Skill and training Feedback

[g04tn4d0]

I've been queuing up trades to (hopefully) train my pilots. I haven't seen any improvements over a few hours, yet. I've also got one larger ship on sector mine duty. Left her running while I slept last night. Woke up hoping to go from 2 seminar-paid stars to 2.5 or 3 stars, but was disappointed to discover it made no improvements at all. Whatever you guys decide on doing in the long run, it would be nice if it makes it's way verbatim into the in-game encyclopedia so people don't have to wonder how stuff works and sift through a message forum to find hints.

[j.harshaw]

I meant what's wrong with manually queueing up trades to just trade as opposed to using it as a means to improve skill. Is it just tedious?

[g04tn4d0]

I meant what's wrong with manually queueing up trades to just trade as opposed to using it as a means to improve skill. Is it just tedious?

EDIT: IMO, it feels tedious driving around discovering previously "well-known" sectors and then creating a satellite network for all the stations just to be able to trade, whether it's done personally or from manually trading with the map. For example, my cell phone (google search and google maps) accomplishes keeping up to date with what businesses exist, where they're at, and how much they're selling things for without requiring me to physically visit things prior to being able to do business with them. I also don't have to drive to a new city in order for my GPS to become aware of it. I'd assume the future would work at least as well. The actual trading mechanics aren't tedious. They're the fun part!

[Raevyan]

I meant what's wrong with manually queueing up trades to just trade as opposed to using it as a means to improve skill. Is it just tedious?

Have you actually tried to manually provide 33k smart chips to build the palace in the PAR plot with a single M Trader? Then you know what’s wrong with it. Yes one could use L traders, that’s not the point. Moving sliders and fighting the map with so many trades is not engaging and not fun at all.

1) It would be nice to max the cargo without having to move a slider (there is a post on that from today somewhere). Why don’t we have a „max“ button?

2) If you Filter a single Ware you only see „the best“ buy/sell offer when zoomed out. Why not display 5 offers for that single ware?
When zooming in the windows sometimes overlap that you cannot read the texts or select something.

The best offer might only be 20 units but the second best sells 5000. Sometimes I just want the quantity, sometimes I want the nearest one.

3) I find it hard to see the station that’s actual selling/buying. The line when you hover over the offer is not very visible and often times the station is behind the property window.

[tomchk]

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with manually queueing up trades? It's a lot easier in X4 than in XR and (I vaguely remember) in X3.

I actually find it much easier to do in XR with that awesome single-window interface you guys added, maybe closer to 4.3. Any chance you could port that to X4 as an alternative?
I do love your map, which clearly took tons of work and is great for many things, including trade sometimes, but there's a ton of clicks and moving of mouse. For gamepad users like me, queueing tons of manual trades is especially tedious right now. Right now I think the process is this:
1) Ensure correct filters are active.
2) Ensure map is zoomed exactly where it must be to avoid massive trade distances (this is especially hard with ultra-wide setups like mine--any chance the menu can be forced to be 16:9 centered for very wide resolutions? That would improve many parts of the UI for me--so much moving across the entire screen right now).
3) Select trade ship.
4) Select ware to buy.
5) Drag mouse to full (any chance we can get a "max" button on each side? Almost every single trade I do just goes to max). Click confirm.
6) Select ware to sell.
7) Drag mouse to empty. Click confirm.
Repeat.

[GCU Grey Area]

The best offer might only be 20 units but the second best sells 5000. Sometimes I just want the quantity, sometimes I want the nearest one.

You can filter the trade info to exclude low volume trade offers. It's a bit vague (minimum volume can be set to none, low, medium or high, but doesn't specify what those levels are), but it is nevertheless effective at screening out those good price/low quantity trades.

[tomchk]

The best offer might only be 20 units but the second best sells 5000. Sometimes I just want the quantity, sometimes I want the nearest one.

I agree with your points, but you can filter out stations with lower quantities. I think this is under the trade filters. Look for Minimum Volume, having to do with the "dots" representing that, like in this video: https://youtu.be/jK7F7RLrv2k?t=246

[phrozen1]

on pilot training.
for me it's simply too slow. even if it would be twice as fast seminars would be still usefull.
and the price for skilled pilots is too high considering how fast they can die just out of bad luck or ai-"intelligence".
right now when you got a pilot to lvl 3 just through normal means you allready have a huge empire and don't need an auto-trader or miner any longer.

and on manually trading:

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with manually queueing up trades?

The ability to define trade-routes and assign ships to them would be great.
Would make it much less tedious, more strategic and fun to create and refine the routes for maximum profit.

Also an option to just repeat a single trade a set amout of times, forever or until it's not profitable anymore.

[Gregorovitch]

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with manually queueing up trades?.

a) Because it's a boring repetitive task that nobody wants to do for any length of time........
b) .... and because you cannot justify spending your time doing repetitive manual tasks like that in this game after you get your first miner

Basically, like Factorio and for similar reasons, the game is all about automation because it's all about scaling up and snowballing. In the case of trading, your input as player is to figure out the market and spot a long term trade opportunity, you then give orders to your trade ships to exploit that automatically whilst you spend your time finding the next opportunity and set up other traders to exploit that, and so on. This is how you snowball and players want to snowball as fast as possible and go beat up Xenon with shiny new ships the snowballing pays for. Also players tend to judge their own performance against the speed with which they can snowball.

This is why folk are so upset about having their autotraders taken away from them.

Couple of other issues you've raised:

The criteria for leveling up traders that you describe does not feel either fair or realistic to me and I suspect a lot of people. It seems contrived and arbitrary. What the simulation should do, one would think, is reflect how successful a trader is operating in prevailing market conditions against competition. For example how much profit they make on what capital outlay over what period of time against some sort of benchmark average. At the very least, if a trader trades half a load of advanced electronics or microchips for four times the profit they would make from trading a full load of ecells or food rations it seems obvious they should earn a lot more experience from it.

As for the mining XP bug you mentioned, I would say that that bug on it's own is probably responsible for 30-40% of the upset over the Pilot Apocalypse on it's own. However, even when you fix it, it still means that rather than buy M or certainly L miners, players should always go for the smallest possible capacity miners with the fastest engines in order to maximise the trade XP element of the job earned. This is not a realistic simulation. Frankly, it sucks.

I am not happy to learn about this. It means that I have to now have:

1. Sell off my entire fleet of M miners
2. Buy a new fleet of S miners, at least twice as many.
3. Go through the gruesome grind of re-allocating them to their sectors
4. Sell of all my M station traders
5. Buy a new fleet of at least twice as many S station traders and re-allocate them all

And of course suffer the resultant bloat to my property list in perpetuity. All because of the way you have programmed pilot XP gains. So no bigger traders or miners until and unless you have a 5* captain seems to be the only way forward if my new understanding of the XP system is correct (if you want them to level up of course, and who doesn't ?).

Is this what your intention was? Did you really mean to write all freight and mining ships except the smallest fastest ones pretty much out of the game? I seriously doubt that, but from my understanding of what you have said here that is exactly what you've done. If I'm wrong and misunderstood you please correct me, but otherwise I would suggest that the chasm that exists between your intentions and the results argues for both a root and branch rethink of this and some immediate steps to alleviate the problems players are experiencing whilst that takes place.

[GCU Grey Area]

a) Because it's a boring repetitive task that nobody wants to do for any length of time........

Speak for yourself. I enjoy playing an active role in the Trade part of the game.

[Gregorovitch]

a) Because it's a boring repetitive task that nobody wants to do for any length of time........

Speak for yourself. I enjoy playing an active role in the Trade part of the game.

Fair enough, I should have said for myself. But I seriously doubt I'm wrong that the majority of players are the same.

[GCU Grey Area]

Fair enough, I should have said for myself. But I seriously doubt I'm wrong that the majority of players are the same.

No way to tell, the overwhelming majority of players don't participate in forum discussions &, of those that do, there's a significant tendency for those with complaints to be more vocal than those without. However in general most people think the majority agrees with them.

[Imperial Good]

Problematic as that would introduce arbitrary numbers that are completely invisible to the player which I tend to avoid. Would introduce discrepancies in this case such as it being physically impossible for pilots in some ships to be able to do 100% efficient trades. Granted it's difficult if not impossible to find such efficient trades for the larger trading ships, but I tend to think of them (more as a player than as a developer) as more specialized pieces of equipment. Superfreighters that aren't very well-suited to use as trucks.

Issue with the current system is that it rewards lots of small fast ships doing trades rather than trader ships being traders. The best trade ship for levelling currently is something like a Pegasus Vanguard, which is not a trader and useless as such due to its tiny cargo. On the other end of the spectrum L trade ships are the worst for levelling since they make very few journeys and need huge amounts of cargo to be full which the trade logic seldom manages.

Making it based on some unit like 1,000 m^3 or 10,000 m^3 would mean that volume moved matters as well as rate. This means that trade ships naturally become better at this since they have better haulage capability. If anything this would be more intuitive to the player since using traders to level via trade rather than scout ships is more logical. It also is kind of balanced out since larger slower transports haul more but make trips less frequently. However there may be new sets of exploits such as manual operation of L traders with a single station transferring wares on and off of it.

I meant what's wrong with manually queueing up trades to just trade as opposed to using it as a means to improve skill. Is it just tedious?

Micro vs macro play. One could queue up traders manually, or use that same time to set up a dozen auto miners or stations which keep making money with minimal future attention. Manual trade does not scale well with player economy as income per effort spent remains constant so revenue is linear with time as opposed to other sources of automatic money earning which increase exponentially.

As for manual effort to level the traders. It just is not practical. To reach level 3 one is looking at hundreds if not thousands of trade orders per captain based on my current observations. This becomes the worst sort of chore and not something people play for. It is far less work to power level a manager to rank 4+ than it is to get a single trader to rank 3 using trading from what I can tell, which is why one usually just leaves managers to level naturally and it works well for them.

Manual trade is only really a task one does when one really needs specific wares moved between places. For example a supply mission, or building a station early game when money is tight. The gain for the amount of effort is too little compared with other activities the player could do, especially given how using map view to issue orders is not the most exciting of activities in a space combat simulator.

This is why people want access to some sort of auto trade default order fairly easily that is similarly as practical to sector mine for mining ships. For example if it was limited to only a single ware and maybe import or export only from a sector (either buy or sell value non-zero, not both). If such an order existed than trader pilot skill is less important as having access to full auto trade is just a nice bonus similar to having access to advanced or expert mining order is.

The ability to define trade-routes and assign ships to them would be great.
Would make it much less tedious, more strategic and fun to create and refine the routes for maximum profit.

Also an option to just repeat a single trade a set amout of times, forever or until it's not profitable anymore.

This would certainly help with manual trading. For example moving excess stock from one of your stations to a distant consumer outside the manager's operating range.

[Raevyan]

The best offer might only be 20 units but the second best sells 5000. Sometimes I just want the quantity, sometimes I want the nearest one.

You can filter the trade info to exclude low volume trade offers. It's a bit vague (minimum volume can be set to none, low, medium or high, but doesn't specify what those levels are), but it is nevertheless effective at screening out those good price/low quantity trades.

I am aware of that filter and I also make use of this. But as you said it’s very vague and it’s different depending on the Ware volume. Also when you want to do multiple trades, e.g buy and sell a stock of like 30k you need to switch the filter in between...

A lot of ppl probably hated it but I’d second bringing back the Trade Window from X Rebirth. That table was great in showing all the trades, it was sortable, filterable and searchable. You could also see the distance for selected ship and trade. The only bad thing about it was the trade ship selection because you needed to loop through each ship until you got to the one you wanted to do the trade.

I‘d also second that trading should reward using actual trade ships and not small s sized scout for maximum efficiency in pilot leveling for trading.

Problematic as that would introduce arbitrary numbers that are completely invisible to the player which I tend to avoid.

Well you might want to look at some aspects of the game then... Pilot leveling for example is nothing else than an arbitrary number we don’t see. We only see those thirds of a star. I observed ships over 30+ hours not gaining a single third of a star. At that point it’s pretty much invisible to the player.

PS: you then might also look into Trade and Fight Ranks. Again arbitrary numbers we definitely not see... while the Xtreme Trade rank is somewhat doable the Xtreme fight rank would need 25million boarding operations...

[Gregorovitch]

This means that trade ships naturally become better at this since they have better haulage capability. If anything this would be more intuitive to the player since using traders to level via trade rather than scout ships is more logical. It also is kind of balanced out since larger slower transports haul more but make trips less frequently. However there may be new sets of exploits such as manual operation of L traders with a single station transferring wares on and off of it.

My 2c on that would be I don't think players are going to be much interested in bothering with that sort of exploit, I think most are going to be perfectly happy if they have a range of decisions and a clear path to pilot progression via natural play with their ships doing what their ships intuitively should be doing given their assigned roles. In part this is because....

Micro vs macro play.

..and notwithstanding GCU Grey Area's point that there is no actual proof the majority favour macro vs micro play, I think fiddly exploits of that nature would be largely ignored for the same reasons that manual trading is in the main only done, as you say, for specific reasons in certain circumstances occasionally.

The sort of exploit I would be concerned about would be an automatable exploit because it would present me with a nagging dilemma over whether to use it, feel like I was forced to play a certain unnatural way 'cos the benefit was hard to ignore.

[Raevyan]

The sort of exploit I would be concerned about would be an automatable exploit because it would present me with a nagging dilemma over whether to use it, feel like I was forced to play a certain unnatural way 'cos the benefit was hard to ignore.

Yeah I started to set up some fleets of 20 S fighter and let them camp indestructible khaak stations that are constantly spawning new ships. Why I do all that? Because I need pilots for almost everything. My attack fleets, distribute wares to keep the economy going, for auto miners and auto traders. I think the next thing I will do is to park a destroyer next to a station and just let it kill the endless drones... just to get those 2 or 3 Star pilots so that I can let them trade...

It currently just takes way to long. By the time I got my first 3 star pilot I already had 2billion in my account and pretty much ignored the whole auto mine and auto trade thing. There are lots of other ways to make more money more quickly than using a 3 star pilot on autotrading.

[GCU Grey Area]

I am aware of that filter and I also make use of this. But as you said it’s very vague and it’s different depending on the Ware volume. Also when you want to do multiple trades, e.g buy and sell a stock of like 30k you need to switch the filter in between...

Tend to leave it set on medium myself & most of the time it selects appropriate trades for me.

A lot of ppl probably hated it but I’d second bringing back the Trade Window from X Rebirth. That table was great in showing all the trades, it was sortable, filterable and searchable. You could also see the distance for selected ship and trade. The only bad thing about it was the trade ship selection because you needed to loop through each ship until you got to the one you wanted to do the trade.

Not me. That trade interface from XR is probably the single biggest thing I miss from that game. I do like the map in X4, however for the Trade aspect of the game it pales in comparison to the sheer amount of spreadsheety goodness the XR trade system provided.

I‘d also second that trading should reward using actual trade ships and not small s sized scout for maximum efficiency in pilot leveling for trading.

Using proper freighters is certainly rewarding if your primary focus is Trade rather than training pilots. The Monitors I'm using in my current game don't have the biggest capacity (29k) but they can still bring in about 700k profit with a single cargo of Adv Electronics. Got 4 of them currently & at any given time generally have trades queued up worth around 15-25 million profit, mostly high tech goods & intermediates. If it ever drops below that I queue up a few more for each one.

[lilbean]

I meant what's wrong with manually queueing up trades to just trade as opposed to using it as a means to improve skill. Is it just tedious?

I've done that for 40 hours in my current game across 3 traders and none of them have hit three stars. It's tedious but it's also so, so rare for the pilots to hit three stars that it completely sucks the fun out of it.

[zakaluka]

so do pilots actually level up slowly still? combat and industrial?

They do. Combat kills have added benefits: even though credit for "hard" kills is divided among everyone; every pilot who assisted gets full credit for an "easy" kill also. Means you get many times the credit for each kill. Depends how you build your combat fleets. Many more chances to level up your pilots in fleet combat.

Mining ships get credit for selling their inventory but for some reason they're affected by the "unfavorable trade" condition. Basically when buy order prices get low (and they will) your pilots get much less credit for each sale.

Transport ships just don't really get enough credit for each trade or move fast enough to progress into 3-star reasonably. In a group of 20 pilots even if you started them all with fast couriers, and at 2-star (or even if not, that's hard to get so many books) - with the low probability for advancing with each trade - it's expected to take around 300 hours before you get your first 3-star trader. Ugh.

Combat is moderately effective. Building a station is the quickest way to get autotrade / automine functionality though, by far.

[micelak]

This single issue, the high dependency on pilot skills mixed with the extremely grindy means of raising pilot skill, along with the extreme ease with which a pilot can be loss....just killed it for me. Stopped playing after building multiple complexes that were making millions for me, so credits weren't an issue....a fundamental aspect of the game I enjoyed from X3 being .... ham strung and butchered was the issue.

Many people have posted how they print money with out auto-traders. If the goal was to slow down the money supply, the goal failed. All that happened was the killing of a play style that some found fundamental to their X experience over past iterations.

I really hope you guys make a hard shift away from this 'balance' over fun mindset in a single player sandbox....