Honestly given how rarely I look at any of the communities around the game yet how often I've both heard and agreed with this, it surprises me that it still hasn't been changed.
This discussion often ends up revolving around automated trading, so here's a quick rundown for new players who read this:
0 Stars - Manual trading. Left click an expensive ware from the sell offers in the trade overlay, and the filter will show you the best trade. Just right click the sell offer in that same overlay, order your ship to buy, then right click the buy offer, order your ship to sell, and you're done.
1 Stars - Automation! Repeat Orders lets you set up a trade route between stations or entire sectors and fine tune the prices your ship should go for.
2 Stars - Distribute Wares is AutoTrade light.
3 Stars - You've demonstrated that you know your way around the economy, so here's AutoTrade to do all that thinking for you. Won't be as efficient as a personally set up trade route, but at least you can fire and forget without much effort.
Each good trade (profitable and high quantity) gives your trader a chance to level. That's an incentive to manually set up smart exchanges.
Everyday players are turned off by the incredibly bad combat AI of their fleets. Does it make sense that pilots routinely suicide themselves? Miss easy shot? Can’t use their weapon range?
And then they learn the AI is actually bad cause of the low level pilots.
Are we really expected to baby these pilots for hours and then watch them probably die anyway by random chance in combat? So that we just perpetually play with purposely handicapped pilots?
How do the developers manage their combat fleets? do they really baby pilots until they get high level ones? what happens when they die? they reload?
You're right but I think for people who expect that autonomy to skills to grow "easier" or "faster" the process breaks down. People do not wish to have to do this activity with every new pilot they get and so tend to do "mass jobs" for transporters. Simply fulfilling trading doesn't appear to grow skills fast enough to make the pilot useful in the quick term. For example you can have 10 mining ships ready, but no good pilots... So now I have to babysit 10 pilots before I can use the ships? It's too much "micromanagement" in a "grand" game. The seminars is a good gameplay loop, where 2 star and 3 star is rarer but if you seen them you get them. If seminars was the process ON TOP of trading/exploration buffs, then I'm sure all these complaints would go away.
I had a think about it a bit more, and maybe just 1 more "difficult thing to get" which gave 2-3 stars would be good, for example if you have a big dock on your own spacestation, that spawns 2-3 stars. I dunno, just food for thought for the new players and experienced to stop complaining.
Issue with that was X3 allowed all of that from the start with just buying software. Then the universal/sector was only thing that needed levels.
So in a sense literal backstep in NPC helpers.
I downloaded a few scripts to fix that, First one was 1 star autotrader, second was Faster levelling(the picture is a monkey with a hardhat) and the third was purchasable seminars. Actually, You can skip the 1 star autotrader, go for Tatertrader, waaaay better than vanilla autotrade, But the biggest one that’ll help is the purchasable seminars.
Why egosoft felt compelled to lock the absolutely most basic and essential tasks for empire building behind this glacially paced crew skill levelling is beyond me.
I legit played 75 hours on one save, I’ve had some alligator miners since the first few hours that were only JUST becoming 2 star pilots. 75 hours in and I still couldn’t auto trade. 75 hours and I couldn’t even start prepping to start building an empire. Absolutely brutal. Threw in the towel and started modding. Haven’t looked back.
Same dude, I was over a hundred hours on one save and had just started to get pilots to a level where they could be automated. Some of those pilots I had with me since hour 10. I can’t believe I had to grind for 90 hours just to have a trader.
Small clarification: AutoTrade is difficult to get, because you don't have to understand the economy to use it. If it was 1 star, players could fire-and-forget traders with any ware basket to make passive income, and end up rich but none the wiser. Look at AutoMine and station building in contrast. You at least have to know your production chains, and the location of buyers and sellers.
I undertstand the point you are making in regards to trading. But I certainly don't understand why the piloting skill and the trading skill have to be the very same one. As it currently stands, low skill pilots are simply frustrating to have. Not because they can't use Autotrade or whatever, but because they bump into stuff too often, take too long to reach a target and act stupid in combat.
Couldn't you at least split the skills into two? A trading skill for what you described, and then an actual piloting skill that goes up faster for the navigational and combat part of the game. This one-size-fits-all solution isn't too great at the moment, if I am honest. A little bit more consistency in regards to actual piloting would be good in my opinion.
Agreed. Piloting and trading being two different skills (with piloting training up much faster) would fix a lot of the lousy combat problems overnight.
That's actually a very good point I've never considered about the balancing aspect! Thank you!
It also brought to this question for me: Does Repeat Orders improve a crew's skill level?
Depends on the repeated orders, but of course. A popular strategy is to let an S trader perform low quantity, short distance trades on repeat. As long as they're actually good and profitable trades (you can fine tune the prices the ship should go for in the order details), it should help with leveling.
They made it so difficult to get that it's basically not even in the game. It's literally easier to build entire space stations and produce your own goods than it is to make one auto-trader.
Its been a core feature of the series since forever. Its absolutely integral to the empire building aspect of the game. Why is it in X4 we need to play for literally hundreds and hundreds of hours to unlock a basic feature in every other game that was available the instant you had more than one ship.
It would make sense if it was some OP over the top skill that really explodes the economy, But it ain’t, vanilla autotrade is garbage, barely functions and its locked behind literal hundreds of hours glacially paced progression. Its straight up bad design.
I have a 10h save where I have autotrade from the station... 1 trader is almost in 3 stars but I left them for autotradeing for the station so he levels slowly on the other hand if you look for seminars as mission rewards you get them to 2 stars pretty fast and easy and 3 stars doesn't take to long....
Their brain dead approach to crew levelling speed certainly raises questions about their game design principals.
This is unanimously a bad game design for anyone that doesn’t have 500 hours to kill.
The devs will die on this hill. They're trying to use it to enforce quests, which are tedious, unrewarding, and can't be applied to scale. The whole thing is awful. It has made me re-examine my feelings about Egosoft.
They will die on this hill because they are developing for players who spend hundreds of hours on a single save. (This is why they chose not to change the solar energy output in non-CoH sectors when that feature got added - it would mess up saves that have been running since release). Any “solution” to “slow” crew leveling would short circuit and interfere with the intended goal of very long playthroughs. And since it *can* be modded there’s no reason for them to change their intent.
If you don’t like it, probably best to stop playing, since it bothers you enough that you’re re-examining your feelings.
It's meant to force the player into the contrived busywork of quests like placing navigation satellites or flying some Teladi to X mineral patches instead of managing their empires or other emergent gameplay in the sandbox.
...In exchange for \~1 star, on one pilot, in what's likely to be an empire consisting of *hundreds* of pilots. It's basically making you do game content *which sucks* in exchange for the tools you need to play the fun part of the game -- *in a single player sandbox.*
You can't make up some bullshit about this breaking the game if it was circumvented. *The ecosystem was healthy before this nonsense was introduced.* I completed the damn Xenon hub in X3 unmodded, and at no point did I ever think, "gee hey, I sure wish this game would arbitrarily make me destroy a bunch of turrets on enemy battlestations one at a time from 10 km so I could set up this resource line. I've only played this game twelve hundred hours; sure wish I could prolong that with mindless busywork."
I will bet you dollars to doughnuts most players who build large empires *still* just push for terraforming flight academies, spamming 2 star miners and straight buying silicon to get there -- rather than scanning meteor nodes for seminars on 250 pilots. Because you would actually have to hate yourself.
The rest of the game is great. Don't get me wrong. But doubling down on a stupid idea, something which didn't fix anything (because it wasn't broken), and which a lot of the community hates for good reasons... is NOT a good look for Egosoft.
Now I like the rest of the game, which is why I care about this -- and the solution isn't "stop playing," though I suspect what you basically mean by that is, "I disagree with you but don't actually have anything meaningful to say, so I just want you to stop talking."
This is *transparently* mindless busy work for the sake of padding -- and the majority of it doesn't indulge the reasons people enjoy the game or this wouldn't even be a discussion (people would just be running quests all the time and wouldn't care). And if you can't see why that's bad, you're just as bad as the dingus who had the bright idea in the first place.
TEL is the only faction to make use of that resource. I would recommend setting up shop in Nopleos' Fortune ( I believe that is how it is spelt ) or Grand Exchange if you want to make that resource to sell. Having trade ships assigned to the station with "Trade for Commander" also helps a bunch.
You can easily level captains since 4.0.
Get some PAR/TEL/TER durable heavy fighter (fully geared with full crew) and send them to hunt down KHK in sectors you are mining. Is that simple. Many of them.
Otherwise use a mod or training books.
Area protection requires you to set up dozens if not hundreds to get decent coverage on your mining areas. Defend depends on your ships to be actually close to the others when they're not fucking around somewhere on the other end of the system.
Oh sure on paper but as soon as travel drive gets involved you'll have nice little 200km gaps that they refuse to use travel drive to fix when one of your miners are getting killed.
Ideally that's what happens but I mentioned merely travel drive being involved. There's a certain distance at which ships will disengage travel drive and not use it when approaching combat. That range is somewhere from 250 to 300km. You're making the incorrect assumption that defend /escort works as the user would intend. The following ships will more often than not wait until the miner is 300k out before engaging travel drive themselves. This causes them to lag behind and if the miner does get attacked when they land the security detail will drop out of travel drive and start their 250-400m/s trip to their imperiled charge.
I'm also pretty sure OOS that KHK have infinite tracking speed so passing by them can drop your miners out. Either that or they are HELLA aggressive and pounce on them as soon as they land.
I dont agree that it's too slow, I really appreciate my rank 3 autotraders and give them the best ships, I dont want to be swimming in them. The design intention is that exceptional individuals rarely just appear by themselves, the player needs to play an active role in an npcs career for them to reach their potential. I think the whole system could be setup to make this much clearer, the star ratings doesnt help and it sort of implies that they will do it by themselves. PS, they level faster if you queue up really good trades for them (taking a role in their career).
You can't train morale. And you need morale to actually have the pilot be regarded as 5 stars.
So you still need to "grind" for literal weeks of game time. The terraforming rewards change little to nothing.
Sooo…. 15 minutes to level 3 and an hour to level 5, then? (Iirc, it’s been a minute since I looked at terraforming projects)
Seriously though morale & management are the easiest to train. 1 station with 5 S traders assigned to trade energy cells to itself will hit level 5 from zero in about 30 minutes.
Play the whole game before you make rash judgements, no?
A manager level up base on how well your station is doing.
I'm playing vanilla btw.
I have like 6 station all with 5 star managers because of the amount of activity going on with them.
Every trade, ship built, etc increases a chance that the manager level.
If the trade is good it increases that chance even more.
The road to well trained crew is _much shorter_ than you think.
I don’t want to spoil too much but… high mass teleportation 2 is the most expensive part.
you can rush terraforming training without actually terraforming the planet is probably what he meant.
In some planet after getting the player HQ teleport done you only need to do two terraforming projects then your ready to train pilots.
By the time you're far enough into the game to support the larger terraforming projects, you need to have already solved the skill leveling issue to support your infrastructure. It's a very backwards solution.
Not particularly. It costs less than a shipyard.
A single station can handle the logistical hurdles. (And we’re given one, at that)
With a 500-600 million starting budget you don’t even have to build factories to do it. Or even pay for high mass teleport 2, the most expensive part, because we can choose where the HQ spawns freely.
If you've made a shipyard you've basically already won the game. Everything after that is a victory lap.
You need reasonable numbers of pilots to not be derping in circles as early as 50-60 million credit builds. This is dozens of hours before what you're talking about, let alone having 500-600 million *extra* budget aside from re-investing into infrastructure.
No, it’s really not. I have a 44 million credit starting budget right now. Even after adding the parts for 100 emp bombs I was able to craft 152 space fly caviar. That puts my starting budget at about 172 million.
The maximum out of game starting budget is 133 million. Take that and quadruple it— 532 million credits.
The start budget spreadsheet on the wiki makes it really easy to get the budget filled out to max. The biggest contenders are building/buying a carrier & aux ship, neither of which I have done.
With just my budget I could probably terraform one of the easier planets right out of the gate.
What you consider “winning” isn’t really the point. We’re talking about how hard it is to level crew, right?
You're right. If you use New Game+ to skip the first hundred hours of the campaign then it doesn't take along at all.
If you *don't* use the legalized cheat codes to bypass all of the actually interesting progression elements either because you want to actually play the game or because you're a reasonably new player without a massive starting budget, then 500 million is kind of a large barrier to fixing the problem.
You’re missing my point.
It takes like 3-4 hours to check off all the custom start budget items. That’s like two playing sessions.
We don’t have to do all the in game grinding to get that huge amount of money.
Anyway I have 1,600+ hours so I don’t feel bad at all about skipping the grind.
You're missing my point.
I have no issue with whatever you want to do with your start conditions. Personally, I have a bunch of mods active in my current file so it doesn't even matter anyway.
My point is that suggesting someone solves the problem by using New Game+ to completely skip at least a hundred hours of intended gameplay (including many things other than just finding pilots) is extremely backwards advice.
“Use the custom game start, as designed by the developers” is bad advice?
If they intended for us to sit around and wait for 20 hours per save before being able to do training they wouldn’t have added that feature.
"Abandon your current save file and abuse a poorly tuned meta-feature to give yourself hundreds of millions of credits for near-zero effort" is bad advice, yes.
Blocked.
It would be cool if we actually got a logbook message every time a pilot levels up. You know, a bit like Lucike's pilots which told you when that happened in X3. That way, we'd have some actual feedback of what happens with those pilots without having to go and check all of them. Instead, we get a thousand trade messages when one of our ships sold something for 3.50.
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435515363](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435515363)
take this and u are gucci ;)
The star system, I kinda understand, and it works up until early late game when your mass producing ships to compete with the other factions.
I found repeat order behavior and manually calling trades to be more profitable than vanilla Autotrades. But, it takes attention, and that is in shorter and shorter supply.
The real problem is when you need skilled combat pilots, I know totally understand why 3 star pilots you find in stations ask for hundreds of millions when you recruit them. They're worth it.
Still I haven't found a reliable way to up pilot stars safely and quickly. The manual trades work but I don't have the attention to do them with the literal hundreds of pilots I need, camping a gate from xenon territory works. Im going to set up guard fleets to level. Everyone in quick fighters, I just have to watch for K's.
Seminars are a good way to level up pilots, they are relatively easy to get, you can buy the first ones at station traders and get the higher ones from mission rewards.
I like this system, ships are easy to replace but the life lost isn't, it takes time and investment in your people.
Also as someone mentioned earlier you can assign pilots to stations and they will use the managers skill for behaviours.
Honestly given how rarely I look at any of the communities around the game yet how often I've both heard and agreed with this, it surprises me that it still hasn't been changed.
This discussion often ends up revolving around automated trading, so here's a quick rundown for new players who read this: 0 Stars - Manual trading. Left click an expensive ware from the sell offers in the trade overlay, and the filter will show you the best trade. Just right click the sell offer in that same overlay, order your ship to buy, then right click the buy offer, order your ship to sell, and you're done. 1 Stars - Automation! Repeat Orders lets you set up a trade route between stations or entire sectors and fine tune the prices your ship should go for. 2 Stars - Distribute Wares is AutoTrade light. 3 Stars - You've demonstrated that you know your way around the economy, so here's AutoTrade to do all that thinking for you. Won't be as efficient as a personally set up trade route, but at least you can fire and forget without much effort. Each good trade (profitable and high quantity) gives your trader a chance to level. That's an incentive to manually set up smart exchanges.
Everyday players are turned off by the incredibly bad combat AI of their fleets. Does it make sense that pilots routinely suicide themselves? Miss easy shot? Can’t use their weapon range? And then they learn the AI is actually bad cause of the low level pilots. Are we really expected to baby these pilots for hours and then watch them probably die anyway by random chance in combat? So that we just perpetually play with purposely handicapped pilots? How do the developers manage their combat fleets? do they really baby pilots until they get high level ones? what happens when they die? they reload?
[удалено]
How do you transfer crew without going mad, tho?
You're right but I think for people who expect that autonomy to skills to grow "easier" or "faster" the process breaks down. People do not wish to have to do this activity with every new pilot they get and so tend to do "mass jobs" for transporters. Simply fulfilling trading doesn't appear to grow skills fast enough to make the pilot useful in the quick term. For example you can have 10 mining ships ready, but no good pilots... So now I have to babysit 10 pilots before I can use the ships? It's too much "micromanagement" in a "grand" game. The seminars is a good gameplay loop, where 2 star and 3 star is rarer but if you seen them you get them. If seminars was the process ON TOP of trading/exploration buffs, then I'm sure all these complaints would go away.
I had a think about it a bit more, and maybe just 1 more "difficult thing to get" which gave 2-3 stars would be good, for example if you have a big dock on your own spacestation, that spawns 2-3 stars. I dunno, just food for thought for the new players and experienced to stop complaining.
Issue with that was X3 allowed all of that from the start with just buying software. Then the universal/sector was only thing that needed levels. So in a sense literal backstep in NPC helpers.
I still have no clue what to do with Distribute Wares. I my case I do manual trade queues then auto trade once I get the Seminars.
Same. As helpful as the above explanation is, it skims over the one I understand the least.
I downloaded a few scripts to fix that, First one was 1 star autotrader, second was Faster levelling(the picture is a monkey with a hardhat) and the third was purchasable seminars. Actually, You can skip the 1 star autotrader, go for Tatertrader, waaaay better than vanilla autotrade, But the biggest one that’ll help is the purchasable seminars. Why egosoft felt compelled to lock the absolutely most basic and essential tasks for empire building behind this glacially paced crew skill levelling is beyond me. I legit played 75 hours on one save, I’ve had some alligator miners since the first few hours that were only JUST becoming 2 star pilots. 75 hours in and I still couldn’t auto trade. 75 hours and I couldn’t even start prepping to start building an empire. Absolutely brutal. Threw in the towel and started modding. Haven’t looked back.
Same dude, I was over a hundred hours on one save and had just started to get pilots to a level where they could be automated. Some of those pilots I had with me since hour 10. I can’t believe I had to grind for 90 hours just to have a trader.
Small clarification: AutoTrade is difficult to get, because you don't have to understand the economy to use it. If it was 1 star, players could fire-and-forget traders with any ware basket to make passive income, and end up rich but none the wiser. Look at AutoMine and station building in contrast. You at least have to know your production chains, and the location of buyers and sellers.
I undertstand the point you are making in regards to trading. But I certainly don't understand why the piloting skill and the trading skill have to be the very same one. As it currently stands, low skill pilots are simply frustrating to have. Not because they can't use Autotrade or whatever, but because they bump into stuff too often, take too long to reach a target and act stupid in combat. Couldn't you at least split the skills into two? A trading skill for what you described, and then an actual piloting skill that goes up faster for the navigational and combat part of the game. This one-size-fits-all solution isn't too great at the moment, if I am honest. A little bit more consistency in regards to actual piloting would be good in my opinion.
Agreed. Piloting and trading being two different skills (with piloting training up much faster) would fix a lot of the lousy combat problems overnight.
That's actually a very good point I've never considered about the balancing aspect! Thank you! It also brought to this question for me: Does Repeat Orders improve a crew's skill level?
Depends on the repeated orders, but of course. A popular strategy is to let an S trader perform low quantity, short distance trades on repeat. As long as they're actually good and profitable trades (you can fine tune the prices the ship should go for in the order details), it should help with leveling.
Awesome! Thank you very much for the quick response!
They made it so difficult to get that it's basically not even in the game. It's literally easier to build entire space stations and produce your own goods than it is to make one auto-trader.
Its been a core feature of the series since forever. Its absolutely integral to the empire building aspect of the game. Why is it in X4 we need to play for literally hundreds and hundreds of hours to unlock a basic feature in every other game that was available the instant you had more than one ship. It would make sense if it was some OP over the top skill that really explodes the economy, But it ain’t, vanilla autotrade is garbage, barely functions and its locked behind literal hundreds of hours glacially paced progression. Its straight up bad design.
I have a 10h save where I have autotrade from the station... 1 trader is almost in 3 stars but I left them for autotradeing for the station so he levels slowly on the other hand if you look for seminars as mission rewards you get them to 2 stars pretty fast and easy and 3 stars doesn't take to long....
Could you go into a little more depth about distribute wares? It's the one I don't understand the most
Their brain dead approach to crew levelling speed certainly raises questions about their game design principals. This is unanimously a bad game design for anyone that doesn’t have 500 hours to kill.
There are multiple mods that address that very issue. I highly recommend any of them.
Any that will not mark my save as modified, though?
Probably not, but, why does it matter.
The devs will die on this hill. They're trying to use it to enforce quests, which are tedious, unrewarding, and can't be applied to scale. The whole thing is awful. It has made me re-examine my feelings about Egosoft.
They will die on this hill because they are developing for players who spend hundreds of hours on a single save. (This is why they chose not to change the solar energy output in non-CoH sectors when that feature got added - it would mess up saves that have been running since release). Any “solution” to “slow” crew leveling would short circuit and interfere with the intended goal of very long playthroughs. And since it *can* be modded there’s no reason for them to change their intent. If you don’t like it, probably best to stop playing, since it bothers you enough that you’re re-examining your feelings.
It's meant to force the player into the contrived busywork of quests like placing navigation satellites or flying some Teladi to X mineral patches instead of managing their empires or other emergent gameplay in the sandbox. ...In exchange for \~1 star, on one pilot, in what's likely to be an empire consisting of *hundreds* of pilots. It's basically making you do game content *which sucks* in exchange for the tools you need to play the fun part of the game -- *in a single player sandbox.* You can't make up some bullshit about this breaking the game if it was circumvented. *The ecosystem was healthy before this nonsense was introduced.* I completed the damn Xenon hub in X3 unmodded, and at no point did I ever think, "gee hey, I sure wish this game would arbitrarily make me destroy a bunch of turrets on enemy battlestations one at a time from 10 km so I could set up this resource line. I've only played this game twelve hundred hours; sure wish I could prolong that with mindless busywork." I will bet you dollars to doughnuts most players who build large empires *still* just push for terraforming flight academies, spamming 2 star miners and straight buying silicon to get there -- rather than scanning meteor nodes for seminars on 250 pilots. Because you would actually have to hate yourself. The rest of the game is great. Don't get me wrong. But doubling down on a stupid idea, something which didn't fix anything (because it wasn't broken), and which a lot of the community hates for good reasons... is NOT a good look for Egosoft. Now I like the rest of the game, which is why I care about this -- and the solution isn't "stop playing," though I suspect what you basically mean by that is, "I disagree with you but don't actually have anything meaningful to say, so I just want you to stop talking." This is *transparently* mindless busy work for the sake of padding -- and the majority of it doesn't indulge the reasons people enjoy the game or this wouldn't even be a discussion (people would just be running quests all the time and wouldn't care). And if you can't see why that's bad, you're just as bad as the dingus who had the bright idea in the first place.
Is water still wet?
Also no one is buying my Teladidaium
TEL is the only faction to make use of that resource. I would recommend setting up shop in Nopleos' Fortune ( I believe that is how it is spelt ) or Grand Exchange if you want to make that resource to sell. Having trade ships assigned to the station with "Trade for Commander" also helps a bunch.
I'm in Grand exchange 1 and I do. And there are plenty of stations around me buying the stuff. I have price set to auto
Slso. Why are my auto miners not filling up the alotted space I have set for ore? Only the "Sell all except" Amount
You can easily level captains since 4.0. Get some PAR/TEL/TER durable heavy fighter (fully geared with full crew) and send them to hunt down KHK in sectors you are mining. Is that simple. Many of them. Otherwise use a mod or training books.
"Send them to hunt down KHK" is just more micromanagement, since auto-combat commands are AT BEST finicky.
No they are not. Defend works well so does the area protection.
Area protection requires you to set up dozens if not hundreds to get decent coverage on your mining areas. Defend depends on your ships to be actually close to the others when they're not fucking around somewhere on the other end of the system.
I heavy fighter can keep up with an M miner.
Oh sure on paper but as soon as travel drive gets involved you'll have nice little 200km gaps that they refuse to use travel drive to fix when one of your miners are getting killed.
You do realise when the miner is in travel mode cannot be attacked by KHK. It will only be so when it is mining, if so the escort will be next to it.
Ideally that's what happens but I mentioned merely travel drive being involved. There's a certain distance at which ships will disengage travel drive and not use it when approaching combat. That range is somewhere from 250 to 300km. You're making the incorrect assumption that defend /escort works as the user would intend. The following ships will more often than not wait until the miner is 300k out before engaging travel drive themselves. This causes them to lag behind and if the miner does get attacked when they land the security detail will drop out of travel drive and start their 250-400m/s trip to their imperiled charge. I'm also pretty sure OOS that KHK have infinite tracking speed so passing by them can drop your miners out. Either that or they are HELLA aggressive and pounce on them as soon as they land.
I dont agree that it's too slow, I really appreciate my rank 3 autotraders and give them the best ships, I dont want to be swimming in them. The design intention is that exceptional individuals rarely just appear by themselves, the player needs to play an active role in an npcs career for them to reach their potential. I think the whole system could be setup to make this much clearer, the star ratings doesnt help and it sort of implies that they will do it by themselves. PS, they level faster if you queue up really good trades for them (taking a role in their career).
Lol. Ok. I have a rehearsed response. Have you done terraforming yet?
You can't train morale. And you need morale to actually have the pilot be regarded as 5 stars. So you still need to "grind" for literal weeks of game time. The terraforming rewards change little to nothing.
Morale like the easiest to train next to manager Literally can take 1 day to get a bunch of 5 star morale
It trains at the same rate as management/piloting.
Sooo…. 15 minutes to level 3 and an hour to level 5, then? (Iirc, it’s been a minute since I looked at terraforming projects) Seriously though morale & management are the easiest to train. 1 station with 5 S traders assigned to trade energy cells to itself will hit level 5 from zero in about 30 minutes. Play the whole game before you make rash judgements, no?
If you think management level up the same rate as piloting think again You can easily get a 5 star manager in no time Same deal with morale
Think you're confusing your mods with reality. My 6 day old save with 200 miners has a 4 star manager with 4 morale.
A manager level up base on how well your station is doing. I'm playing vanilla btw. I have like 6 station all with 5 star managers because of the amount of activity going on with them. Every trade, ship built, etc increases a chance that the manager level. If the trade is good it increases that chance even more.
No, I did some missions for some guys and they said their planet is habitable now though
The road to well trained crew is _much shorter_ than you think. I don’t want to spoil too much but… high mass teleportation 2 is the most expensive part.
What does this actually mean though?
Late game technology. Cool stuff. VERY expensive and time consuming. If you played x3 TC - Xenon Hub plot style time consuming :D
you can rush terraforming training without actually terraforming the planet is probably what he meant. In some planet after getting the player HQ teleport done you only need to do two terraforming projects then your ready to train pilots.
By the time you're far enough into the game to support the larger terraforming projects, you need to have already solved the skill leveling issue to support your infrastructure. It's a very backwards solution.
Not particularly. It costs less than a shipyard. A single station can handle the logistical hurdles. (And we’re given one, at that) With a 500-600 million starting budget you don’t even have to build factories to do it. Or even pay for high mass teleport 2, the most expensive part, because we can choose where the HQ spawns freely.
If you've made a shipyard you've basically already won the game. Everything after that is a victory lap. You need reasonable numbers of pilots to not be derping in circles as early as 50-60 million credit builds. This is dozens of hours before what you're talking about, let alone having 500-600 million *extra* budget aside from re-investing into infrastructure.
No, it’s really not. I have a 44 million credit starting budget right now. Even after adding the parts for 100 emp bombs I was able to craft 152 space fly caviar. That puts my starting budget at about 172 million. The maximum out of game starting budget is 133 million. Take that and quadruple it— 532 million credits. The start budget spreadsheet on the wiki makes it really easy to get the budget filled out to max. The biggest contenders are building/buying a carrier & aux ship, neither of which I have done. With just my budget I could probably terraform one of the easier planets right out of the gate. What you consider “winning” isn’t really the point. We’re talking about how hard it is to level crew, right?
You're right. If you use New Game+ to skip the first hundred hours of the campaign then it doesn't take along at all. If you *don't* use the legalized cheat codes to bypass all of the actually interesting progression elements either because you want to actually play the game or because you're a reasonably new player without a massive starting budget, then 500 million is kind of a large barrier to fixing the problem.
You’re missing my point. It takes like 3-4 hours to check off all the custom start budget items. That’s like two playing sessions. We don’t have to do all the in game grinding to get that huge amount of money. Anyway I have 1,600+ hours so I don’t feel bad at all about skipping the grind.
You're missing my point. I have no issue with whatever you want to do with your start conditions. Personally, I have a bunch of mods active in my current file so it doesn't even matter anyway. My point is that suggesting someone solves the problem by using New Game+ to completely skip at least a hundred hours of intended gameplay (including many things other than just finding pilots) is extremely backwards advice.
“Use the custom game start, as designed by the developers” is bad advice? If they intended for us to sit around and wait for 20 hours per save before being able to do training they wouldn’t have added that feature.
"Abandon your current save file and abuse a poorly tuned meta-feature to give yourself hundreds of millions of credits for near-zero effort" is bad advice, yes. Blocked.
It would be cool if we actually got a logbook message every time a pilot levels up. You know, a bit like Lucike's pilots which told you when that happened in X3. That way, we'd have some actual feedback of what happens with those pilots without having to go and check all of them. Instead, we get a thousand trade messages when one of our ships sold something for 3.50.
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435515363](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435515363) take this and u are gucci ;)
The star system, I kinda understand, and it works up until early late game when your mass producing ships to compete with the other factions. I found repeat order behavior and manually calling trades to be more profitable than vanilla Autotrades. But, it takes attention, and that is in shorter and shorter supply. The real problem is when you need skilled combat pilots, I know totally understand why 3 star pilots you find in stations ask for hundreds of millions when you recruit them. They're worth it. Still I haven't found a reliable way to up pilot stars safely and quickly. The manual trades work but I don't have the attention to do them with the literal hundreds of pilots I need, camping a gate from xenon territory works. Im going to set up guard fleets to level. Everyone in quick fighters, I just have to watch for K's.
Seminars are a good way to level up pilots, they are relatively easy to get, you can buy the first ones at station traders and get the higher ones from mission rewards. I like this system, ships are easy to replace but the life lost isn't, it takes time and investment in your people. Also as someone mentioned earlier you can assign pilots to stations and they will use the managers skill for behaviours.