Did pilot experience gain get turned off in a patch?

[Axeface]

So can we have a dev tell me why we cannot get the NPC pilots to gain experience? Is this broken code?

You can get npcs to gain experience, you need to train them. Exceptional individuals that reach their full potential alone are just that, exceptional. Once in a while an exceptional individual will rise up by themselves, but most need a nudge.

[Alan Phipps]

I don't have any problems in current vanilla 4.00 release with getting pilots to improve their skills by doing pilot activities such as defence and patrols. Also I find that the reserve captains of the various ships that I fly myself seem to to level up quite quickly in both piloting and morale during my expeditions in their ships. (I tend to transfer my reserve captains to captured capitals as skilled captains and replace them on my personal ships with rookie pilots on a fairly regular basis.)

Morale (for which there are no seminars) might be a significant factor in this discussion as 'piloting' is not the only requirement; pilots/captains need complementary levels of morale to get the combined skill star rating. You can feed pilots quite high tier piloting seminars yet still end up with just an average pilot if they have low morale.

[Kajar]

I have given up on leveling the piloting skill long ago. I have 298 pages of hire personnel, some 32.000 people on over 6000 ships in total. I got four 3-star pilots. Every other pilot is stuck at 2 to 2,5 stars. Meanwhile, the Service Crew and Managers reach 4 and 5 stars in no time.

Want Autotraders? Build a trading station, and every transport assigned to it will be an Autotrader, no matter the level.
Want the best Autominers? Build a mining station. Each mining ship assigned will instantly be a max-level Autominer.
Basic and 1-Star seminars are easily obtained from any trade corner on any station, giving you instant access to 2-star managers, which is enough jump range to work anywhere.

The crew-leveling is such a weird system, that is essentially made pointless by using stations.

after that we had kha aak berzerkers in asteroid fields, and I learned to play without small and medium mining ships.

I have set up an alert for whenever a Khaak ship is spotted. I then blow up the Raid-Outpost and the Hive-Nest, and my miners can work in peace without getting attacked ever.
I don' use L-mineral-miners because they are absolutely horrible at mining. M-miners are by far the most cost-efficient ones. S-miners have about 50% of the performance of the M-miners. L-Miners, in turn, sit at around 40% of the performance of S-miners.
Or, in other words - You need to buy around 60 million worth of L-miners to reach the same mining output as 15 million worth of M-miners.

Gas miners are the opposite, and L are easily the best; their cargo fills almost instantly.

[Kpla Keltak]

i have hundreds if not thousands of fighter pilots who have done 3-4 deployments per game hour and my game is at the point that there is no point to carry on.
none of them have gone above 3 stars...its a joke.
And still egosoft does not provided any academy's to train crew, pilots or marines. Still no development of defence stations. Still no bug fixes.
I still watch intercept pilots fly past their target to fly where it had been when the intercept order was given...then they turn round and intercept eventually.
hundreds of annoying bugs, some have been here since day one.
Egosoft know all about them... but no interest to fix them.
lets develop terraforming and ventures...clearly egosoft lack the drive and ability to fix their mistakes.
I cant see much changing on this front...not after two and a half years of waiting.

[Rahman Yuuna]

i have hundreds if not thousands of fighter pilots who have done 3-4 deployments per game hour and my game is at the point that there is no point to carry on.
none of them have gone above 3 stars...its a joke.
And still egosoft does not provided any academy's to train crew, pilots or marines. Still no development of defence stations. Still no bug fixes.
I still watch intercept pilots fly past their target to fly where it had been when the intercept order was given...then they turn round and intercept eventually.
hundreds of annoying bugs, some have been here since day one.
Egosoft know all about them... but no interest to fix them.
lets develop terraforming and ventures...clearly egosoft lack the drive and ability to fix their mistakes.
I cant see much changing on this front...not after two and a half years of waiting.

This is exactly what I am experiencing.

[Rahman Yuuna]

I don't have any problems in current vanilla 4.00 release with getting pilots to improve their skills by doing pilot activities such as defence and patrols. Also I find that the reserve captains of the various ships that I fly myself seem to to level up quite quickly in both piloting and morale during my expeditions in their ships. (I tend to transfer my reserve captains to captured capitals as skilled captains and replace them on my personal ships with rookie pilots on a fairly regular basis.)

Morale (for which there are no seminars) might be a significant factor in this discussion as 'piloting' is not the only requirement; pilots/captains need complementary levels of morale to get the combined skill star rating. You can feed pilots quite high tier piloting seminars yet still end up with just an average pilot if they have low morale.

And that kind of sucks, because early on in the game, picking a high morale NPC meant you had to spend up to half a million to hire it, when you can take an average NPC for a couple of thou, and train up with seminars to 2 star. Everyone starting is a noob, so a lot of players didn't know that.
So then if that is true, how do you boost morale? I'm not so sure I'm convinced, so I'm going to look at the state of morale of my NPCs, and see how many three+ star morale NPCs are actually exceeding two star.

I've got a trick to boost past two stars though, (but IM a little worried if I point this out, I'm very sure I'm not the only one doing it)
if you apply seminars to fractional star NPC up, such as 3/4 star, or 1-3/4, or or 7/8ths star, you can add exactly 1 or 2 stars to the fraction they already possess, making that 1-3/4 star into 2=3/4 or that 7/8ths star a 2 -7/8ths star NPC pilot. I've been applying that trick for some time now. I search for those fractional star NPCs, because I now that fraction will remain on top of the seminar training I apply.

I'm worried to point it out, because I'm afraid that this will go into the bug fix for the next patch iteration. (please don't)

So the question I have: How do you boost morale without turning to a mod?

[Alan Phipps]

That is not a trick/expoit. The devs changed it in an update so that even lower tier seminars raised their intended main skill by a whole star. Before that it was just one third of a star and that was causing real complaints about slow training progress.

So, you see, the devs do listen to posts here but also want the game progression/balance to be more as they intended and less always about quick gratification or skills for credits.

[Drumma]

NPC skill levels is the one big issue I have with X4. If you hire a hundred people off the open market you should get a few mid level skilled crew (statistically) but that's not the case in this game. One or two star crew is the best I've seen (so far) when buying new ships.
The only mod I've used on this TER game-save is LearnAllTheThings to ramp up my initial group of NPC crew. I turn it on for several hours then turn it off when I have a few 5 star pilots and several all around 3 and 4 star crew.
I can play the game completely vanilla except for this one thing. I have not tried the seminar mod to see if that helps.

[Nort The Fragrent]

When and if a pilot get’s to level 3, they are a prime target. And are dead soon after,.
Seminars are like searching for the tooth fairy, only available if a tooth falls out.
Note the level 3 star pilot has no teeth.
My most recent game is 379 hours in, I do not have any miners ( They are a waist of time )
Am at level 30 with 6 factions,
I have 2 Captains who have reached level 3, and no more, or higher.
Level 4 and 5, are just but a dream, a fictitious story told at bed time.

level 4 and 5 Pilots,
They were once Heroes who now prop up head stones in graveyards.
Get out your bugles and Remember them.

[Eyeklops]

I don't have any problems in current vanilla 4.00 release with getting pilots to improve their skills by doing pilot activities such as defence and patrols. Also I find that the reserve captains of the various ships that I fly myself seem to to level up quite quickly in both piloting and morale during my expeditions in their ships. (I tend to transfer my reserve captains to captured capitals as skilled captains and replace them on my personal ships with rookie pilots on a fairly regular basis.)

Morale (for which there are no seminars) might be a significant factor in this discussion as 'piloting' is not the only requirement; pilots/captains need complementary levels of morale to get the combined skill star rating. You can feed pilots quite high tier piloting seminars yet still end up with just an average pilot if they have low morale.

I don't have issues with getting crew to 3*+ in piloting (some missions give multiple seminars for 2* pilots) or engineering (build ships 4TW). Getting 5* in morale is the big problem for me. They always seem to stall out around 4-1/3* morale. Out of 24 pages of crew I have ONE person with 5* morale (my current PHQ manager, was 5* morale before that posting, was previously a random engineer on a miner).

Maybe the game needs a "Pep Talk Seminar" that can boost crew morale. Possibly feed seminar to captain and all crew gain 1/3 to 2/3* morale.

[Rahman Yuuna]

That is not a trick/expoit. The devs changed it in an update so that even lower tier seminars raised their intended main skill by a whole star. Before that it was just one third of a star and that was causing real complaints about slow training progress.

So, you see, the devs do listen to posts here but also want the game progression/balance to be more as they intended and less always about quick gratification or skills for credits.

Good deal. I wont see it go away then.

[Pares]

I would really like to know the honest opinion of the devs or Bernd himself on what positives or fun do they think the current crew system adds to the game? Because after 800 hours the only thing my mind instantly associates it with is unnecessary tedium and frustration. More so that crew level seems to affect the competence or effectiveness of the AI, which would be (if it actually is like that) an absolutely dumbfounding design decision to me.

There are other much simpler and transparent ways to simulate crew competence and experience while keeping the AI as smart as it can be, like traits/perks with fixed and direct positive/negative effects, and commands/features locked behind research or purchasable/craftable/lootable/plot reward software instead of stars.

[grapedog]

That is not a trick/expoit. The devs changed it in an update so that even lower tier seminars raised their intended main skill by a whole star. Before that it was just one third of a star and that was causing real complaints about slow training progress.

So, you see, the devs do listen to posts here but also want the game progression/balance to be more as they intended and less always about quick gratification or skills for credits.

There are times i do miss when a 2 star pilot could autotrade with a 12 gate range... or 5 stars with a 30 gate range... though i also like the move away from autotraders being the main thing people do.

I don't even really bother with stars anymore, or even worry about it. Get a good manager, and it all works out.

Get a couple traders up to 2 for distribute wares, couple miners up to 2 for sector automine... do research, steal BPs, build, rule...

[dark7np]

Honestly, with the Aerial Maze Terraforming Projects, getting 4 and 5 star Pilots is not that difficult. It's a hassle UI wise to assign 100 pilots to group training (though a change for that that is in the current beta I think), but do a couple group trainings, some competitions and individual trainings and you gut yourself 10 5 star pilots easy peasy. And it's not that far behind - you build a Bubble City, get 10k pop, you build the Aerial Maze, you start the repeatable training projects. Sure, you need all the Teleportation research. But Terraforming wise it's not a huge investment. If I start another save, I'll try to push for it ASAP, probably. Shouldn't be that hard.

I'd still like to see some changes to how pilots are assigned, mind you. And yeah, I've wondered about the insanely slow experience gain as well in practice they could just remove it, since it does not happen in any reasonable timeframe. But getting them via terraforming is almost too easy now I'd say. Assigning them, that's the hard part.

And yes, morale is another issue. Not sure how important that is. The terraforming projects don't help with that.

[Rahman Yuuna]

Honestly, with the Aerial Maze Terraforming Projects, getting 4 and 5 star Pilots is not that difficult. It's a hassle UI wise to assign 100 pilots to group training (though a change for that that is in the current beta I think), but do a couple group trainings, some competitions and individual trainings and you gut yourself 10 5 star pilots easy peasy. And it's not that far behind - you build a Bubble City, get 10k pop, you build the Aerial Maze, you start the repeatable training projects. Sure, you need all the Teleportation research. But Terraforming wise it's not a huge investment. If I start another save, I'll try to push for it ASAP, probably. Shouldn't be that hard.

I'd still like to see some changes to how pilots are assigned, mind you. And yeah, I've wondered about the insanely slow experience gain as well in practice they could just remove it, since it does not happen in any reasonable timeframe. But getting them via terraforming is almost too easy now I'd say. Assigning them, that's the hard part.

And yes, morale is another issue. Not sure how important that is. The terraforming projects don't help with that.

Ive experimented with morale. I have a 2 star pilot with 4 stars on morale on a capital freighter, and after many successful trade runs, still 2 star pilot. Not 2.5, not 2.25, just 2. No change.
I can see why many have given up on paying any attention to the pilot rating. I still think its broke.

[Alan Phipps]

Actually that makes perfect sense to me.

A two star in piloting captain should not be able to perform at better than 2 stars combined overall skill at piloting regardless of how high their morale as they are at their current ceiling of piloting competence, but a two star piloting skill captain with low morale will perform at less than optimum and hence only have a combined score of less than two stars. Thus low morale would be a limitation to learned skill performance, while high morale is nice but is not itself a source of performance above and beyond learned skills (but it does allow further training/improvement in core skill to result in the optimum improvement).

That's my theory anyway.

[Raevyan]

Oh no, seminars! It's like they want you to actually play the game or something!

These scale absolutely terribly with numbers. Plus, it makes little sense they'd add natural skill progression with the intent that it doesn't occur during real usage, because in that case why add it at all? It feels more as if they want this game to be played with SETA left on whenever the user goes to sleep or work.

Yeah, almost like highly trained employees are supposed to be special and not everyone becomes a genius trading mogul from shooting rocks.

Rest assured that even with 5 Stars, pilots still don’t know how to fly.

[Raevyan]

Honestly, with the Aerial Maze Terraforming Projects, getting 4 and 5 star Pilots is not that difficult. It's a hassle UI wise to assign 100 pilots to group training (though a change for that that is in the current beta I think), but do a couple group trainings, some competitions and individual trainings and you gut yourself 10 5 star pilots easy peasy. And it's not that far behind - you build a Bubble City, get 10k pop, you build the Aerial Maze, you start the repeatable training projects. Sure, you need all the Teleportation research. But Terraforming wise it's not a huge investment. If I start another save, I'll try to push for it ASAP, probably. Shouldn't be that hard.

The thing is, by the time you reach that point you usually don’t need to care about high level crew because one could just throw more ships at the problem and don’t bother with that crappy leveling system. I mean Egosoft still thinks that the lock they put in should prevent ppl from making tons of money early game. The truth is, autotraders are actually one of the worst money making tools early game. Expert automining? Irrelevant because one could just build a storage module with a dock and assign miners to that station and you got a 3 range autotrader and a manager that will level in no time to 5 star and max range. That setup costs just 200k for the station and one additional miner.

[Drumma]

In my first game with X4, I seemed to notice crew on Construction vessels advanced faster in overall skill level. I just bought my 1st Construction ship in this new save so I'm going to watch and see how the crew's star ratings change. I put it to work on my PHQ so they should be gaining experience in some way (engineering, management, etc.). Has anybody noticed this or is it common knowledge? GL HF

[Alan Phipps]

Building Ship service crew level up very quickly while the ship is constructing. It's as if (for them) lots of building with lots of builder drones equals lots of repairing with lots of repair drones.

I make a point of putting lots of crew on my builders.