Skill and training Feedback

[Pares]

Are going to manually switch out that many combat pilots into mining and trading ships?

There isn't even a proper "switch pilots between ships" option, AFAIK you have to demote them to service crew, move them to the other ship, then promote to captain. And if the other ship has full crew, you have to potentially fire a 3-4 star engineer, or find another place where he/she can work. Massive pain in the ass if you ask me...

[mr.WHO]

It would be good to have crew quarters or bar where player could store unused crew that await reasignment.

[micelak]

The devs have indeed stated that miners have an experience-gain bug that they are working on.

Have they spoken to a rough ETA on patch? I stopped playing due to frustrations on pilot advancement/auto-trade/auto-mine.

[g04tn4d0]

Just let us buy 3-star pilot training from the trading stations and be done with it, please.

[Alan Phipps]

"Have they spoken to a rough ETA on patch?" Do they ever? (Before dates being published openly here)?

[Gregorovitch]

Well I've built an little annex station next to my PHQ and called it The Straylight Space Academy (that's the name of my outfit). It consists on a pair of 3M6S docks, a medium container storage, a 3* manager and a solar panel to make ecells. I have my first six students waiting in line polishing their little discovery vanguards. I've got them all to 2* in the classroom already. Soon as the solar panel makes enough ecells I'll set them off hopefully selling the ecells all over in batches of, IIRC, 29 per load.

I shall take notes of the start time for this exercise and any subsequent important developments, such as any of these students actually gaining a level up and the time it took. Or not of course. Then theory is with them zipping around with their Mk3 travel drives and a full load each delivery, many deliveries, they should level up reasonably quickly (relatively speaking of course). I shall report back when I know more.

[zakaluka]

1. miners are apparently getting no rolls for actually mining, only from selling their loads

And the roll they get for selling their cargo uses the same "favorable/unfavorable" trade logic as a dedicated trader. But for miners, the majority of sales will be an "unfavorable trade". Because, you're filling up all the demand for resources, and the prices will be permanently suppressed.

Basically it means your miners aren't going to progress much past 2-star without help.

[micelak]

1. miners are apparently getting no rolls for actually mining, only from selling their loads

And the roll they get for selling their cargo uses the same "favorable/unfavorable" trade logic as a dedicated trader. But for miners, the majority of sales will be an "unfavorable trade". Because, you're filling up all the demand for resources, and the prices will be permanently suppressed.

Basically it means your miners aren't going to progress much past 2-star without help.

This still blows my mind. To 'train' a pilot and make them 'better' traders....the optimal path is putting them in scout ships.......

[sh1pman]

IIRC the absolute best path is to put them into ventures, but I may be wrong.

[joppe_k]

Well I've built an little annex station next to my PHQ and called it The Straylight Space Academy (that's the name of my outfit). It consists on a pair of 3M6S docks, a medium container storage, a 3* manager and a solar panel to make ecells. I have my first six students waiting in line polishing their little discovery vanguards. I've got them all to 2* in the classroom already. Soon as the solar panel makes enough ecells I'll set them off hopefully selling the ecells all over in batches of, IIRC, 29 per load.

I shall take notes of the start time for this exercise and any subsequent important developments, such as any of these students actually gaining a level up and the time it took. Or not of course. Then theory is with them zipping around with their Mk3 travel drives and a full load each delivery, many deliveries, they should level up reasonably quickly (relatively speaking of course). I shall report back when I know more.

Looking forward to your findings! Even though it seems silly to have to do so, I'm not opposed to "gaming the game" if that's what it takes. Like you mentioned, one can style it as the "Space Flight Academy" to make it more palatable.

[Gregorovitch]

IIRC the absolute best path is to put them into ventures, but I may be wrong.

That's what Bernd said, so I tried it.....for about 100 hours on one pilot. Don't work. Too few rolls to get reasonable piloting level ups for the hours spent. Morale drops through the floor. One venture platform = one pilot at a time when obviously you need at least a dozen at once in training. I got two 1/3* levlel ups so far on one pilot using this method in 100 hours basically. I call that a bust.

[grapedog]

I have 2 venture ships, an M freighter and an S fighter. The M freighter has done probably 95% of all my venturing... and he's almost 4 stars. The fighter pilot, who I don't even know what he started off at, has done very little venturing and is just over 2 stars. I've sent Venture ships out 112 times, and the freighter is probably 90-100 of those, mostly 64hr ventures. I'll try sending out the fighter for 1H ventures for the next day or two since I took a week off work, and I'll see what how he progresses.

[zakaluka]

To 'train' a pilot and make them 'better' traders....the optimal path is putting them in scout ships.......

Actually combat in a swarm, but this is less about taking a single pilot and leveling it to 3*, more about taking a swarm of pilots and generating 3* pilots over time. Explore orders take forever. So does distribute wares. Turn on SETA and come back in two days. No joke. Grinding up books would be a better use of time, but you shouldn't do that.

And actually, for almost all industry purposes - building a station is the optimal path. Takes a few hours and less than two million cr to get up and running. I really think this is the route the game is trying to nudge players, not grinding the same quests 800 times for books. The game just doesn't teach very well, nothing new there when it comes to X games.

[Berhg]

Just let us buy 3-star pilot training from the trading stations and be done with it, please.

I agree with this. Also, since they are so cheap let us buy a lot more of them at once, instead of going to one trade center after another and talking through a dozen vendor npc's trade menus and dialogue to get a few.

And increase the natural rate of increase.

I'd be happy with increasing the cost of the seminars by a lot if they increased natural experience gain and made high level seminars available to purchase.

[CaptainRAVE]

Focus on expanding content rather than tinkering with these features that people don't want.

Why we can't buy these crew when we equip a ship is beyond me.

[Berhg]

Why we can't buy these crew when we equip a ship is beyond me.

Indeed

[grapedog]

Focus on expanding content rather than tinkering with these features that people don't want.

Why we can't buy these crew when we equip a ship is beyond me.

The devs stated previously they don't want just a pay for pilots scenario, they want to have getting a 3 star pilot meaningful.

The problem is pilot are somewhat completly useless until they get 2 stars.

They need to add in a basic sector auto trade option for less than 2 star pilots. I think distribute wares is fine too... and the idea behind gambling/chance for skill ups is fine as well... but the actual numbers need to be tweaked.

Unless the community as a whole is missing something. I know combat gives good skill ups, ventures supposedly do, there needs to be more options that are trade related. Someone asked before if i mind moving combat pilots over to traders, and i don't mind... but i would rather not do that. Maybe there is a secret formula we are all whiffing on...

[pjjohnstone]

The problem is pilot are somewhat completly useless until they get 2 stars.

Capital captains are still suicidal morons at 4 stars

[zazie]

leveling pilots... i just sit my pilots in a fighter, and task a group of them with watching a Xenon gate, and they get 3 piloting stars pretty fast. I've probably got at least 50 pilots who have 5 piloting stars, three or four times that amount who have 4+ piloting stars (...)Combat is the quickest way BY FAR, for leveling the pilot skills.

That's odd. Doesn't fit to my experience:
I have a fleet of 16 "Plasma Nemesis Vanguards" (Plasma = Guns) as OOS-Rapid Intervention Force, numbered from 0020 to 0035. 0020 - 0030 have hundreds of hours as I have bought them during the appx. first 14 days of my game. Some of them already started as 3-star-pilots.
Today, after patching from 2.5 to 3.1 about 30 IG-hours ago, some of them are 4,5 star, only exceptionally one is 5-star in piloting (2 in total).

The whole group is constantly used to guard gates and to attack Xenon P, M and N (plus Xenon freighters) the past 30 IG-hours. To give an indication: 0035 is manually told to pick up loot, its inventory has more than 3500 items in it. So YES, they are experienced. But none of the pilots 0031 - 0035 has more than 2 stars in piloting. On a sinde note: I used the same group to kill those stations the Xenon try to rebuild after I have taken out the stations, Wharfs, Factories, Shipyards in all their sectors but one. Within three hours of playing yesterday they killed more than a dozen of those visible attempts to rebuild. Yes, they are experienced.

Another example: pilot of 0021 is a special one. I hired her about at day 9 at a station (patch 2.5), incompetent, but pretty . I made her to captain on my ship. But she was bad at attacking ore manoevering, so I put her in one f those Nemesis in a sector with Kha'ak-Hive and regular Kha'ak-groups raiding the few stations. Slowly she gained experience, up to 2 1/2-stars in piloting.

There she still is. All those hundreds of killed Xenons inluding the roughly 30 hours under 3.1 did not promote her an additional single 1/3-star.

So I hardly see any progress with the pilots of my fighter-group, neither the veterans of pre 3.0 nor the new personel hired post 3.0. I therefore have rejected the idea that the new system of pilot's promotion workd only on 'new' pilots.

[Berhg]

....

So I hardly see any progress with the pilots of my fighter-group, neither the veterans of pre 3.0 nor the new personel hired post 3.0. I therefore have rejected the idea that the new system of pilot's promotion workd only on 'new' pilots.

I see the same thing happening with my combat groups. I have a bunch of groups ranging from carrier groups with several destroyers and a mess of fighters as well as frigate and corvette patrol and interdiction groups that have been in my current game for 150+ hours. None of them have reached 3 stars on their own. Most of them haven't gained a single pip.