Star’s, & Hybernation. !

[Nort The Fragrent]

Star’s, & Hybernation. !

These star captains are a thorn in this game, not enough stars and the ship is useless. What is the point?

I know they level up,!, if you can get them to do anything, But why?

Why not when you buy a mining ship do you not get a suitable pilot for that ship? It is ludicrous. Inconvenient and stupid. Really spoils the game. In X3 you could buy your Demeter Miner, assign it to a station, and off it went. Did it’s intended job,,, and continued to do it. Well,, with no fuss. They were brilliant.

Now in X4 a new ship is pot luck what captain you get, a lottery, an inconvenience, a waist of time.

Ok a captain might not be that good to start, but at least let him go and do the job. Be it slow, and he levels up to be more efficient. But for him to be useless is so dumb…. (Frustrating, absurd, I am shaking my head in wonder at who thought this X4 protocol up, Did they test its functionality?) It would seem not. If they did !! Then who? Give yourself a kick up your own posterior.

The Property Owned List !

Wow, yet another magnificent failure,!,
Why is it jumping up and down all the time?
What for?
Click on something and the list snaps about as if to frustrate you as much as possible.
Where did my selection go?
Then when scrolling through the list I find it, (for a second) and then its gone again.

Why?

I do so like the potential of this X4 game, but it’s broken, incomplete, and lacks logic, Functionality, and pleasurable game play. It is fraught with frustration….

I am selling off all my fighters, shutting down my marginal stations. And putting the game into Hibernation. I will once in a while pop back in for a fly through, but nothing else. There is nothing to do. That is pleasing, just frustration.

So sleep tight.

See you in a year or two, as that is how long it will take ES to address the problems.

[MakerLinux]

These star captains are a thorn in this game, not enough stars and the ship is useless. What is the point?

I know they level up,!, if you can get them to do anything, But why?

That one is simple enough, because if you just got a 5-star pilot every time and went on to autotrading/automining/autocombat(?) with him/her, you wouldn't learn proper trading/mining/combat mechanics and tactics. In the beginning, it's necessary micromanagement.

I can however agree that's micromanagement that as your empire grows, gets really unwieldy and boring. Maybe you level up too and after some time your hired people have a minimum number of stars (say, 3)?

BUT the leveling up must be fixed too, it's terribly broken. A pilot should earn piloting experience when piloting, not only in combat. A trader should get trading and piloting experience when trading, not (only) management.

[Olfrygt]

Micromanagement ok, but X4 is still a space simulator. If i want to micromanage everything using a map i'm playing Stellaris.

[Kadatherion]

While the leveling system needs rebalancing, it also needs... a point. Any point.

Right now you either have pretty much useless pilots or usable ones. There's no real progression: a bit was introduced with the patch that limited trade trange relatively to how many stars a pilot has, but only between 3 and 5, still it's definitely not enough. Simply put, 1-2 stars pilots should be usable as well, in any intended field. Less effective, sure, getting experience and as such perks in time (much faster than they do now when trading, which is an incredible slog), but at least cohesive.

No, it makes no sense that for getting to 3 stars and finally be able to assign a captain to trading, I first have to assign him to a different task. It might, with a lot of imagination, make some sort of sense in-character (dunno, let's say mining is a more humble job, before being experienced and renowned enough to start haggling and looking at trade boards and whatnot), but it's just silly when it comes to sensible gameplay and management. If what I want right now is traders, I need to be able to hire traders, I can't be asked to micromanage every single pilot giving him tasks I don't currently need or care for, only to come back to him later: this might work at the very start of the game, when we are talking just a handful of ships, but after that it becomes simply unwieldly.

The result is what we all know and do: we exploit the game mechanic, by buying cheap ships in bulk and then reselling them just to keep those random pilots that happen to spawn at 3+ stars, then we assign them and forget about it alltogether. Which, in turns, bypasses the whole concept of a leveling system: it indeed currently has no point, so much we exploit the game to pretty much skip it. Make pilots usable at any level and then only spawn 1 star ones when we buy ships, limiting the more experienced hirable ones as random on station encounters and such while increasing differences between star levels (not just range, but, for instance, number of wares they can concurrently trade in etc), and then we are game. Otherwise, we could just as well scrap the leveling system alltogether, as it would not make any substantial difference as things are now.

[Nort The Fragrent]

The star system can work, like an apprentaship. An apprentice can do some work, but is limited as to what. But over time get’s better and more capable. Buying a new ship (Trader) getting a one star pilot makes sense, ( as long as they can go do all kinds of jobs ) then levels up the more he/she does. The 1 to 2 star pilots are an irrelevant part of the game at the moments and as said before a thorn.
Kadatherion is right, the micromanagement is ok as a beginner in the game, but once you start trading all over the place with fleets of ships it is unmanageable.

As for fighter pilots, the stars are stupid. Having a 1 star fighter pilot is suicide. No point. They need to be 3 at least.. If you want a fighter pilot to then go trading, he/she needs to retrain! As an apprentice (1 star) and vis-versa. That would stop the cheat of buying lots of small ships just for the 3 star pilots.

Air line pilots today have to do extensive retraining if they change the kind of plane they fly. That needs to be the same in game. You change ship, and you drop skill level. simple.

So a Trading pilot must reach level (5 star ) so when and if gets moved into a fighting ship and drops by 2 to a ( 3 star ) can still be an effective fighter pilot.

A fighter pilot of say 4 stars would drop by 2 if put into a trading ship. Then becoming a ( 2 star ) and thus is undergoing training.

So dropping a pilot skill level by 2 when changing ships might work! ( obviously 1 is the bottom limit )

Or could be a ( 0 star ) and be a ES grade pilot. (( what could you use him for? ))

Sorry ES, that was harsh, But funny.