[SCRIPT][X3TC][X3AP?]Wercho's Marine Academy

[wercho]

v1.00
Date: 01/25/2012
Author: Wercho

Wercho's Marine Avademy

Definitely works on TC, I haven't tested it on AP but I think it should work. Let me know.

Download v1.0

Required: Cycrow's Plugin Manager
Cycrow's Community Plugin Configuration

This is my marine training script. I had used some others, but wanted one with a better menu system so I wrote my own. Enjoy!

Description
Do you have a hard time leaving your oh so coddled marines alone for training? Are you tired of receiving constant updates on their progress, like "Trassumiglius has finished hacking training" or "I need to borrow some money... for books" while they are away at school.

That is a thing of the past. With Wercho's Distance Learning Academy, your marines can learn hacking, engineering, mechanics, and even fighting from the comfort and safety* of your ships' lounge.

*Wercho's Marine Academy assumes no liability for marines lost on board your ships.


Features:
Move your marines around! Our online training materials are accessible from anywhere, so your marines' training program will follow them whichever ship they are on. Even if they go on boarding operations, their training will only be temporarily suspended.

Pause Training - You can temporarily pause training for all marines.

No wasted cash - you only pay for the training your marines receive! If your marines die*, you stop paying tuition.
* Wercho's Marine Academy is not liable for damages sustained.

Easy to manage training menus!


Instructions and instructions:
Install
1. Install using Cycrow's Plugin Manager
2. Go to the Artificial Life Settings menu and make sure that "Wercho - Train Marines" is enabled.

Hire Marines
1. Do this yourself, the usual way.

Accessing the Menu
With Cycrow's Community Plugin Configuration, just select the menu through that.

Main Menu
All of your ships with marines will be listed. Select one to set training goals for the marines on it.

To view the current training status on all ships, select that.

Options can be changed at the bottom of the menu.
Menu Screenshot 1

Training Options
Fight Training - I disable this because there isn't a way to train fight skill in Vanilla X3TC, but do what you want. If disabled, it won't show up in the goals menu.

Lower Spending Limit - if you cash supply falls below this number, marine training will be temporarily suspended.

Marine Training is "Active" or "Paused" - use this to temporarily pause training, say to save money or whatever. No training will take place, but training goals will be saved.

Set Training Goals Menu
Set goals for each skill and marine, or all marines on a ship simultaneously.
Menu Screenshot 2

View Training Status
View the current skill level, goals, and time remaining for each marine and skill. See the hourly cost of training.
Menu Screenshot 2


Acknowledgements
Special thanks to LV, Cycrow, and ScRaT_GER for their excellent tutorials on AL plugins, general scripting, and creating menus respectively.

\t Files
8983-L044.xml (page file is also 8983)

[wercho]

For those interested, training a single skill with my script takes about this:

From 0 to 25: 25 minutes and 16k credits
25 to 50: 2 hours and 82k cr
50 to 75: 5 hours and 190k
75 to 100: 8 hours and 300k

Multiple skills train in parallel, so the cost goes up but not the time.

[Vayde]

So would I be close when saying approx 8 million credits and 15 1/2 hours gets you a 5* marine in all 4 training aspects?

[wercho]

Actually, it's more like 2.4 (600k per skill) million and 15.5 hours to get a super soldier.

I don't know how that compares to vanilla TC (I'm guessing it's cheaper and faster, so !cheat alert!), but its fairly comparable to what I saw in some other training scripts.

When it comes down to it, marines are a ridiculous money maker once trained however much they cost to train.

[DrBullwinkle]

I think that is approximately the vanilla cost, depending on which training packages you buy. Time seems faster than vanilla, but I do not have the exact numbers.

Looks like a terrific implementation, Wercho!

[wercho]

Thanks DB,

This plus your hacked improved boarding script makes one a force to be reckoned with.

[DarkdogChris]

Love this script i always wondered why in the future we seemed to have lost the ability to learn from a distance.

The fact that i can now tell all my marines to get at least 50 in engineering while also having only some train mech/hacking and its all done in 1 single action instead of having to do back to a station everytime and getting random results is invaluable.

Also it does work on AP 100%

[wercho]

Thanks for the encouragement and the feedback on AP, Darkdog.

As commander, I always want to say "Stick with class until you are a competent marine, and don't bother me until you are."

[Zanadar]

Hey, thank you for this amazing mod, it makes marine training so much more tolerable. I don't know if you're still developing this mod, but in case you are a bit of testing feedback:

There's an odd incompatibility issue with Ware Blueprint Manager (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=276107). Your mod breaks that mod's Headquarters menu, even though the two seem to have nothing in common. A real bummer since I was forced to switch to Marine Training Manager so I could have both a marine mod and the ware mod. Your mod is waaay better though.

[wercho]

It was a text file incompatibility. I renamed the file and changed the tag. Here's a fixed version. Version 1.01 - Oct 28, 2014

I'm not playing X3 right now and I don't want to go to the trouble of getting a setup going, so let me know if it works properly and I'll update the main post.