up to four squads of marines on point and on mission. While you technically don't outrank them and can't give them orders, you are responsible for alerting them to dangers they may not have noticed, telling them when a squad member is in danger and may be too busy to speak, and making sure all of them (or their bodies) get back to the NARV.

Bare minimum requirements: Know how suit sensors work, alert Squad Leaders to dangers, use all-Squad calls to tell Squads when to pull out.

As the Overwatch Officer, your duty is often limited to brief periods of activity, but during these periods you will be responsible for the lives of the Marines, and will be supplying information between squads for the benefit of all. There are five squad-comm channels that you have access to, one for each of the four squads and a fifth channel that calls to all of them. You also have a list of suit sensors for each Marine registered with a Squad, access to the helmet cams of each Squad Leader, and access to the Observer helmet cam and suit sensors for those occasions when a non-military observer is assigned to join the squads, such as when Salvagers are working.

When the troops are aboardships and not dealing with a military boarding party, you may also deal with their requests, although they do have a Requisition Officer to handle that sort of thing, really, and you don't have Cargo channel access. Just respectfully remind them to resupply with the Req Officer and alert them when their services boarding or planetside are needed again.

If the Engineers are feeling particularly combat-ready, or if the Squad Engineers have made good use of their time aboardships, they may have prepared an advance base that can be deployed planetside. While you are not directly responsible for whatever constructions they may have prepared, you do have the ability to deploy it upon request to an area roughly near any of the Squads, in case nobody remembered to bring a deployment beacon. Your deployment will not land directly on top of anyone, so don't just chuck it into the combat zone and expect it to flatten either your soldiers or their latest adversary; it is meant to be a defensible point that soldiers can fall back to when necessary, not a large rock to drop from orbit.

You do not have the ability to launch an orbital bombardment, but you can provide targeting coordinates to the Weapon Officer, typically ten or more tiles from the current location of a Squad Leader. It is up to the Squad Leader to be aware of whether their chosen coordinates will directly imperil other Squad Members, although you should warn them if you are aware of the conflict unless the situation is dire. Likewise, if salvage or boarding parties request fire support, you can tell the Weapons Officer what specific coordinates to aim at.

Although Head of Personnel is technically your immediate supervisor, 99% of the time you'll be answering directly to Command. With that said, they should be listening to you and what you have to say while you're doing your job, so just keep an ear out should they have orders, particularly to withdraw, form up, advance, or deploy an advance base.

The Executive Officer tends to give most of your orders, and expects to be kept in the loop regarding shuttles, pods, and marines and other crew landing in potentially hostile territory. In turn, you should be supplying support to these individuals through your Overwatch systems, deploying drop pods, and providing other support.

• When deployed, you are in charge of the salvage team; be sure to inform them of potential areas for salvage, and make sure the Marines are there to handle any dangerous survivors.
• Planetside, the Marines are often called in to solve problems that require more gun than the natives have, so expect anything and everything to come up as an active threat, from armies of bees to hungry slimes to belligerent xenomorphs to Syndicate sympathizers.