Which of these combat officers is better?



Hello everyone, I could use a hand from people that are more familiar with how to survive (and hopefully win) late game combat.

After routinely hitting my head against the wall and dying in late game crew combat, I've decided to hang up my pride and use the early game grace period to cheese things as much as I can. Part of this was playing the hiring lottery an ungodly number of times, where I wound up with these two officers as my final candidates for a slot 2 combat officer.

Candidate #1 has great all around attributes, excellent initiative, and the following traits:

* Tough (+10% armour) * Classically trained (+10% accuracy) * Device freak (2 gear slots) * Fast talker (+2 init)

Candidate #2 has great fortitude and mediocre resilience, ok initiative, and the following traits:

* Tough (+10% armour) * Stedy (+5% armour, half morale loss) * Device freak (2 gear slots)

Neither has any skills to speak of.

I already have a sword officer and a medic officer. I'm leaning towards Candidate #1 with the extra initiative, but I was thinking Candidate #2 might be better just to serve as a tough to kill frontliner.

I would love some advice on this, whether it be on which of these could be better, if I'm overestimating their late game utility, how you might deploy them, or anything in between.