Station Managers Engineering Skill improving?

[Imperial Good]

Morale is also impossibly hard to level up to high amounts. Reaching 3 stars in morale is easy enough for warf/shipyard managers but I do not think I have anyone with 4 or 5 stars in morale.

A big issue is that there are not enough activities one can do to level up staff. For example the only way to gain experience with boarding is by boarding ships and the only way to gain decent experience boarding is by boarding hard targets which mean significant losses. Although boarding is used when claiming ships when deciding to retain equipment, that action does not level up boarding. Ordering ships to patrol will not improve skills at all despite the captains and crew ranking up huge numbers of flight hours.

When actions do generate experience they might not generate enough to be practical either due to limits or falloff. For example ships not selling stuff for greater than 50% between average and maximum price or buying stuff for less than 50% between minimum price and average price will gain experience very slowly. Most trades from auto miners and station subordinates will fall into the average range. Worse still, if the deal is the opposite end of the price ranges then the captain will lose morale.

As such to level up crew currently one must spend a huge amount of effort constructing specific working conditions which optimize number of high end experience gain types as well as the fraction for such gains. Even then it takes many hours and often a lot of manual effort. This is not very healthy from a gameplay perspective.

One would ideally want to assign a rookie to a station as a trade subordinate. Then after a few hours (3 or 5) he is skilled enough to be made an auto trader then after 12 or 18 hours he starts to max out skill.

[Nort The Fragrent]

I now do not hire any staff, I go to one of my own stations and pick up one of my employees. Put them into my ship as captain, then push them out of the chair, and take them to the new station. Re assign them to station Manager. This stops hire charges ! Then make sure the station has way more cash than it needs, and the new manager’s moral shoots up, and then the manager star rating also shoots up. Keep them happy with cash, and the station starts pumping.

One thing I think could be changed is the manager ought to sort out what freighters the station needs. Then finds the best for its needs and sends a request to me the owner to approve the purchase of the ships for the station.
Then down the track, if a station ship gets lost, the manger steps in and requests a replacement.
These station related requests need to be in a seperate list. So we don't have to trawl through all the irrelevant garbage ..