All staff and pilots start at zero. Each category of things a pilot can do has its entry level position that requires zero stars. This would look like this:
Navigation: (This category is not player assigned but increases naturally as NPC pilots fly their ships and is the only factor that counts towards the total star level of a pilot)
Pathfinding - 0 Stars (Allows the pilot to fly the ship and choose waypoint routes. Default level for all pilots)
Acceleration Control - 2 stars (Gives the pilot greater control of the ship while speeding up, slowing down, and exiting highway lanes, so that the ship stops at the desired location)
Travel Mode Efficiency - 4 stars (Gives the pilot bonuses to ship maneuverability, and decreases the time it takes the pilot to get to max speed while in travel mode)
Advanced Vectoring - 5 stars (Gives the pilot access to vectored curves while in-system of the player, allowing the pilot to fly along a curved axis instead of a segmented straight-line axis, giving the pilot much smoother control of their ship, also taking collision avoidance into account)(See this post concerning AI decision making)
Combat:
Escort ship - 0 stars (Default combat role. Allows any pilot to defend a ship)
Protect Station - 2 stars (Just like escort ship except now the ship will engage enemy targets within a certain range of the assigned station)
Patrol Sector - 4 stars (This gives a ship the ability to lead a fleet of ships in the defense of a sector. It will engage hostile targets within a certain radius)
Invade sector - 5 stars (This allows the player to assign ships to invade sectors on his/her behalf. The pilot will jump a fleet of ships into that sector and burn everything down in their path)
Mining:
Sector Automine - 0 stars (Default mining role. Allows any pilot to learn how to mine/sell minerals within a sector)
Region Automine - 2 stars (Allows the pilot to reach out 2 jumps from selected system for mining)
Galaxy Automine - 4 stars (Allows pilot to mine 1 specified mineral in any sector it chooses)
Advanced Automine - 5 stars (Allows a pilot to choose from any mining resource anywhere in the galaxy and auto sells at the best price)
Trading:
Station supply agent - 0 stars (Allows a pilot to learn trading by keeping a single station supplied with goods. Range for goods purchase is 4 jumps)
Shipyard construction supplier - 2 stars (Allows a pilot to automatically determine what materials a station is lacking for the construction of vessels at the assigned shipyard, keeping that shipyard supplied)
Galaxy Trader - 4 stars (Allows a pilot to find best buy/sell prices for up to 10 items which are set by the player within the galaxy)
Advanced Galaxy Trader - 5 stars (Allows a pilot to find best buy/sell prices for ALL ITEMS within the entire known galaxy)
So that's it in a nutshell. Please note that any level 0 pilot can do ANY level 0 task. A pilot should never come with "I can trade but I can't mine" by default. Defaulting ALL PILOTS to level 0 when you hire them, but allowing the to take part in ANY level 0 activity, will alleviate the massive outcries you have on the forums about mass migration of pilots and the insane task the players are experiencing trying to staff their ships. This system is easy and logical and would not take much for you to change, since it's a recent change added to the game, and it's all brand new to the X series. Now is the time to hammer out how it really works, and the system I am proposing here should be getting a +1 from the entire community. Egosoft, please table this idea.
Once again. All categories have level 0 tasks that ALL PILOTS can perform when they are hired. Experience in that task is then grown into a stronger piloting ability within that task genre. Note that navigation also naturally increases as the pilots star level increases. So this is what a pilot could eventually look like:
[THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A LEVELED PILOT]
Pilot star level - 3 (Feeds from pilots navigation level)
Navigation - 3
Combat - 0 stars (pilot has never engaged in combat or has ran from all situations)
Mining - 4 (pilot has been doing a lot of mining and is very proficient at it)
Trading - 1 (pilot has sold a lot of goods as a result of selling ores from being an autominer, but has never really bought/sold items for profit)
Despite having a 4 star in mining the pilot is only a 3 star pilot. This is because the pilots navigation is at level 3. But each category is tracked separately and given star levels associated with that specific task. This example pilot in question here would be a horrible combat pilot if switched into a combat ship since his career has been spent mainly as a miner and a tiny bit of trading in order to sell the goods.
One last thing I would like to note here is take a good look at the trading stars. The whole way traders do their thing really needs to be changed because "autotrade" just isn't cutting it. We need to be able to assign traders to keep individual stations nicely stocked up. If they sit there for a while waiting for a trade deal to come up, that's fine. At least when push comes to shove I can keep one or two of the stations there supplied. Doing a good job of supplying a shipyard might take several station level traders. But we really need the ability to set up CAG's for NPC shipyards. The micromanagement of the dozen items each shipyard needs in order to build a ship is overwhelming to micro manage, just to build a simple fighter. I don't know how in the world I"m supposed to build fleets of hundreds of ships if it takes hours of supplying a single station just to cut through all the pre-existing orders that are on waitlist so that my one small fighter can be built. I will go into this mechanic in detail in another post. Thanks for reading
