Skill and training Feedback

[Gregorovitch]

plus his station managers were rubbish.

I have not found that to be a problem. I have three station managers who all started with 2* and now have either a straight 5* or nearly 5*. TBH I wouldn't be surprised if they nerfed manager level ups pretty soon.

[StoneLegionYT]

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.

Here Is Mine:
- 106 Hours Save never seta once (seta not installed)
- 4,234 personnel
- Average 1 Star 2/3
- 50,649 Personal Skills (mostly engineer)

Top 5 Outside of Engineers
Manager: 4 1/3 Stars
Pilot: 4 Star (Ratttlesnake that I personally use my main killing ship with tons of Xenon Stations, K's, etc under it's belt)
Manager: 3 Stars
Raptor: 2 2/3 Stars: This guy has killed so much stuff were talking about dozens of K's and I's and stations and more.....
Trader: 2 1/3 Stars: Been doing Ware Distro almost since the start of the save day and night never being touched.....


It's painful painful

[StoneLegionYT]

plus his station managers were rubbish.

I have not found that to be a problem. I have three station managers who all started with 2* and now have either a straight 5* or nearly 5*. TBH I wouldn't be surprised if they nerfed manager level ups pretty soon.

I might Alt F4 that day and change my review for the first time from positive to negative.

The devs have a horrible time breaking things when we ask them to make them better. We did not ask them to nerf or break leveling with Crew's we asked for more methods of leveling them so we can get ahead a bit if we choose.... Instead we were given the opposite a seminars system that blows I mean who is going sit around buying and farming low level seminar skills? I thought these were going be like 4-5 star skills for those we wanted to top up... Then they butchered the already broken leveling system more.

[mr.WHO]

I agree,
The one thing Egosoft is consitnetly make from bad to worse is crew managment, leveling and experience blockwalls and this is since X-Rebirth.

Current system could be usable if not that many thing are blocked by high skill and skill gain is blocked by rudiculous RNG.

I mean isn't this TOTALLY STUPID? I think every single negative review and complaint mention stupid AI, yet Egosoft decided to lock normal AI behind skill wall and every player first impresions is that X-unvierse is full of retarder pilots.
This is literally shot in the foot!


Having to manually apply seminars...multiple...for single pilot is a SLAP IN THE FACE!

I lovehow X4 improved from 1.0 to 3.0, but Crew leveling system is as trash as it was in 1.0.
For the love of God - just give us X3 style training academy - where I can dump 1'000 workforce, dump 1'000'000'000 Cr and have decent pilots/engineers/marines in 10 or 20 hours.

[Pesanur]

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.

The alternative to autotrade is already in the game, ware distribution only needs of two stars, and you not have any problem getting seminars in the stations to raise your captains piloting skill to two. Raising morale instead need of more patient, as your need to keep making manual trades until it raise to two stars. What we now need, is that captains with the ware distribution task, to slowly raise their global skill to three stars.

[Shehriazad]

So I just realized something I had totally missed before after someone pointed it out:

Morale affects overal * rating of your pilots.

I went ahead and checked my service personnel...and personnel with 2 2/3 Piloting and 4 1/3 Morale all count as 3*.

Why this is interesting? Because training up morale is rather easy and 2 2/3 Pilots are relatively cheap when compared to straight up 3* ones.

It seems that you will also sometimes get service personnel by default that has 2 2/3 Piloting...I have not checked all of my "older" ships yet but have already found 9 Pilots that count as 3* Pilot now even though they are service personnel.

I'm quite sure that this could be used quite effectively to train up 100+ pilots in a few hours if you straight up put 2 1/3 and 2 2/3 pilots you find and cram em in your service personnel for a few hours until their morale is high enough to bring up their average!
It DOES work the other way around as well, though. I have a 4* Captain with low morale so he only counts as 3*!
You can literally see their morale skill go up regularly when they have to constantly repair the ship they are on. *cough*


So if you're aiming to just have masses of 3* Pilots this is a rather fast way...convenient, too because you know where all your pilots will be coming from. I'm thinking about filling an Aux ship with them...

It ain't perfect but if they are on your own ship and it keeps taking damage, this will just passively happen and you can pick all of those boys up whenever you stumble upon one.
I mean sure you could also spend hundreds of millions on single Captains ;p

[Krisz984]

Hello.
I have a solution, its not good, but its an alternative.
If you put a trader/miner to station mining/trading, then you teleport or get to that ship.
Then if you take control of that ship, then give back to his pilot, it stucks in the auto trade/ auto mining function, and gets out from the station command.
I dont like to do this, but now i have maybe 10 auto trader and expert miner.

[Nort The Fragrent]

So far this hop in and hop out method seems to work !

As I do not have teleport, I have a Pegasus following the miner.
Jump out from the miner in space suite, call the Pegasus to my position and request to dock at Pegasus.
The miner is out auto mining ,
At last a way to get a 2* captain to auto mine.

The cool thing was the Kha’ak were having a battle at the time. So was a bit touch and go for a while !

[dtpsprt]

Hello.
I have a solution, its not good, but its an alternative.
If you put a trader/miner to station mining/trading, then you teleport or get to that ship.
Then if you take control of that ship, then give back to his pilot, it stucks in the auto trade/ auto mining function, and gets out from the station command.
I dont like to do this, but now i have maybe 10 auto trader and expert miner.

Interesting workaround,,, what happens if (actually when) you want to change the wares or the location?

[dtpsprt]

So I just realized something I had totally missed before after someone pointed it out:

Morale affects overal * rating of your pilots.

I went ahead and checked my service personnel...and personnel with 2 2/3 Piloting and 4 1/3 Morale all count as 3*.

Why this is interesting? Because training up morale is rather easy and 2 2/3 Pilots are relatively cheap when compared to straight up 3* ones.

It seems that you will also sometimes get service personnel by default that has 2 2/3 Piloting...I have not checked all of my "older" ships yet but have already found 9 Pilots that count as 3* Pilot now even though they are service personnel.

I'm quite sure that this could be used quite effectively to train up 100+ pilots in a few hours if you straight up put 2 1/3 and 2 2/3 pilots you find and cram em in your service personnel for a few hours until their morale is high enough to bring up their average!
It DOES work the other way around as well, though. I have a 4* Captain with low morale so he only counts as 3*!
You can literally see their morale skill go up regularly when they have to constantly repair the ship they are on. *cough*


So if you're aiming to just have masses of 3* Pilots this is a rather fast way...convenient, too because you know where all your pilots will be coming from. I'm thinking about filling an Aux ship with them...

It ain't perfect but if they are on your own ship and it keeps taking damage, this will just passively happen and you can pick all of those boys up whenever you stumble upon one.
I mean sure you could also spend hundreds of millions on single Captains ;p

That's one way to do it, Bring them to 4+ stars of morale, then give them up to 2 stars pilot seminars... Also, in accordance with Egosoft's holy mantra: "Just like real life" a Captain you DEMOTE into Service Crew will keep on raising his morale washing the dinner trays and serving the newly promoted Captain his coffee on the bridge... (in Real Life he/she would have shoved it's resignation deep down the Company's throat)

[dtpsprt]

Maybe both we, the players/customers and Egosoft have got this wrong all the way around.

We DO want an as close to Real Life simulation as it gets right?

So, in Real Life (as those who are or have been working know) No Company will hire incompetent staff. There fore they must all be good enough to fill their posts period.

Then again, in Real Life employees are being paid Salaries, which are a burden but, also, a limit to the Company for hiring too many and overexpanding. Also if they are not paid said salaries they DO strike!!!

So, let's have the "threat" of having our "Empires" crumble to shreds by workforce cost and let's have our personnel do what we get them for. Of course this means that ships will need a "reasonable" amount of employees to operate.

I believe that this will give an end to the "impasse" of Players wanting to enjoy their game (which is a Real Life Simulation in Space) and Egosoft (rightly) wanting to put some "barrier" in fast and "unjust" expansion of a player's Corp.

[grapedog]

- 28k personnel....
- Average is 2 stars
- 25ish - 5 Star Personnel, two are managers, the rest are captains.
- multiple pages, probably at least 100 or more 4.5 star personnel... mostly crewpeople

[dtpsprt]

- 28k personnel....
- Average is 2 stars
- 25ish - 5 Star Personnel, two are managers, the rest are captains.
- multiple pages, probably at least 100 or more 4.5 star personnel... mostly crewpeople

Quite impressive... Then again I have to ask you as I ask myself: Is all this "army" (or even without quotes) necessary?
So far (in about 500+hours) I have made more than 40 different starts (36 of them saved) trying to "optimize" my gameplay. The "worst" was my last Split Start, where I ended with 2 Rattlesnakes, 10 Dragons, 12 Chimeras, 3 Split mining M ships (sector) and 1 M Container (Autotrader) (can't remember the names of the models) All Fighting Captains at 4 stars!!! (lots of blood on their windscreens), just to take the "Head of the Split"!!! (TBH I wanted to board and capture him). Then started the "normal" part of the game and abandoned it cause it was too damn easy and, in this sense, meaningless (to me), even one of my Dragons brought me the Odysseus (I had sent him to explore Faulty Logic to "get rid" of him as surplus like a new King David)!!!
Now playing a "nice" and "conventional" Paranid Start, Got my PHQ and still trying my damnedest to get a +10 rep with HOP. Total personnel 30...

[Krisz984]

Hello.
I have a solution, its not good, but its an alternative.
If you put a trader/miner to station mining/trading, then you teleport or get to that ship.
Then if you take control of that ship, then give back to his pilot, it stucks in the auto trade/ auto mining function, and gets out from the station command.
I dont like to do this, but now i have maybe 10 auto trader and expert miner.

Interesting workaround,,, what happens if (actually when) you want to change the wares or the location?

You can change the location and the wares also.

[zakaluka]

I went ahead and checked my service personnel...and personnel with 2 2/3 Piloting and 4 1/3 Morale all count as 3*.

Why this is interesting? Because training up morale is rather easy and 2 2/3 Pilots are relatively cheap when compared to straight up 3* ones.

One problem with this is that a single bad trade will knock the overall rank back down to 2 stars. If I'm not mistaken, you get to keep the autotrade order, but the range does back down to 2.

That's one way to do it, Bring them to 4+ stars of morale, then give them up to 2 stars pilot seminars...

Not good enough - the pilot has to be 4 1/3 morale (rank 13), and 2 2/3 (rank \8) piloting
At a flat 2 star in piloting you cannot reach an overall score of 3.

[zakaluka]

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

He didn't use all the tools available to him. Most people here aren't using all the tools available to them. And I'm not referring to mods.

It's a very narrow way to look at things, this streamer who is a really average brand new player (albeit with lots of time in x3 ages ago) and doesn't optimize his approach, didn't manage to set up regional mining & trade. It does illustrate a problem, but not really with the mechanics. More with how the game presents its systems to the player.

Stations take a little time to set up but they're the most obvious way around star requirements for regional mining and regional trade. And. Ware distribution really isn't the critical path to leveling up pilots. If you leveled multiple guys to 3 star on ware distribution you would have to have like 20+ scout ships on ware distribution and leave SETA running for 48 hours realtime. Neither intuitive, nor the quickest way.

[TonyEvans]

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

He didn't use all the tools available to him. Most people here aren't using all the tools available to them. And I'm not referring to mods.

It's a very narrow way to look at things, this streamer who is a really average brand new player (albeit with lots of time in x3 ages ago) and doesn't optimize his approach, didn't manage to set up regional mining & trade. It does illustrate a problem, but not really with the mechanics. More with how the game presents its systems to the player.

Stations take a little time to set up but they're the most obvious way around star requirements for regional mining and regional trade. And. Ware distribution really isn't the critical path to leveling up pilots. If you leveled multiple guys to 3 star on ware distribution you would have to have like 20+ scout ships on ware distribution and leave SETA running for 48 hours realtime. Neither intuitive, nor the quickest way.

Eh, even getting high-star station managers can be a pain. I set a upa High-tech factory in a primary sector and it trains managers to 4/5 stars for me. I then have to move managers from there to other, lesser-profiting stations. Because stars are gained by profits, mostly. REfined Goods complexes, for example - they don't level up managers hardly at all.

[zakaluka]

Eh, even getting high-star station managers can be a pain.

A 2-star manager can mine and trade all of any faction's space. Choose any faction. Put a station in the middle, a range of 2 is enough to reach all of that faction's territory.

It takes about 3 hours with reasonable volume of trade (say, all 5 refinery modules attached to one station, medium miners, medium cargo ships) for a 2-star station manager to progress to 4-star.

Leveling station managers is really absurdly easy. What's annoying is the initial investment and construction time, since at the beginning of the game you can only buy basic refinery modules; and, because refinery stations cost about 3 times more than the miners you'll assign to them, but only earn about a third as much. But that's the critical path to setting up regional trade. The alternative is 300 hours of distribute wares (that's really about the expected time!). Best tool for the job is a station.

[Raevyan]

Eh, even getting high-star station managers can be a pain.

A 2-star manager can mine and trade all of any faction's space. Choose any faction. Put a station in the capital, a range of 2 is enough to reach all of that faction's territory.

It takes about 3 hours with reasonable volume of trade (say, all 5 refinery modules attached to one station) for any 2-star station manager to progress to 4-star.

Leveling station managers is really absurdly easy. What's annoying is the initial investment and construction time, since without rep you can only buy basic refinery modules. But that's the critical path to setting up regional trade.

You can get almost all modules without any rep by using an emp bomb

It is also not very expensive to get a station up and running. Theoretically you only need a S/M dock, a cross connection and a container storage. This is enough to set up buy/sell orders for all products you wanna trade regardless of pilot skills. The range is only limited by the manager skill and he will level up fast. This setup costs less than a million credits... compared to 2/3 star pilot prices...

Yeah pilot leveling change is really balanced and does prevent the player from fire and forget money printing from the start. Having to pay 10‘s millions for a 3 star pilot that is able to auto trade is even more balanced. Imagine how many stations one could build with 10m. That would be enough to cover the whole universe with 1 star pilots that basically do the same as auto trading/distribute wares and its Fire and Forget.

That attempt to balance pilot levels failed really hard...

[Andrey12y]

Yesterdray I hired for free a Paranid on my station ~ 2.7 engineering/2.7 morale. Average hiring price on NPC stations - 500k or even 800, dont remember.
It seems such pilots (2.7/2.7) most commonly an Argon (in my game at least). I suggest building argon biome on own station for free pilots... Or a station in Argon space.
Just one 2-star seminar and they get third star.