Skill and training Feedback

[CaptainRAVE]

I don't understand how they thought it was a good idea and good game design, especially when they got feedback about it.

The feedback was mixed. Many people understood, and agreed, that not everything in the game should happen quickly, or be tied to the amount of money you have. We will continue to iterate on this feature to try and strike the right balance between there being too little and too much work involved in building up the experience of your crews. Just don't expect easy linear progress from one star to five, or to be able to completely skip this progression just by having large amounts of cash, as this is completely contrary to how experience progression is intended to work, and indeed works in many, if not most, games.

If this is the intended direction then I’m out. It’s not fun. Starting out this time with the Split has been more frustrating than dealing with all of the 1.0 bugs.

[chew-ie]

Lets see what they will change and relax. I think we can let this thread die until next version comes out.

Excellent idea. At the end it's weekend and Egosoft just had a major release cycle. Give them some time to catch their breath, then we will see what the next patches have in store.

[Axeface]

One thing that is certain, is that it is not clear when and by how much pilots level up.

I think communicating this should be a priority.

Before release I was convinced that Distribute Wares simply doesnt level captains because I had ships doing it for hooooours and nothing - but i'm told that it definately does.

[Tanvaras]

I currently have 14 Trade ships (all captured tradeships - cause its a pirates life for me) on my Split start and not one of my pilots I have added to the ships have ranked up their piloting. All were given Pilot Skill books to get them to 2 stars, but alas they are 1 or less star in morale so their overall rating is less then 2 stars for Distribute wares. I have manually traded these ships (So brain numbing) for the past 12 hours of play and not one of them have put a smidgen of skill into a star. I feel this is completely broken, and I have now come to the conclusion I am going to need to play a modded game to add some functionality into my tradeships. I dont want to be sitting for days on end in time manually controlling many trade ships... This is the captains job, when set to the task, which they cant do.

If I hired a courier to deliver a package for me and he turns up and tells me I have to direct him all the way to the delivery point, I don't see why I would hire them. This is the same when adding a pilot to a Tradeship in-game, he should at least know how to do basic Sector Trading. Sector trading needs to be Zero Star's like Sector Mining is.

[Andrey12y]

Excuse me if I posting some thing wery obvious, but I want to share my observations:
you can give basic books for newbie pilot, 1 star for 1 star pilot and so on. If you have, for example, 2 star pilot and basic, 1s, 2s and 3s books - you only can give 2s book (you actually still have only one option, but game will choose 2 star book) and it will add ~0.33 star to pilot skill.
2 and 3 star book sometimes proposed as a reward in missions.

Just checked - 2-3 basic books to make 1 star pilot from noob, 3 one-star books to make pilot grew up from 1 to 2 stars.

[TVCD]

I also have a suggestion. I have now not read both topics completely, if that should have been suggested then excuse me.

Variant 1: You can train your employees in administrator modules. 1 star in a 1h to 100k. Each additional star doubles the cost. The assignment is made via the hire menu. NPC -> station with administrator module -> flight school. If possible, other specialist areas can also be trained here. Flight school, management school, service school and so on.

Variant 2: You need a 5 star NPC (Pilot). New standard behavior "flight school". Now ships with pilots are added to this NPC as a fleet . The fleet then flies through the area leveling the NPCs. 1 star in 1 hour at no cost.

I think it's a good compromise between about more micromanagment and a little less micromanagment.

[Bastelfred]

@ Egosoft what do you want? A simple solution or a complicated one? For solution suggestions it would be important to know why there was such a hard change. What exactly did you want to do with it? Suggestions that do not fulfill this purpose make no sense.

Bernd said in the stream one reason was to limit the unitrader as a cash cow...

A simple one would be that you get a dealer license from a reputation, let's say +15? with which you can run 1 unitrader. As soon as the player has his HQ or his own sector he gets an additional one.

By the way @Egosoft... the Bordingpods flew better with a good pilot than with a bad one. With 3.0 they fly like with a 5 star pilot. They are practically indestructible in 3.0.

[ff8ff8]

I installed the learning mod to fix things up.
However prior to that A great way to get a bunch of crewmembers up to 4.5/5 morale Is to take either the Rattlesnake or Raptor and park it in Rhy's Defiance right by the gate. Bunch of M/N/P ships kept flying into me. Then just keep swapping your pilot out.

Get a bunch of 3 star or close to 3 star pilots (mostly because 5 stars in moral) in maybe an hour?


You basically have to do something like that, have a construction ship build hundreds of connectors as a station, dismantle and rebuild over and over for 2 hours....or if you're lucky a pilot will get 3 starts after 30-35 hours of non-seta time.


But Raptor/Rattlesnake for 5 moral and then spam the low-tier pilot seminars to finish it up. Luckily every job has moral as a secondary skill and you just have to get an average of 3 stars.

[Gregorovitch]

I also have a suggestion. I have now not read both topics completely, if that should have been suggested then excuse me.

Variant 1: You can train your employees in administrator modules. 1 star in a 1h to 100k. Each additional star doubles the cost. The assignment is made via the hire menu. NPC -> station with administrator module -> flight school. If possible, other specialist areas can also be trained here. Flight school, management school, service school and so on.

Variant 2: You need a 5 star NPC (Pilot). New standard behavior "flight school". Now ships with pilots are added to this NPC as a fleet . The fleet then flies through the area leveling the NPCs. 1 star in 1 hour at no cost.

I think it's a good compromise between about more micromanagment and a little less micromanagment.

These are very welcome considerations from a staff post.

I don't know how everyone else feels about it, but I have two main things at this stage:

1. The exact nature of the solution to staff development is not really the concern, nor indeed is the time or cost involved. What matters to me is that the game offers one or more automatable (or largely automatable) systems under my control that are scalable to late game requirements and have predictable results. I am happy to plan, work and invest to establish such systems, I don't care how difficult, time consuming or expensive it is to do so.

2. I find myself in the position of having stopped playing my new 3.0/Split save due to being conflicted over how to proceed. The only viable solution at present seems to be a mod called Professional Crew which does this:

This mod enables recruiting of professional crew on any ship you buy.

Service crew and marines will be more costly (between 10 000 and 30 000 credits, depending on your standing with the related faction) to compensate a little (nothing I can do for captains as they don't seem to have any recruitment fee).

I've also boosted NPC stats, to hopefully reduce AI issues, as low skill pilots get a worse AI according to X4 scripts.

The mod comes in two flavours:

The "Mild" version with crew ranging from 2 1/3 to 4 stars in their related skill and morale;
The "Employee of the jazura" version with crew ranging from 3 to 4 2/3 stars in their related skill and morale.

The problem I have is that I can't see how I can continue my game under base game rules currently, however this mod feels far too much like cheating to make me comfortable using it. I am stuck between the devil and the deep.

I am not looking for an easy solution to this issue, I am looking for a predictable, scalable and automatable solution.

[ff8ff8]

If seminars were maybe more expensive but rather than needing 3 for a star you only had to give one. Or if you could select how many you gave at a time. And then have a dialogue to just make that crewman the captain of another docked ship.
That would make the parkingabigshipinxenonspacetofarmmoralestarsreallyfast method fine.
I just really hate having to go

right click-> comm -> give seminar -> wait for dialogue -> repeat x3 -> right click -> work somewhere else -> scroll over -> right click -> click select -> scroll over -> click drop down ->click marine-> click->confirm ->scroll to new ship -> rick click ->click crew -click marine ->click promote to captain

That is just an absurd way to get a crewman to captain another ship...and that is for the absolute fastest way to get a 3 star captain without using mods.

[Kospy]

I totally understand that Egosoft don't want everything linked to money, but let's be honest, the current implementation is not a good solution.
I'm really enjoying X4 since the last update / DLC, but having to wait more than 30-50h in game to get a 3-5 star pilot is a major issue. We can't even know if they are progressing and deduct what is giving the most experience, it's far from being player friendly.
Moreover, a lot of players may never get a 3 stars pilot as there is a rumor that Xenon is obliterating everything past 15h-20h (another major issue that should be looked too by the way).

Anyway, crew skill should not be linked to time, at least not at this scale. It should be linked to player skill and be rewarded for their hard work, not just sitting there waiting hours for them to progress automatically.
To fix this, here is my proposals:

- You can get skilled pilots by doing missions
- During boarding, you have a chance of capturing/converting enemy pilots to your cause, depending on marine skills.
- Randomize skills of wandering NPC on station/ships, so the player as some incentive to speak and look at people actively. However, don't make them join you 100% of the time. Link their chance of joining with the faction reputation. For example, if you got +20 with ARG you got 50% chance of an ARG crew to join you. I also think hire cost should be way higher, or maybe use some special resources.
- You could get them from escape pods (destroyed stations or ships), but it should remain rare. It could also be used to save your own crews if things go bad.
- Scrap/overhaul seminars, the current mechanic is really not interesting and it's tedious to do.
- A training/academy module on stations. But to run a training you will need skilled crew first. For example, if you want to train 2 pilots to 3 stars (trainee), you will need 1 pilot with at least 4 stars (trainer). The catch is the trainer will be locked in the module for a set of time until the training is done. It could also cost money or special resources (reuse seminars?). The more you get the more you can train, but it should fit pretty well with the exponential grow of the game. The only downside I see is it require more work to be implemented.

Hope Egosoft will consider this solutions. If anyone see an issue with them I will happily discuss about that!

[TVCD]

These are very welcome considerations from a staff post.

I am only a moderator for the German Forum, nothing more and nothing less.

That was just a suggestion. I understand the problem that pilots shouldn't level too quickly. On the other site, too slow is not the right way. The possibility to train them for credits and a duration is an option for the current slower leveling. The values ​​mentioned above were only an example. It should be some work to train your employees. The other thing is, are there really only bad NPCs in the universe? Possible that if they train, the AI ​​can do that too. As in my example, high-skilled NPCs could be hired at AI stations where there is an administrator module. The balance has to be right. If I need a defense fleet quickly I can't wait for hours until the NPCs are halfway usable. Otherwise you will quickly lose your ship and credits. It's not just about the player maybe earning too much credits, but losing them even faster.

[Axeface]

So I made a suggestion thread about the UI and seminars and it got folded into this thread and lost?

[Sandalpocalypse]

I think it will be impossible to achieve restrictions on autotraders through limiting crew skill gain, unless (as currently is the case in X4) those restrictions are so onerous as to all but prevent advancement. As soon as Egosoft loosens up a bit we're going to be right back to people having exponential autotraders.

I believe that the best way to cut this gordian knot is to split autotraders into a related but seperate mechanic. Instead of crew skill requirements, you have a hardcap or effective hardcap on your ability to use autotraders that you can expand via rewards. For example, you could have the Boron present you with a Commerce Analyzer that lets a ship Autotrade. He only has the one at the start, and the components are quite rare. But you could unlock more of them by completing researches, finding them in dusty corners, and possibly as a reward for completing storylines or reaching extremely high reputation with a faction. Or it could be some sort of interlink system built into the PHQ, and you expand the number of channels - aka how many ships it can support - via similar methods. That would have the advantage of not losing anything on an autotraders death.

Or it could be a rare Seminar that you apply to a pilot, enabling them to autotrade but without relation to their Piloting stars.

There would be many ways to accomplish this goal, the point of which is to uncouple the problem - Autotraders - from the rest of the skill system.


P.S. Scrap Morale, its obtuse and annoying. It makes it harder to understand how skilled your pilots actually are, which is especially a problem when considering where to use Seminars. If Morale is needed for AI scripting purposes, it could be replaced with a personality type, such as cautious or aggressive.

Edit - P.P.S - Just spitballing here, but I think it would also be interesting for training and simply gaining experience to be limited to 3 stars or so of skill. Getting to 4 or 5 stars should require facing real challenges and would hterefore be more rare and valuable. For example, a combat pilot might only advance towards 4 or 5 stars by actually getting kills. A Trader might only advance by Autotrading independently, since you dont learn too much past a certain point when trading for a station or just wherever the player tells you to. et cetera.

[Big_Gun]

I believe that the best way to cut this gordian knot is to split autotraders into a related but seperate mechanic. Instead of crew skill requirements, you have a hardcap or effective hardcap on your ability to use autotraders that you can expand via rewards. For example, you could have the Boron present you with a Commerce Analyzer that lets a ship Autotrade. He only has the one at the start, and the components are quite rare. But you could unlock more of them by completing researches, finding them in dusty corners, and possibly as a reward for completing storylines or reaching extremely high reputation with a faction. Or it could be some sort of interlink system built into the PHQ, and you expand the number of channels - aka how many ships it can support - via similar methods. That would have the advantage of not losing anything on an autotraders death.

Or it could be a rare Seminar that you apply to a pilot, enabling them to autotrade but without relation to their Piloting stars.

There would be many ways to accomplish this goal, the point of which is to uncouple the problem - Autotraders - from the rest of the skill system.

I like these ideas. Micromanaging each pilot and moving them around to different ships is tedious as hell. If they tied the ability to use multiple auto traders to one skill or thing based on the player, I think that would be much better.

[dtpsprt]

Hiring staff is one of the very few things that X: R does better.

1. You could see all staff available in a sector and get their skill levels somewhat quickly by using keyboard commands (maybe you need a mod to get them to tell you their skills, I can't remember).
It was still too slow having to check every single potential crew member but it's much faster than in X4.

2. Crew transfer was done via mini-transport ships which simplified things a lot more.
When building stations, it's tiring having to get a transport ship to dock at each station one at a time to supply stations with managers.
If the automatic crew transport ships came back it would speed things up a lot.

1. You DID need a mod to see their skills

2. Stations? With the building speed of X4 the time to transfer managers to stations is unimportant unfortunately... You can have a ship pick one would be manager from different statins in different systems, then make a tour of known space and STILL it will arrive early to "dispose" of the first one!!!

[dtpsprt]

My concern with making crew any more complex is that I think it would bloat saves even more and extend save/load times, which are already too long. I'm actually avoiding full crews right now in the hopes my game will perform better. If anyone has any data or input on the effect of crew on this, I'd love to know! It's just easy to have many thousands of crew, and the game tracks so much about them.

Crew and their skills are just numbers which means 10-30 bytes each, so the increase in save file would be unnoticeable.

[Mackan]

The problem with the experience gain system is that, well, there is none... Experience does not exist. What we instead have is a roll-based system where certain actions have a chance to increase your crew's level by 1.

The formula for level rolls is (basevalue * falloff^currentlevel) and can be found in /libraries/experiences.xml. So a level 14 (4.67 stars) pilot winning against a ship considered stronger than them gives the pilot a chance of 1 * 0.43^14 to level up to 15 (5 stars). Roughly 0.0007%. And that's assuming a factor of 1 which is not guaranteed. Because it's completely RNG the level up can happen in 1 kill, or half a million kills.

In the table below are some stats I took from leveling up a pilot from 1 to 15 a hundred times faking hard kills (function used for posterity: <apply_experience entity="$pilot" experience="'ship_kill_hard'" factor="1.0" />) It is not entirely accurate from level 1 to 9 though as from what I can tell pilots with less than 3 stars in piloting gain double rolls from hard kills.

Code: Select all

Pilot        Average    Percent
Skill          Rolls     Chance

{2}     =       2.45   (~40.8%)
{3}  1* =       4.68   (~21.4%)
{4}     =      11.02      (~9%)
{5}     =      32.03    (~3.1%)
{6}  2* =      66.42    (~1.5%)
{7}     =     138.00   (~0.72%)
{8}     =     362.78   (~0.28%)
{9}  3* =     776.76   (~0.13%)
{10}    =    2148.75   (~0.05%)
{11}    =    4403.12   (~0.02%)
{12} 4* =   10499.32   (~0.01%)
{13}    =   25192.12  (~0.004%)
{14}    =   64724.24  (~0.002%)
{15} 5* =  142095.19 (~0.0007%)

I mean wtf? Do I completely misunderstand the code or is this for real? Trading is even worse btw with a falloff of 0.32 on piloting ASSUMING A FACTOR OF 1!!!

Egosoft?

[Neloth23]

The problem with the experience gain system is that, well, there is none... Experience does not exist. What we instead have is a roll-based system where certain actions have a chance to increase your crew's level by 1.

The formula for level rolls is (basevalue * falloff^currentlevel) and can be found in /libraries/experiences.xml. So a level 14 (4.67 stars) pilot winning against a ship considered stronger than them gives the pilot a chance of 1 * 0.43^14 to level up to 15 (5 stars). Roughly 0.0007%. And that's assuming a factor of 1 which is not guaranteed. Because it's completely RNG the level up can happen in 1 kill, or half a million kills.

Very interesting.

From what I experimented with experiences.xml I also noticed there seemed to be a maximum level of XP that certain actions generate.

For example, a "normal" trade run will give piloting XP up to 3 stars. After that it no longer delivers experience.

Add to that, that certain situations can make you loose XP (there is a "bored" function in the script that slowly erodes morale, for example. It also happens with bad station trades).

On the bright side, as Bernd said in the Q&A, it seems at least that low level pilots have stopped to fly like idiots. For that, I thank Egosoft.

[Matthew94]

The problem with the experience gain system is that, well, there is none... Experience does not exist. What we instead have is a roll-based system where certain actions have a chance to increase your crew's level by 1.

The formula for level rolls is (basevalue * falloff^currentlevel) and can be found in /libraries/experiences.xml. So a level 14 (4.67 stars) pilot winning against a ship considered stronger than them gives the pilot a chance of 1 * 0.43^14 to level up to 15 (5 stars). Roughly 0.0007%. And that's assuming a factor of 1 which is not guaranteed. Because it's completely RNG the level up can happen in 1 kill, or half a million kills.

If this is true that's one of the most bananas level-up systems I've ever heard of.

In one of the recent X-Logs Bernd says that they essentially use "super-seta" and simulate a universe for a long time to see what the faction and economy outcomes will be in order to assess balance and with that it's no wonder why they assert that the pilot system "works".

"Oh yeah, after 10,000 hours play we noticed a few pilots had leveled up".