Manage Stats for Multiple Party Members

I'm working on a turn based strategy game with minor RPG elements involved. You start the game by choosing 6 crew members from a list and then go on your journey.

Each crew member has 5 stats that I want to keep track of and can be modified by the player as they gain xp etc.

This game is intended for offline play as its own executable.

I feel like I'm missing a part of the logical process or I'm missing some knowledge. How would I make something like this work?

* Can I create an excel file that has the names and stats and have the game access that information?

* It seems that creating an array would be ludicrously time-consuming considering that I want to give the player many different crew members to choose from. Is there a way to do the work in a text file and then load it into the game?

* Furthermore, given that the player chooses 6 out of many crew members for his/her journey, what would be the best system for having the game "know" which crew members the player has chosen.

Oddly enough, most of the other aspects of the game fall into place once I know this. I also believe this is an issue of missing a piece of knowledge or technique. Any advice would help. Particularly any advice on JSON and arrays, which frankly are just words to me right now. It's like no matter how many times I read the manual on JSON or Arrays, I just can't get it.

An array would be one way to deal with this, however there are always different ways of doing something...

At some point you will have a graphical representation of your crew members,be it a portrait or a sprite, give this an instance variable for each stat...you should be able to work on that from there...

The way I've been thinking about it is to have one sprite (like a ship or something) represent the entire crew on its journey. As the crew encounters random events, the best crew member from the 6 is chosen to resolve those events. It's more like they're playing cards in a way.

They won't ever be managed as individual sprites encountering an enemy, but rather as a group and the player decides which crew member has the best stat to solve this issue. Then it becomes a simple number test.

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Regardless, I still run into the issue that if I wanted to add many crew members to choose from, I still have to add that information into Construct 2 in a very inconvenient and cumbersome way. Whereas something like a csv, tab separated, or excel based listing system is more efficient.

Thank you for your help though. Knowing that an array is the general direction I should look in gives me some help.