[MOD] AutoTrain

[pref]

workshop link
dropbox


Ship&station crews gain skills while working.
If used together with AutoCrew, it will reduce the initial skills for auto-hired employees so there is space for improvement.

Skill gains can happen during
* patrol (captain, defence, engineer),
* general movement (captain/pilot),
* station daily work (manager, defence, specialist)
* trade (captain, engineer),
* full repair of a component (engineer)
* kills (defence)

Tested on 4.0 only

Skill increase should be relatively slow, but when installing the mod on a save with many employees you might get an initial flood of skillups. It will settle down once only new hirelings need to be trained.

If you feel it needs more balance drop me feedback (quite possible).






below the original discussion:
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I got curious if its possible to have NPCs get trained during everyday actions - so i put the code together, but i can't test and balance it reliably.
If anyone is willing to help with that let me know and ill upload a test version somewhere.

Idea is to train your ship crew automatically when they complete a task (a single skill gains one more star with a low chance).
Chances are a bit higher to increase the main skill (nav for captains, combat for DO). And having a used skill maxed will reduce chances for further trainings by about 30%.
Skills not used by the NPC will stay as they are.

* captain: 5% chance after finishing a generic move to order (used by most move and trade related commands)
* defence: 1-25% on enemy ship destruction
* engineer: 1% on completing repair of any component

It reduces AutoCrew's initial skill values (without depending on it) so optionally both can be used at the same time.
I mean it should work with ot without AC just as well.

[mcaule]

Why not making them train in realtime? I mean after lets say an hour of patroling, trading etc. officers gain a star, or after a number of tasks finished.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

There's already a time-linked training mod, which pref may be aware of.

[pref]

The problem is detecting if they were patrolling or trading etc.

If you leave your captains sitting in one place for no matter how long, they should not gain any skills.

Maybe ES decides to do something more with the skill system laters, then this could be used to avoid smalltalk.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

I dunno if it could be useful but the following might offer hooks for Managers and free traders (Captain, Pilot):

[pref]

Well, it kinda works so far. Getting a more or less balanced growth on all npc roles.
Maybe too fast, not sure on speed.

workshop link

[pref]

Anyone knows what is the difference between fighter numbers between different game difficulty settings?
It seems i have to come up with a multiplier for exp/kill values esp for S ships.

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

Hi pref!

Sorry for the dumb question, but the skills crew as they result in actual game? I have not understood the difference between them. What change?

If they have a big impact on ship movements, I recommend using a range time equivalent to 300+ hours to go from 0 to 5. My game lasts 700+ hours and if the skills bring an economic advantage too large, it is good to balance their rise more slowly as possible.

example:

I buy 50 employees at the beginning the game with 1/2 stars and use them for my ships and stations. If skills have a major advantage, not good to have five stars after 30 hours of gameplay. It 'good to have 5 stars after 300 hours of gameplay. By doing so you know that you need 300+ hours of gameplay to maximize skills. This would be very similar to the time necessary to obtain X3 marine 5 stars



In your case you make use of percentages rather than seconds, so if you want to balance good, keep these chances very very low.

example:

if an employee takes a big advantage (sells very fast, quickly destroys many enemies, etc), will have lots of chances to increase their skills. Here, this should not happen. If you count ship operations for "chance", just apply a very very low percentage for it to happen. So "1 star random skill chance" happens every five or six hours maybe.

Sorry but I do not know English well, I hope I explained well!

Bye!

[pref]

Thanks! I try to provide a slow growth, and plan to drop skill chances a little further once they are balanced compared to eachother.

Currently with a loop of fabs taking one page in the property list operating 30 ships drops an increase every couple minute (100+ employees).
The frequent events that happen every few mins have a 1-5% chance to trigger a skill increase.

Skills in general result in better pathing, combat moves and things like that.
It has no huge economic impact, rather how well ships move, or if they jump without fuel, or how they use missiles for ex. It mostly affects general speed of command execution, or in zone behaviour as i saw.

[alexalsp]

What for? Does not the mod work without it?

[kyrah]

Do it work with CWIR?

[Aszrayel]

Does this work with 4.3 and AutoCrew?

[w.evans]