Pilots skill

[M@ReK]

I must say that I have started being angry on the new approach to the pilot leveling system (I have created one of multiple threads about what is wrong with this system) now after just around 40 hours invested into the new playthrough I am starting to not only accept it but strangely... linking it, you know when something you get to easy you are not respecting it. In fact there are multiple ways of getting the money early on - I am using miners, the more you get more money is flowing steadily. I have one AutoTrader and the 3* pilot I got from the Fires of Defeat start, but this guy is not making much more than a Silicon Miner to be honest. What is more if you want quick income just hunt some Xenon, get the materials, craft SETA (it took me like 30 mins of fighting them to have all ingredients), setup some miners and you will be flowing with cash. What you just need to progress is to change the approach we got used to in X3 just sharing my new thoughts about it...

[dtpsprt]

I must say that I have started being angry on the new approach to the pilot leveling system (I have created one of multiple threads about what is wrong with this system) now after just around 40 hours invested into the new playthrough I am starting to not only accept it but strangely... linking it, you know when something you get to easy you are not respecting it. In fact there are multiple ways of getting the money early on - I am using miners, the more you get more money is flowing steadily. I have one AutoTrader and the 3* pilot I got from the Fires of Defeat start, but this guy is not making much more than a Silicon Miner to be honest. What is more if you want quick income just hunt some Xenon, get the materials, craft SETA (it took me like 30 mins of fighting them to have all ingredients), setup some miners and you will be flowing with cash. What you just need to progress is to change the approach we got used to in X3 just sharing my new thoughts about it...

TBH I love X4 but the pilot levelling system does need some looking into. I wouldn't mind if it was too hard (even extremely hard) to get experience on the pilots as long as it was not based on lottery so that we would know (or find out) what to do. People say (and it is true) that pilots have better chances of getting experience by fighting, then again there is no guarantee how much experience they get when (lottery) and of course they have to survive while all you can do about it is to send more meat to the grinder. What kind of Donald Trump approach is this? Later in the game you have massive need for experienced pilots as things get really bad with the Xenon and/or any faction you fight against (if you take sides, I never meddle in their wars, just profit from them) will you have them on time or you have "wasted" a good amount of days (and I mean game days) just to get snuffed out like that?

[duncan idaho]

I also find this to be a serious issue, and my largest peeve other than the usual irritating bugs. I have 120+ hours invested in my current save, with 50+ traders that I have been manually trading with for an absurd amount of time. I have something like 30 destroyers guarding Xenon gates and 20+ corvettes for dealing with pirates, as well as numerous station traders. I have 200M in the bank and about 20 stations. I have 20+ reputation with every faction other than the free families. I think it's fair to say this is the early endgame stage, and yet after all this time I still only have about 4x 3* pilots, and those are ones I leveled using seminars.

I appreciate the devs hate autotrading (but love stations which are for all intents and purposes also fire-and-forget passive money machines) and want to encourage us to do missions, but grinding seminars is *boring boring boring* . I hate it. Firstly they are uncommon, forcing us to spend time uselessly flitting around between stations and sectors like a drunk bee, and secondly they are not even remotely interesting. I'm a multi-millionaire mogul with combat capability to wipe out entire empires, but the best missions I can find that offer seminars are satellite coverage missions? And Ventures are not a solution either - RNG mobile game mechanics should not be gating progress in a singleplayer PC game, I'm sorry.

And why is all the hate poured upon autotraders only? Stations are a much more stable money-maker, and you can level a manager to 4* very quickly with no input, no need to grind out missions. Crew can level to 4* very quickly also. So why is passively leveling a pilot so hard? Are autotraders really that big of a problem that the entire game balance is crippled just to discourage players from using them? I feel there is a serious disconnect between the desires of the playerbase and how the devs view the balance of this game.

[dtpsprt]

I also find this to be a serious issue, and my largest peeve other than the usual irritating bugs. I have 120+ hours invested in my current save, with 50+ traders that I have been manually trading with for an absurd amount of time. I have something like 30 destroyers guarding Xenon gates and 20+ corvettes for dealing with pirates, as well as numerous station traders. I have 200M in the bank and about 20 stations. I have 20+ reputation with every faction other than the free families. I think it's fair to say this is the early endgame stage, and yet after all this time I still only have about 4x 3* pilots, and those are ones I leveled using seminars.

I appreciate the devs hate autotrading (but love stations which are for all intents and purposes also fire-and-forget passive money machines) and want to encourage us to do missions, but grinding seminars is *boring boring boring* . I hate it. Firstly they are uncommon, forcing us to spend time uselessly flitting around between stations and sectors like a drunk bee, and secondly they are not even remotely interesting. I'm a multi-millionaire mogul with combat capability to wipe out entire empires, but the best missions I can find that offer seminars are satellite coverage missions? And Ventures are not a solution either - RNG mobile game mechanics should not be gating progress in a singleplayer PC game, I'm sorry.

And why is all the hate poured upon autotraders only? Stations are a much more stable money-maker, and you can level a manager to 4* very quickly with no input, no need to grind out missions. Crew can level to 4* very quickly also. So why is passively leveling a pilot so hard? Are autotraders really that big of a problem that the entire game balance is crippled just to discourage players from using them? I feel there is a serious disconnect between the desires of the playerbase and how the devs view the balance of this game.

In the very early days of X4 it was ridiculously easy to make money, all you had to do was mine some crystals for 1-2 hours and you had some decent 10 millions. This lead to the abuse of buying 10 ships from the shipyard )or Wharf more likely, cheap ones, so that you would get 2-3 pilots with 3* plus, you would keep these pilots, sell the ret of the stuff. Since pilots and ship materials are not recycled this lead to the economy stalling, because of the waste the player did. I believe this is what the devs wanted to "correct" and limited the experience you would get at the shipyard to 1 1/2* and put a "barrier" just below the 3rd star that is almost impossible (or at least very hard) to overcome.
Myself, going for quality against quantity was actually ordering one ship in full shebang and the least experienced captain I ever encountered was 2 1/2 stars.
IMHO Egosoft got this whole thing wrong but they don't want to accept it (in public) by changing this absurd method of levelling (lottery) and putting the game in more even keel. After all we are each and all playing our own game in our own computer. If someone stalles his/hers economy bad for them, let them restart and restart until they put some brains on, not "manhandle" the players in a playstyle they don't want or even hate...

[pref]

I don't get the issue about skillup times, i just popped a drugplex less then 1.5 days ago, most of the captains are 2*, and 1 is into the 3rd already. All were fresh meat from the shipyard.
Another smaller plex produced 2*s in less then a game day. You get 3* in 2-4 game days if you never touch a seminar. Or you spend that 10sec per captain and cut off the day delay to get to 2* if 3* captains are your obsession.
How fast does it have to be?

Sending ships on point defence where enemies often move also works.

And how would a 3* captain be critical or mandatory? It's a nice to have feature for later game when your empire is complex enough to need more config options.

Also i just tested this, got a 0 star pilot gave him 1x basic and 2x 1star seminar and the guy is at 2 + 2/3*.
10 sec.. what on earth all these people complain about?

[Raevyan]

I don't get the issue about skillup times, i just popped a drugplex less then 1.5 days ago, most of the captains are 2*, and 1 is into the 3rd already. All were fresh meat from the shipyard.
Another smaller plex produced 2*s in less then a game day. You get 3* in 2-4 game days if you never touch a seminar. Or you spend that 10sec per captain and cut off the day delay to get to 2* if 3* captains are your obsession.
How fast does it have to be?

Sending ships on point defence where enemies often move also works.

And how would a 3* captain be critical or mandatory? It's a nice to have feature for later game when your empire is complex enough to need more config options.

Also i just tested this, got a 0 star pilot gave him 1x basic and 2x 1star seminar and the guy is at 2 + 2/3*.
10 sec.. what on earth all these people complain about?

You know some ppl don’t like to do boring missions to get those 3* seminars, others need more than a few pilots. To me Auto Trade isn’t a late game command. It’s more of an early/mid game thing. Auto Traders don’t even make you a lot of credits. I have miners running since 3.0 release and they’re still not 3*. I have station traders since 3.0 that are still not 3*. I also have Distribute Ware traders since 3.0 that are still not 3*. I’ve got 32b in my account and want to set up an economy with lots of small stations and DW/Auto Traders and need more than a few 2*+ pilots. Late game that is a tedious nightmare. (Oh before you say it, I’ve spend 2h looking for a skilled captain on stations, did not even found a single 2* one, then stopped bothering with that boring “gameplay”).

Aside from that, Egosoft does not want to reward automation with skill progression. Your drug plex, although on an extreme end, is just that. Fully automated with no player intervention (getting all those black marketeer is time intensive and boring too). Because you can exploit black marketeers with infinite demand you can keep your 300+ module plex running and ships constantly in the move. You level them by the sheer number of trades, that is only possible with small ships and the exploit of infinite demand that refreshes the second after the trade was done.

Also, parking a group of ships next to a xenon gate and let them defend is also no effort, no player intervention. I’m mostly complaining because the reasoning behind the leveling system that Egosoft gave us is completely garbage. “Automation should not reward skill gains” —> station managers level like crazy, xenon gate defense work quite well, invincible khaak stations with infinite spawning khaak can be exploited.

[Gavrushka]

I think Egosoft are gonna have to add an extra avenue from which more skilled pilots can emerge. - The issue as I see it is that significant numbers of players don't find an effective enough route to churn our personnel fit for a given purpose. It seems one glaring area of the sandbox where the tools aren't available to accommodate certain play styles.

And if there's one thing I've learned about Egosoft, it's that they do listen, but they've a very finite team and I imagine significant resources have been, and still are, allocated to working on the upcoming DLC.

*BUT* I really think a simple public 'we hear you' along with an assurance that the skilling system will be improved in due course would be beneficial. (If they've already done this, then consider everything complaining poked with a stick! )

I'm happy with the current system, but fully appreciate why others aren't. Now I've many factories filled with employees, it's fine for to wander around them and find skilled dudes for most roles free of charge. - I recognise for others, doing such a thing would be tedious, just as I'm sure they'd appreciate that I'd never consider hitting SETA to make a factory build quicker.

[Accuracy]

I don't get the issue about skillup times, i just popped a drugplex less then 1.5 days ago, most of the captains are 2*, and 1 is into the 3rd already. All were fresh meat from the shipyard.
Another smaller plex produced 2*s in less then a game day. You get 3* in 2-4 game days if you never touch a seminar. Or you spend that 10sec per captain and cut off the day delay to get to 2* if 3* captains are your obsession.
How fast does it have to be?

Sending ships on point defence where enemies often move also works.

And how would a 3* captain be critical or mandatory? It's a nice to have feature for later game when your empire is complex enough to need more config options.

Also i just tested this, got a 0 star pilot gave him 1x basic and 2x 1star seminar and the guy is at 2 + 2/3*.
10 sec.. what on earth all these people complain about?

Nothing in offense but you sound extremely ignorant. You have 8+ pages of people describing exactly what their problem is. The least you can do is act less arrogant and show some respect to them by at least bothering to read half of the complaints

[sh1pman]

@pref they’re never going to get 3* in piloting through trading, and the only way for a fighter pilot to get 3* is to make “hard” kills, that is killing enemy capships while in an S or M ship. And you need to kill *a lot* of capships. All other kills are considered “easy” and don’t give any progression past 2 2/3*. That’s what I observed in my game. Why Ego built such a system and gated some basic AI behaviours behind it is beyond my understanding. I guess the only intended way to level your pilots is through seminars, and any other “progression through activity” is in fact unintended and accidental.

[Alan Phipps]

@ Accuracy: pref just posted their personal experience in the game and their opinions without insulting any one else. I would be grateful if you would restrict yourself to doing the same. Typing 'Nothing in offence' before being offensive is not a defence.

@ pref: There is no need for you to respond further on the matter of insults but you can of course respond to the counter-arguments being raised.

[Raevyan]

@pref they’re never going to get 3* in piloting through trading, and the only way for a fighter pilot to get 3* is to make “hard” kills, that is killing enemy capships while in an S or M ship. And you need to kill *a lot* of capships. All other kills are considered “easy” and don’t give any progression past 2 2/3*. That’s what I observed in my game. Why Ego built such a system and gated some basic AI behaviours behind it is beyond my understanding. I guess the only intended way to level your pilots is through seminars, and any other “progression through activity” is in fact unintended and accidental.

And even when he gets hard kills It comes down to a pretty low chance of rng which is even more hilarious.

[jlehtone]

We have full spectrum: content, happy, and not ok:

I'm happy with the current system, but fully appreciate why others aren't.

I don't get the issue about skillup times, i just popped a drugplex less then 1.5 days ago, most of the captains are 2*, and 1 is into the 3rd already. All were fresh meat from the shipyard.

@pref they’re never going to get 3* in piloting through trading

It is unclear whether the "into the 3rd already" contradicts with "never going to get 3*" or not.

We can guess what happens in task priorization when everybody is not unhappy.

[GCU Grey Area]

I quite like the current system. The way it works means that the average pilot ends up with average stats, which seems fair enough to me & if I want better pilots I have to put in a little bit of effort to train them. Really don't mind doing that, indeed gives me a bit of pleasure selecting a specific individual to receive the training.

Mostly I get my candidates for further training from among the fighter pilots aboard my carrier. They seem end up as gung-ho maniacs just by doing their standard job (Interception), generally ending up with average piloting (around 2-3*) & high (4*+) Morale. I pick those with the best Morale & use seminars to finish their training before assigning them a destroyer to command. Seminars I find relatively easy to obtain & am acquiring them at a faster rate than I use them.

Mostly get my seminars from guild missions & find I can mostly delegate the task to other ships loaded with the right stuff (e.g. sats), so completing the mission is as easy as opening the map & telling another ship where to go & what to do when it arrives. If there's anything which actually requires personal involvement (e.g. the mining missions) it's just a matter of judging whether the reward for that mission (& any subsequent missions in the chain) is worth my time. If it is I'll do it, if not abort the mission & do a different one.

[dtpsprt]

I quite like the current system. The way it works means that the average pilot ends up with average stats, which seems fair enough to me & if I want better pilots I have to put in a little bit of effort to train them. Really don't mind doing that, indeed gives me a bit of pleasure selecting a specific individual to receive the training.

Mostly I get my candidates for further training from among the fighter pilots aboard my carrier. They seem end up as gung-ho maniacs just by doing their standard job (Interception), generally ending up with average piloting (around 2-3*) & high (4*+) Morale. I pick those with the best Morale & use seminars to finish their training before assigning them a destroyer to command. Seminars I find relatively easy to obtain & am acquiring them at a faster rate than I use them.

And when exactly did you get that carrier? In game days that is. There are (lots of) people that need about a week or more to complete a game day since they are working or seriously occupied otherwise (i.e. caring for someone or studying). So if you tell me it took you 4 game days that means a month of grinding for those people. Then how many days did it took the carrier pilots to progress? This, as a matter of real perspective.

Then you can notice that the "complaint" mostly involves early to mid game. After you have made your first 10 billion you can easily just fork meat in the grinder and come on top... Reminds me the Trench War of WW 1 (Real life, not a game.... google it)

Mostly get my seminars from guild missions & find I can mostly delegate the task to other ships loaded with the right stuff (e.g. sats), so completing the mission is as easy as opening the map & telling another ship where to go & what to do when it arrives. If there's anything which actually requires personal involvement (e.g. the mining missions) it's just a matter of judging whether the reward for that mission (& any subsequent missions in the chain) is worth my time. If it is I'll do it, if not abort the mission & do a different one.

I do agree that this is the best way to do it, even though if one bothers to take a look in the mission descriptions outside of guild missions you can find (rare to be honest) missions that give 2, even 3 star Piloting and Managerial Seminars.

[GCU Grey Area]

And when exactly did you get that carrier? In game days that is. There are (lots of) people that need about a week or more to complete a game day since they are working or seriously occupied otherwise (i.e. caring for someone or studying). So if you tell me it took you 4 game days that means a month of grinding for those people. Then how many days did it took the carrier pilots to progress? This, as a matter of real perspective.

Then you can notice that the "complaint" mostly involves early to mid game. After you have made your first 10 billion you can easily just fork meat in the grinder and come on top... Reminds me the Trench War of WW 1 (Real life, not a game.... google it)

Honestly don't remember precisely when I got the carrier (months ago). It was however still in the phase of the game when I had to be careful how I spent my money & still had plot missions to complete which required vast amounts of cash. At that stage pretty much every credit was still derived from a fleet of 6 manually controlled freighters. Think I'd started building my first station by that point, but I was still putting more credits into it's construction than I was getting back in profits. Think I had 2 destroyers at that point & had decided they could probably do with a bit of fighter support, so got the fleet a carrier rather than a third destroyer.

As for how long it took the fighters to level up - probably around 1 day in total, though wasn't keeping close track of pilot skills at the time (could potentially have happened sooner, just know at the end of it I had some decently experienced pilots). Fighter pilots primarily levelled up by helping to defend construction sites near gates to Xenon infested sectors, while my construction vessel built defence platforms for the Argons behind my fleet. Each platform took an evening session to build (around 3-4 hours) & fighting was in waves, but fairly continuous. Think I'd built 6 such defence platforms before I decided I had the Xenon sufficiently well contained. Hence the estimate of roughly 1 day total fighting time for fighter pilots to hit their effective max level for on the job learning.

[Clownmug]

Is this really that hard for people? I'm having no issues creating 3-star pilots by just following the steps below.

1) Assign work to fully crewed ships: explore, patrol, sector miner, station miner, station trader
2) Buy basic pilot seminars and 1-star pilot seminars from trader corners
3) Earn 2-star pilot seminars from missions
4) Check personnel management menu for employees with 3 stars morale
5) Give seminars to those employees
6) Reassign employees as needed

Alternatively, I could just complete guild missions with Magnetar or Chthonios as reward that come with 3-star captains.

[jlehtone]

There are (lots of) people that need about a week or more to complete a game day since they are working or seriously occupied otherwise (i.e. caring for someone or studying). So if you tell me it took you 4 game days that means a month of grinding for those people.

If you play six nights a week, four hours per night, then you get 24 hours -- one day, per week.
Four hours per night seems quite a lot, when you are otherwise occupied too.
It took me almost three months to get a Raptor and sufficient wing.

Technically, one does not need a Carrier for Intercept wings; almost any barge will do as a "Controller".
It is the fighters/trainers that one has to gather.

[pref]

@pref they’re never going to get 3* in piloting through trading,

That's definitely false, i have plenty 3* who only gained stars via trading. Actually the guy whom i was talking about, that got a basic and 2 1* seminars has already 3* in piloting since because i sent him to DW, but maybe i got extremely lucky with him.
Just using 1* seminars i now created 20-30 2+2/3* pilots, curious how long they take to level via normal activities.

And i still don't get why would 3* guys be mandatory for anything?

[dtpsprt]

There are (lots of) people that need about a week or more to complete a game day since they are working or seriously occupied otherwise (i.e. caring for someone or studying). So if you tell me it took you 4 game days that means a month of grinding for those people.

If you play six nights a week, four hours per night, then you get 24 hours -- one day, per week.
Four hours per night seems quite a lot, when you are otherwise occupied too.
It took me almost three months to get a Raptor and sufficient wing.

Technically, one does not need a Carrier for Intercept wings; almost any barge will do as a "Controller".
It is the fighters/trainers that one has to gather.

You got my point exactly to the dot. If you add absurd load/reload and save times, these 4 hours of playing easily translate to 5 or more. Then the game day can easily become a week and a half? Maybe more?

Then comes the elephant in the room: Who will invest this amount of time in grind to start getting meaningful results? The game locks a huge amount of people out, leaving only dedicated affictionados (like me for example) and people with too much time to spare and huge amounts of patience (a rare breed), waiting to see results for their efforts.

This inevitably results in Egosoft remaining a small Indie producer, dependent on the likes of Steam to sell (can't forget my disappointment the first time I entered the Egosoft site and was directed to another, I believe it was Gamesgate or something, to get my game...), so now we have to be loading spyware (What I call Steam and the likes mainly because they are) to play

[dtpsprt]

And i still don't get why would 3* guys be mandatory for anything?

3* is mandatory for advanced auto mining for example. Two autominers operating in a sector will just saturate demand even to a standstill in less than 3 in game hours (even one can do it), making this whole thing senseless (especially in early game) because they will have barely make their buying price return. If they are able to trade in more sectors than one this does not happen and your initial investment turns out profits that you desperately need in early game (less than 1 game day).