Skill and training Feedback

[mr.WHO]

Except that 99,99% of crew are morons.

I have hundreds of ships, 10 full carrier battlegoups, 200 hours save game - yet I have single 4-star crew ship (my second oldest carrier, while my first carrier is still at 2 stars).

RNG is fun only for masochist and looser.
Most people on this planet prefer to work towards their goals instead of putting all effort into lottery ticket.
If it's like that in real life then is is valid for the game too.

it wouldn't be a problem if this would be a minor thing - like Bulleting Board lottery from X3.
However this is done for key feature of X4 which is crew - this is crucial for ship behaviour and abilities (e.g. autotrader, trading ranges, combat behaviour).

This means currently in X4 players end with braindead AI, but not because it's bad AI, but rather because it is intentionally made bad by feature design:
90% of crew are morons
4,99% of crew are acceptable by high amount of playe micro (e.g. apply seminars, do the auto-mine, crew shuffle)
0,01% are good crew if you had a lucky dice roll.

Well done this really sound more like ****** mobile game than something made to be actually fun.

[grapedog]

Except that 99,99% of crew are morons.

I have hundreds of ships, 10 full carrier battlegoups, 200 hours save game - yet I have single 4 crew ship (my second oldest carrier, while my first carrier is still at 2 stars).

Weird, it's safe to say that I have probably 5,000+ 3 star crewmembers.... at least, spread throughout my fleets, and 25,000 hired personnel.

[Gregorovitch]

but one of the key failings with the current implementation is that there are too few steps and thus the probability to gain a third of a star must be very low.

Yes but one of the major advantages of the way it works is that two pilots doing roughly the same job will level up (potentially) at different speeds thus creating the illusion of ace pilots, average pilots and crap pilots. In reality of course a "good" pilot is just a "lucky" pilot, but the illusion is powerful and the small number of steps made the difference obvious and dramatic (until they nerfed the chances in 3.0 of course) which it would not be if you increased the number of steps, it would even out and become predictable, all pilots would be more or less the same, a commodity.

TBH I don't think there's much mileage in debating the precise method of calculating level ups here. What Egosoft have done is to reduce the chances of rolling a 1/3 star level up for pilots engaged in trade and mining tasks to virtually nothing with the obvious intent of preventing sector miner and distribute wares (or manually controlled) traders from becoming expert miners and autotraders automatically by just doing their normal jobs. Where mileage can be made in this discussion IMHO is in asking three questions:

1. Why did Ego want to make it virtually impossible to get expert miners and autotraders in the early- and mid-game? (I ventured a hypothesis about this above)

2. In practice by the time you do get 3* pilots now they are no longer relevant as your stations will be making far more than miners or traders ever could. Was this Ego's intention as well (i.e they deliberately want autotraders and expert miners to wither on the vine) or is it an unanticipated side effect?

3. So OK, as players we can no longer use expert miners and autotraders as a meaningful part of our businesses plans now, they are dead more or less. But aside from being one less thing you can do, what actual effect does this have on gameplay? Does it matter and if so why? Can anyone give an account of how this change has affected their current vs previous games in the large, at big picture level?

I'd just comment that Ego will not have made this change simply to piss off their player base, they will have done it because they believe it will improve the overall gameplay experience. My questions her pertain to whether or not they are right about that. That's what the debate should be about IMHO, I don't believe the maths of the system matter in this respect, they can easily change it.

[tomchk]

3. So OK, as players we can no longer use expert miners and autotraders as a meaningful part of our businesses plans now, they are dead more or less. But aside from being one less thing you can do, what actual effect does this have on gameplay? Does it matter and if so why? Can anyone give an account of how this change has affected their current vs previous games in the large, at big picture level?

I suspect it has created far more shortages for me. I had a decent number of autotraders in a mostly pre-3.0 save, and my 3.0/3.1 new game has none but has far more shortages. Obviously there are other factors, but it makes sense that this would happen with less autotrading. My shortages are so bad that it's incredibly slow building anything: ships, stations, whatever. Many places can't build or repair at all. It's not good. I hope they will fix other factors causing this problem I'm hearing many are having, at least.

[Axeface]

Remember, you don't need a 3 star pilot.... you need a total 3 star captain.

At least for me, ive always made it a habit to put a full crew on my ships... engineering and morale go up pretty quick. Look at your service crews, and see if you have workers with 3 total stars. In my game, i have HUNDREDS of 3 and 4 star captains if i need them... they are just mostly like 4 engineering star, 3 or 4 morale stars.... promote to captain, bam, auto trade or auto mine ready to go. Once they are in the captains chair and you have already set them to auto trade, throw em a few super cheap seminars, now you have a 2 star pilot, 4 star engineer, 3 or 4 star in morale... average is still over 3, and they're doing good things for your empire.

I tried this before but because of your post i tried again. Promoting a high star crew member (usually engineering and morale) and then giving them piloting seminars to 2 stars has never yielded a 3 star captain for me, they remain lower than 3 because pilotting seems to be the big one. Obviously the instant you promote a 4 star service crew to captain their overall star rating drops to almost nothing.

[Pares]

Except that 99,99% of crew are morons.

I have hundreds of ships, 10 full carrier battlegoups, 200 hours save game - yet I have single 4-star crew ship (my second oldest carrier, while my first carrier is still at 2 stars).

RNG is fun only for masochist and looser.
Most people on this planet prefer to work towards their goals instead of putting all effort into lottery ticket.
If it's like that in real life then is is valid for the game too.

it wouldn't be a problem if this would be a minor thing - like Bulleting Board lottery from X3.
However this is done for key feature of X4 which is crew - this is crucial for ship behaviour and abilities (e.g. autotrader, trading ranges, combat behaviour).

This means currently in X4 players end with braindead AI, but not because it's bad AI, but rather because it is intentionally made bad by feature design:
90% of crew are morons
4,99% of crew are acceptable by high amount of playe micro (e.g. apply seminars, do the auto-mine, crew shuffle)
0,01% are good crew if you had a lucky dice roll.

Well done this really sound more like ****** mobile game than something made to be actually fun.

What is it with Egosoft and RNG? The whole crafting system is a random mess too. I can't decide wether this is intentional and bad design decision, or it was the quicker solution because of development time constraints?

[joppe_k]

but one of the key failings with the current implementation is that there are too few steps and thus the probability to gain a third of a star must be very low.

Yes but one of the major advantages of the way it works is that two pilots doing roughly the same job will level up (potentially) at different speeds thus creating the illusion of ace pilots, average pilots and crap pilots. In reality of course a "good" pilot is just a "lucky" pilot, but the illusion is powerful and the small number of steps made the difference obvious and dramatic (until they nerfed the chances in 3.0 of course) which it would not be if you increased the number of steps, it would even out and become predictable, all pilots would be more or less the same, a commodity.

For sure. Whether or not that is a major advantage is debatable. As long as there is a probabilistic approach to the skill-ups, there will always be variability between two pilots. Finding the correct expected skill-up rate and variance of that rate (to account of "individuality" if so desired) is down to tweaking numbers and methods. No biggie. I'm sure they'll get it right eventually.

TBH I don't think there's much mileage in debating the precise method of calculating level ups here. What Egosoft have done is to reduce the chances of rolling a 1/3 star level up for pilots engaged in trade and mining tasks to virtually nothing with the obvious intent of preventing sector miner and distribute wares (or manually controlled) traders from becoming expert miners and autotraders automatically by just doing their normal jobs. Where mileage can be made in this discussion IMHO is in asking three questions:

1. Why did Ego want to make it virtually impossible to get expert miners and autotraders in the early- and mid-game? (I ventured a hypothesis about this above)

2. In practice by the time you do get 3* pilots now they are no longer relevant as your stations will be making far more than miners or traders ever could. Was this Ego's intention as well (i.e they deliberately want autotraders and expert miners to wither on the vine) or is it an unanticipated side effect?

3. So OK, as players we can no longer use expert miners and autotraders as a meaningful part of our businesses plans now, they are dead more or less. But aside from being one less thing you can do, what actual effect does this have on gameplay? Does it matter and if so why? Can anyone give an account of how this change has affected their current vs previous games in the large, at big picture level?

I'd just comment that Ego will not have made this change simply to piss off their player base, they will have done it because they believe it will improve the overall gameplay experience. My questions her pertain to whether or not they are right about that. That's what the debate should be about IMHO, I don't believe the maths of the system matter in this respect, they can easily change it.

No offense to anyone at Egosoft, but I'm not convinced that all the changes were all that well thought-through and deliberately designed to be this way. Software development is hard and there's a lot of trial and error involved in finding the best solution. There's only so much time you can spend on play testing in-house, which is why it's important to get the product out there in the form of Beta or early-access to get feedback. Which is why this topic exists in the first place. No system is ever perfect in its first iteration.

I do think it was intentional to make it more difficult to get 3-star pilots and galaxy traders. Perhaps they felt that it detracted from the game by allowing the player to automate too much of the game too early? That it made the game boring when you could just sit back and watch the money roll in by having the AI play the game for you? When good pilots is hard to come by, it makes you value them more and it forces you to prioritize what to do with your senior pilots. All these are good things. I simply think they took it a bit too far.

This is possibly due to the developers being a little too good at their own game. That is, if you know exactly how the formulas are written and you take advantage of that to maximize skill-ups, you'll probably arrive at an acceptable rate of skill-ups. But if you come in as a new player, not having even the foggiest idea of what the skill-up meta is, then the system will appear positively broken. And as it turns out, in the case of autominers, it actually was broken.

I have the feeling that most people here feel that the system is good (or at least OK) in principle: that crew should level up by performing their actual role. I think it's mostly a question of tweaking some numbers and formulas to get the experience gain of pilots to a good place. Every other role is basically fine. It's just pilots that lag behind terribly.

[tomchk]

I have the feeling that most people here feel that the system is good (or at least OK) in principle: that crew should level up by performing their actual role. I think it's mostly a question of tweaking some numbers and formulas to get the experience gain of pilots to a good place. Every other role is basically fine. It's just pilots that lag behind terribly.

Yes, if Egosoft takes just one message from this thread, I hope it is to please make pilot training closer in speed to the other skills. No massive or time-consuming development changes are needed.

[grapedog]

Remember, you don't need a 3 star pilot.... you need a total 3 star captain.

At least for me, ive always made it a habit to put a full crew on my ships... engineering and morale go up pretty quick. Look at your service crews, and see if you have workers with 3 total stars. In my game, i have HUNDREDS of 3 and 4 star captains if i need them... they are just mostly like 4 engineering star, 3 or 4 morale stars.... promote to captain, bam, auto trade or auto mine ready to go. Once they are in the captains chair and you have already set them to auto trade, throw em a few super cheap seminars, now you have a 2 star pilot, 4 star engineer, 3 or 4 star in morale... average is still over 3, and they're doing good things for your empire.

I tried this before but because of your post i tried again. Promoting a high star crew member (usually engineering and morale) and then giving them piloting seminars to 2 stars has never yielded a 3 star captain for me, they remain lower than 3 because pilotting seems to be the big one. Obviously the instant you promote a 4 star service crew to captain their overall star rating drops to almost nothing.

Oh wow, they changed it, you're absolutely right. I know a few months ago you could do this and it worked fine.... they've changed it so it looks at piloting first and minimizes everything else. That's annoying.

[Berhg]

A positive thing about super slow star leveling is that high skill pilots become much more interesting and individualistic. I like that it works out like that, but I still want quicker access to the auto trade and mine commands.

How about reducing pilot star requirements? Distribute Wares at 1, Auto Trade at 2, the advanced mining at 1 and 2 as well.

[lordmuck]

They could add the ability that a 3 star + crew member and more so the captain should use ejector pods and wait to be picked up by one of our ships at a station or in space.. Preferably at a station.

[Axeface]

A positive thing about super slow star leveling is that high skill pilots become much more interesting and individualistic. I like that it works out like that, but I still want quicker access to the auto trade and mine commands.

How about reducing pilot star requirements? Distribute Wares at 1, Auto Trade at 2, the advanced mining at 1 and 2 as well.

Problem is that if they lowered the requirement you wouldnt feel like that about high star pilots anymore?
Im fine with autotrade being endgame like it is now because its very good, but we absolutely need lower alternatives. I suggested one and devs said they are doing something similar, basically pick a station > pick a ware > pick a target station. And I think the progression from 2+ stars needs to be faster (but still slow enough to be rewarding).

I wouldnt even mind if autotrade got moved to 4 stars if trading crews (edit: captains) actually could level past 2 stars, and if there were lower star behaviour alternatives that were fun.

I do think autotrade should be the last step in trading.

[grapedog]

well what the hell is the difference between:

Sector - Automine
Automine
Expert Automine

Why not have three levels of trade? Like Sector Trade, Limited Autotrade, Expert Autotrade?

[dtpsprt]

People, I think you are missing the BIT PICTURE here... with no traders roaming around autotrading or at least distributing, ALL economies ground to a halt... then the Xenon take over unopposed because even the player at that early stage can not get decent ships to make a stand, just because of said shortages.

I surely propose to let the vanilla die on the vine and go to mods. Personally I suggest DFSI Skills with a combination of JP Another Explorer. DFSI is making a big difference in early game leveling up (up to 2.5 stars) and JP Autoexplorer REALLY explores a sector (or even the Galaxy) making a difference in levelling up the pilot via exploration.

They can shove their Ventures, afterall WHO wants all paintmods to be in Red? They do not increase the skillset of the pilot, or the crew for that matter, unless you send the same ship again and again in 60h Ventures+. Totally inacceptable for me...

[dtpsprt]

Why not have three levels of trade? Like Sector Trade, Limited Autotrade, Expert Autotrade?

Because it was like that in X3... And ohhhh.... NOTHING should be like X3...

[Gregorovitch]

So 100 hours into my Split DLC game now and a few long term implications of the Pilot Apocalypse have reared their head:

1. The Gas Crisis.

There are a lot of NPC faction stations around that are starved of gas resources. There are a few sectors around that are stuffed full of gas. Unfortunately these sectors tend not to have any gas consuming stations. I have four gas miners and once they've filled up the gas consumers in the very few sectors where they can actually operate I have nowhere else to deploy them. Meanwhile many stations around the galaxy are bereft of gas and obviously cannot produce their wares as a result. I do not appear to be able to do anything about that.

I had the idea of setting up a gas mining station in one of these few "gas sectors" but this idea would rely on my ability to deliver gas to customers across multiple nearby sectors - something it appears I cannot do since it seems a) there is no freighter ship that can transport liquids available and b) you cannot assign a mining ship to trade duties.

So with expert miners written out of the game now it's difficult to see what, if anything, can be done about this.

2. Ore and silicon miner micro-management hell -> The Ore Crisis

So I have a fleet of 18 ore/silicon sector miners. Since they never level up they are obviously all still 2* sector miners (yes, after nearly 100 hours some of them). The problem here is I am losing patience with managing them and moving them around. One miner will fill up a refinery on it's own in a few hours, even if thew refinery starts off needing 100k ore or silicon. Whilst it's doing so it makes reasonable bank. Once the refinery is full it can only sell typically 1/5th or less loads to the refinery. i.e. just topping it up. The miner is now no longer serving a useful purpose for the overall economy nor is it making me any money. Meanwhile other refineries in nearby sectors (which I had previously filled up) are now starved of ore/silicon.

The solution is to move the miner to another sector with an empty refinery of course. The problem is I'm losing patience with this tedious task, it takes long time and is very boring to have to repeatedly every hour or two figure out which miners now need to be moved and where to. I've got to the stage where I have three complexes the game tells me are worth close on 750m Cr, my first serious fleet of three destroyers plus various escorts, 200m Cr in the bank and another 80m in station accounts, a string new build projects to consider, a batch of Xenon sectors to stomp, and two interesting lengthy plot quests to attend to. My commitment to public service and the greater good with these miners is waning, I really don't want to be bothered with this crap any more.

Previouse games my miner fleet leveled up and could handle all this on their own automatically by this stage of the game. I think two of my 18 miners have managed to earn 1/3rd star towards the 3* target for expert mining so far. The rest not a sausage. That means to fix this problem I would need a total of 52 2* pilot seminars. Yeah, right. I haven't seen even one 2* pilot seminar so far in my game.

3. Exploration giveth pilot level ups, sort of - then it taketh them away

I used to map sectors using chained Fly To commands in a spiral hex pattern. Quick. Effective. Safe. Following advice received from Egosoft I switched to using the Explore command for this game in the hope of gaining the pilots some stars. Well, it does work. Sort of. Of the six scout ships I've used so far in this game two of them have earned one 1/3 star increment and one has managed 2 increments. Wow, that's....fast (no, it is....relatively).

But there is small problem here: the one that earned two increments and one of the two who earned one increment are now dead.

Of course since I don't spend my whole play time watching my scouts going about their work I don't know the exact circumstances leading to these intrepid pilots demise beyond hearing desperate and vain pleas for help followed immediately by a red termination report, but my overall impression from watching them at work occasionally is that the way the Exploration AI is currently coded makes scouts sitting ducks for any passing hostile (whereas my previous tactic of using chained Fly To commands didn't) and is in the medium to long term to all intents and purposes a suicide mission, a death sentence.

I therefore withdraw my endorsement of Exploration as a viable route to 3* pilots.

[Lord Dakier]

Just make the increase in experience slower and more gradual the higher the number of stars.

I play using faster level up or whatever it's called and it's just a much nicer experience being able to go back to my station traders and turn them into universal traders after several hours. For the sake of balance, it's a bit too quick a gain, but better than vanilla in any case.

[Thurgret]

I watched a fair bit of CohhCarnage's stream of X4. The most significant recurring issue he seemed to have was getting any 3-star crew - even just one. He found two on platforms, but at more than 60 million credits each. None were getting to three stars through organic leveling. I said before that the current crew skill system makes for a bad 'new player' experience, and it was quite evident when watching that stream, since Cohh was locked out of fairly basic functions, namely automatic trading, plus his station managers were rubbish.

Personally, I just modded it. I still think it's a needlessly frustrating design choice.

[StoneLegionYT]

I watched a fair bit of CohhCarnage's stream of X4. The most significant recurring issue he seemed to have was getting any 3-star crew - even just one. He found two on platforms, but at more than 60 million credits each. None were getting to three stars through organic leveling. I said before that the current crew skill system makes for a bad 'new player' experience, and it was quite evident when watching that stream, since Cohh was locked out of fairly basic functions, namely automatic trading, plus his station managers were rubbish.

Personally, I just modded it. I still think it's a needlessly frustrating design choice.

**** what an embarrassment. Thankfully these have 0 pride to feel it but hell that would make any normal developers gutt just sink some big shot giving there game a decent play through and they can't even get frigan pilots.

[mr.WHO]

I've looked at my personel statistics:
- 300 h save
- 12'000 personel
- no 5 star personel
- only 8 are 4 1/2 star - all of them are managers for my megaplexes.
- of my combat ships only one of my carriers has 4 stars crew.


This really feel like lootbox mechanics - where odds are stacked against you.