Skill and training Feedback

[mr.WHO]

Egosoft, could you allow our crew to have a chance to survive ship destruction with escape pods? We'd need a new menu and list for unassigned crew. They dont need to physically 'be' anywhere, just have a timer for assigning them implying that they are travelling? There is even potential here for a new rescue stranded crew mission? (Escape pod didnt work/ran out of fuel).

Escape pod mechanics would be great!
- generic missions to save NPC pods.
- making some dedicated S&R ships like Callisto (which is otherwise useless)

[Axeface]

I think making skilled crew harder to obtain has definately made them feel more precious. This is a really good thing. Plus, less ship spam is needed

If anything, more spam is needed given that most of your fleets will be at 1 star and the enemies will almost certainly be not.

If you're playing OOS with equal fleets, you're probably going to lose unless you teleport in and handle every battle yourself which just negates the whole point of OOS combat.

It just makes you have to spend more time making the fleets and the battles more important.

[Axeface]

What if we could click the star rating of a pilot to apply a seminar? With it showing us how much they will improve? Then the pilot comms us quickly saying "training in progress!" or something? Current implimentation is rudimentary at best.

[chew-ie]

Before 3.0:
Buying 20 trade ships with one pilot each, killing 15 pilots because of lack of skill (exaggeration - of course they were just sacked ). The surviving 5 were sent into open space [all by their own] with the sole purpose to earn credits. Slavery.

With 3.0:
1 pilot is recruited. The pilot is given beginners task and the occasional off-the-job training to hone his/her/it's skill. Upon graduation, a well equipped trading vessel along with an escort [just the usual: a destroyer, a full fighter complement, a support vessel] is given and the new trader is send to work in a fully secured part of the known galaxy. He/She/It is alive ever since and a productive member of the universe.

= the world [space] is now a better place, human/aliens do matter again.

[tomchk]

Egosoft, could you allow our crew to have a chance to survive ship destruction with escape pods? We'd need a new menu and list for unassigned crew. They dont need to physically 'be' anywhere, just have a timer for assigning them implying that they are travelling? There is even potential here for a new rescue stranded crew mission? (Escape pod didnt work/ran out of fuel).

Escape pod mechanics would be great!
- generic missions to save NPC pods.
- making some dedicated S&R ships like Callisto (which is otherwise useless)

Yes, please give our pilots (and us, in another way) escape pod mechanics like this!

[mr.WHO]

Escape pods for bigger ships, spacesuits for fighters.

Escape pods could even be a new deployable since most of ships has plenty of space for these.

[Alm888]

While I welcome the changes to initial pilot stats, the mission rewards right now are poorly set up.
Right now missions reward seminars quite often (almost half of the time).

The problems are:
1) most of the time it is either basic, or 1-star seminar, which can be bought freely for 100 Cr and 200 Cr respectively;
2) most of the time these missions feature seminar as a sole reward, which (combined with point 1) effectively means the reward for a mission is 100Cr.
Almost insultingly low rewards for (often) a lot of work.

I think with current availability of basic and 1-star seminars from traders EgoSoft should remove junk seminar rewards from missions and increase 2-star and above seminars probability (possibly reserving 4-star seminars to final rewards for guild missions).

[Gavrushka]

Loving this thread.

Loving the ideas.

But now I've so many 'must haves' in this game, I don't think I'll ever now be able to play it without grumbling they ain't there yet!

[tomchk]

While I welcome the changes to initial pilot stats, the mission rewards right now are poorly set up.
Right now missions reward seminars quite often (almost half of the time).

The problems are:
1) most of the time it is either basic, or 1-star seminar, which can be bought freely for 100 Cr and 200 Cr respectively;
2) most of the time these missions feature seminar as a sole reward, which (combined with point 1) effectively means the reward for a mission is 100Cr.
Almost insultingly low rewards for (often) a lot of work.

I think with current availability of basic and 1-star seminars from traders EgoSoft should remove junk seminar rewards from missions and increase 2-star and above seminars probability (possibly reserving 4-star seminars to final rewards for guild missions).

Extremely good point. I haven't been doing basically any missions even in a new start because the seminars aren't worth the effort and (unrelated to thread) I still don't see any missions based on "real things," like actual shortages or actual attacks. I don't mind having missions that aren't "real" and just use mass traffic, but I thought we'd have some triggering of missions from shortages, attacks, and such. Perhaps we should start a thread about that issue.

[Rimak]

I'm gonna be waiting for the mod to the seminar system.
I really like the change. However, it is too heavy-handed in the sense that I need to babysit every single pilot.
I like X because I have the freedom to play it my way. With this change, I am forced to do missions/grind for seminars. Otherwise, I cannot do trading, empire building.
I had no problems with the previous system, I just wanted seminars to do something, but now they are mandatory.
Hopefully modding will help.

[Split-knot]

Have anyone noticed their pilots leveling management instead of piloting? I have 3 ships all maxed out at 2 piloting after I gave them seminars, and I figured that after all the manual trades I ordered them to do they would at least gained 1/4 of a star, but no, instead they're all getting manager stars.

[Alm888]

Have anyone noticed their pilots leveling management instead of piloting? I have 3 ships all maxed out at 2 piloting after I gave them seminars, and I figured that after all the manual trades I ordered them to do they would at least gained 1/4 of a star, but no, instead they're all getting manager stars.

I believe they learn management because (as a tooltip points this out) management helps with trading decision-making. Pilots have been gaining some basic management even in 2.60 (I believe it caps out at 2 stars). I think it is parallel learning.
Of course, EgoSoft commentary on exact learning mechanisms and conditions is always welcome, but they are probably busy changing the rules every single update and can not write up-to-date info.

[pref]

it seems that low level pilots possess a downgraded AI, notably in combat. For instance low level pilots will have a delay before firing their missiles or using the destroyer batteries compared to high-level ones. Not only is it frustrating from a gameplay perspective, but it also makes little sense immersion wise.

This is a huge issue from day 1 since XR, that the whole concept is way too lazy. Skill system just removes features that had to be implemented anyway for the game to be usable, there are no bonus actions or capabilities that come with skills.
There are lots of parameters that they could increase from price margin through mod usage, crew skill gain rate to ship params like crew capacity or weapon compatibility (think there is some variety with split now?).

Skills in lots of cases just remove some intentional AI deficiencies, which does not feel like an improvement and is not noticeable (esp with "all" the info available regarding commands and skill impact in the docs).
Just frustration is increased with low skill employees without any solid knowledge why that guy can't fly a ship. This might be acceptable if generally AI was so perfect that there was a buffer to scale down.
Skills should turn an employee from usable to having visible bonuses that matter.

The other issue is when the skills' results are visible it usually just means not being to execute commands that are the reason to get that guy in the first place.

Then training activities are not aligned with the "profession" we are training for at all.
Need traders? Organize a huge fleet with many pilots attacking something - since only pilots will gain relevant skills not the crew. The 2 activities have nothing to do with each other, and is a no-go for people preferring a peaceful trader's game.
Need managers? Hire miners....?

Either skill increase needs to happen in roles appropriate for the trained skills so a trader should skillup relatively quickly via trading activities, managers with tasks related to station housekeeping etc. No clue how this works in 3.0 but before getting the third star via just trading simply never happened for me.

[tomchk]

it seems that low level pilots possess a downgraded AI, notably in combat. For instance low level pilots will have a delay before firing their missiles or using the destroyer batteries compared to high-level ones. Not only is it frustrating from a gameplay perspective, but it also makes little sense immersion wise.

This is a huge issue from day 1 since XR, that the whole concept is way too lazy. Skill system just removes features that had to be implemented anyway for the game to be usable, there are no bonus actions or capabilities that come with skills.
There are lots of parameters that they could increase from price margin through mod usage, crew skill gain rate to ship params like crew capacity or weapon compatibility (think there is some variety with split now?).

Skills in lots of cases just remove some intentional AI deficiencies, which does not feel like an improvement and is not noticeable (esp with "all" the info available regarding commands and skill impact in the docs).
Just frustration is increased with low skill employees without any solid knowledge why that guy can't fly a ship. This might be acceptable if generally AI was so perfect that there was a buffer to scale down.
Skills should turn an employee from usable to having visible bonuses that matter.

The other issue is when the skills' results are visible it usually just means not being to execute commands that are the reason to get that guy in the first place.

Then training activities are not aligned with the "profession" we are training for at all.
Need traders? Organize a huge fleet with many pilots attacking something - since only pilots will gain relevant skills not the crew. The 2 activities have nothing to do with each other, and is a no-go for people preferring a peaceful trader's game.
Need managers? Hire miners....?

Either skill increase needs to happen in roles appropriate for the trained skills so a trader should skillup relatively quickly via trading activities, managers with tasks related to station housekeeping etc. No clue how this works in 3.0 but before getting the third star via just trading simply never happened for me.

Agreed--these are the two main points I've made to Bernd, and I think he and the team are listening. They at least have (1) reduced the downgrading of flight AI (perhaps it should be removed completely and have bonuses for stars instead). We still need much better (2) alignment between desired role of pilot and how to train them.

[Alm888]

Come to think of it…
I kinda miss old (X: Rebirth) skillset. I think the decision to simplify skills was a mistake. Now there is no difference between combat ace and humble merchant: both require only one skill (piloting) plus "morale".

Previously (in 2.60HF2 at least), the only skill relevant to jobs was "piloting". Even 5 stars in "morale" (never seen that) won't enable a 2-star "pilot" auto-trade (or 0-star pilot to use any formation other than "line abreast"). Now, with 3.0, EgoSoft finally fixed this and it is a combination of skills, that determines capabilities, so they are moving in the right direction.

With "X: Rebirth" skillset EgoSoft could make combat pilots dependent on "combat" (absent in X4), "piloting" and "morale" while traders could use "piloting" ("navigation" in X:R terms), "management" and "morale". This way we could still make a half-decent trader out of ex-station manager without sending him/her out to fight Xenon (and most probably die in the process given her/his 0 stars in "piloting").

[tomchk]

Come to think of it…
I kinda miss old (X: Rebirth) skillset. I think the decision to simplify skills was a mistake. Now there is no difference between combat ace and humble merchant: both require only one skill (piloting) plus "morale".

My concern with making crew any more complex is that I think it would bloat saves even more and extend save/load times, which are already too long. I'm actually avoiding full crews right now in the hopes my game will perform better. If anyone has any data or input on the effect of crew on this, I'd love to know! It's just easy to have many thousands of crew, and the game tracks so much about them.

[Alm888]

My concern with making crew any more complex is that I think it would bloat saves even more and extend save/load times, which are already too long. I'm actually avoiding full crews right now in the hopes my game will perform better. If anyone has any data or input on the effect of crew on this, I'd love to know! It's just easy to have many thousands of crew, and the game tracks so much about them.

Well, EgoSoft can always ditch "boarding" (useless stat no one except player really uses and even players won't probably miss it) by replacing it for "combat".

[pref]

I'm actually avoiding full crews right now in the hopes my game will perform better.

Not necessary, NPCs won't affect performance much apart from when they are rendered on screen.
Things that do matter a lot are things like pathing, turret aim, collision detection and such. In combat or dense areas with many ships or stations where performance tends to drop NPCs are just a stat more or less.

Well, EgoSoft can always ditch "boarding" (useless stat no one except player really uses and even players won't probably miss it) by replacing it for "combat".

Boarding is the only skill that is executed okay, works, and has obvious and balanced benefits. I'd rather ditch all but this skill tbh

[Cormyr]

Do pilots even level up without seminars? My auto miner and (manual) trader didn't get 1/3 of a star after several hours now. The ship crew on the other hand has gained several stars by now.

[tomchk]

I'm actually avoiding full crews right now in the hopes my game will perform better.

Not necessary, NPCs won't affect performance much apart from when they are rendered on screen.
Things that do matter a lot are things like pathing, turret aim, collision detection and such. In combat or dense areas with many ships or stations where performance tends to drop NPCs are just a stat more or less.

To clarify, I meant perform better in terms of save/load times. I'd be interested if anyone can quantify the impact of lots of crew on those.