Did pilot experience gain get turned off in a patch?

[Wraith_Magus]

So, I'm about 50 hours into a game, and I still have zero pilots above 3 stars, in spite of having some captains for nearly that entire time, including the likes of miner captains that are still less than 1 star. I notice *crew* get some engineer experience, (barely, those guys are only getting to 3.5 stars after 50 hours) but pilots are gaining zero experience as far as I can tell.

Did Egosoft just kill all pilot experience to force us to use seminars, now?

[cranium1]

Its so slow, that it might as well not exist. For example, it takes roughly 13,000 trades to get to 3 stars and 40,000,000 trades to get to 5 stars based on game files. Which would have been fine if you only ever needed a handful of pilots since you could level them up with seminars. But you need hundreds of miners as low level miners are completely worthless.

[Fenris321]

They still level up. The quickest I've found is to have them open lock boxes. Still takes a long time though.

[dcarver]

it's a complete joke. How many pages of trades does it take?! I take some blame, I didn't buy 1 and 2 star training....That must be a requirement, you know cause I figured after a couple days they would get to level 2... not 14 play days.

14 days played, 3bil net worth. 100 traders/couriers, 30+ stations.... Tons of fleets in combat. I now have 3x 3star pilots. I must be doing something wrong by playing the game as designed.

Eggosoft,
Please stop slowing down the game and let us play around.

OH,
I had a 4 star trader NPC when I started (plot quest or something), and 14 play days of auto trades and they are still 4.0 stars.

[LameFox]

I think I've seen it happen, but it's so slow I'd have to write it down and keep track to be sure. It's just baffling honestly. So many apparently intentional choices they've made leave me totally confused how they expect this game to be played. However it is, I clearly don't play it that way, and will just have to be wary of future purchases, which is sad.

[Fenris321]

Someone else made this meme, I just found it funny when I saw it

[PDWNET]

Egosoft likes to pad their games. They seem to frequently equate the duration of a task with the enjoyment of a task. This has been a theme going back to X2.

Fortunately, there are plenty of mods that fix this. There is one that speeds it up slightly, and there is another that makes all of the training seminars (2-5 star) available at the trader.

[Clownmug]

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

[LameFox]

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.

[Clownmug]

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.

[LameFox]

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.

Almost! They have the scarcity down anyway. The genius trade mogul part is a bit laughable though, maybe they're still working on that.

[Clownmug]

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.

Almost! They have the scarcity down anyway. The genius trade mogul part is a bit laughable though, maybe they're still working on that.

Seem to be working fine for me since I have the "expected profit from trade" constantly at 10-20 million Cr with my auto-traders.

[LameFox]

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

Almost! They have the scarcity down anyway. The genius trade mogul part is a bit laughable though, maybe they're still working on that.

Seem to be working fine for me since I have the "expected profit from trade" constantly at 10-20 million Cr with my auto-traders.

Nothing special about it either, though. It's just a generic trading behaviour which appears to be in use around us all the time, and which we can bypass entirely using trade stations. That's not even a significant extra investment, as stations are astonishingly cheap to build in this game. The roaming traders are a sort of mild convenience that is bafflingly hidden behind an inconvenience. Miners are similar... one can reach the point of building their own ships self sustainably and not ever need to skill them up, because the basic order is fine. Can fire and forget them in faction space to have them grind rep for you as well.

It's as if what they expect to be worth grind is simply not reflected in the actual state of the game. It creates a very unintuitive system, leading to people constantly wondering why their captains don't visibly level despite on paper having a system for it. Especially when other roles do.

[Wraith_Magus]

Oh, I thought I might be doing something wrong, but it turns out it was Egosoft doing things wrong all along. 40,000,000 trades?! I know they brag that this is a game players will play for hundreds of hours, but did anyone run the math on how long that would take? There might as well not even be a 5 star rating at that point.

It wouldn't be a problem if it were just an efficiency boost, but the captain skill locks off trading. (I thought at first that "revisit stations in sector" would be trading limited to a single sector, not something as stupid and useless as just literally flying past the same stations over and over - if you have time to program that, Egosoft, make a damn auto-satellite dropping command!)

As it stands, it might as well be that Egosoft just completely removed autotraders from the game, because I will never see them. This isn't about "making player work to earn them", I appreciated the value of a 5-star manager in X3, this is literally making one of the core game features unusable to most players, which is insane and self-defeating behavior on the part of the developer.

[plynak]

Just use a mod. The level of Egosoft incompetence is simply mind blowing...

[Raevyan]

They have ignored this for a pretty long time. They don’t want us to get higher level pilots. There is a new training facility at the end of each terraforming project to train pilots. But it’s pretty late and at that point you should have enough resources to just throw more ships at the problem.

Other than that, there are missions that are totally not repetitive at all that reward a single seminar. If those would at least reward a batch of seminars instead of a single one...

[abisha1980]

Someone else made this meme, I just found it funny when I saw it

this is exactly how it feels like

Level 4 on tomb stone

[Wraith_Magus]

They have ignored this for a pretty long time. They don’t want us to get higher level pilots. There is a new training facility at the end of each terraforming project to train pilots. But it’s pretty late and at that point you should have enough resources to just throw more ships at the problem.

Other than that, there are missions that are totally not repetitive at all that reward a single seminar. If those would at least reward a batch of seminars instead of a single one...

Yeah, if those were 4-star seminars, I could understand, but being that stingy with 2-star seminars is pretty strange.

At least many of those totally not repetitive missions are accidentally capable of being completed mostly through the map, like those godawful prospecting missions where I eventually just carpeted whole sectors in resource probes, and any time they tell me to go back and find more pockets of the densest resources, I just order a scout to go drop a resource probe on top of an existing probe with the required resource amounts, then pick it back up.

[Rahman Yuuna]

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

[Malchar]

People are never happy.

With Level restriction, I learn to play without sector trading or sector mining. In end game I have a few 3 stars and they act a fleet commanders ... even it dont makes fleets smarters.

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

Then the new OOS system + asteroids field drastic productivity shutdown, resulted in completly inept and amorph xenons. So I learned to play without ennemies.

Peoples always say X4 is complicated ; He guys look, it becomes simpler at each release, so stop to complain.