Post
by M4lInX255 » Mon, 21. Sep 20, 14:03
Just adding my grain of salt by paraphrasing what I said in an another thread.
Egosoft wants to prevent the automation snowball by locking the "Give me a behaviour and forget about me" commands behind pilot level progression. I think the vast majority of players agrees with this, since just being able to spam autotraders (like it was more or less possible in X3) means you never really get invested in the economy in a proactive manner. You'll have to actually think and find the most efficient trade routes yourself, at least at the beginning. That's fine, but in the current state of the game, because of the leveling system, autotrading and other similar commands are essentially never used. For instance autotraders are not that good in the first place, and become almost useless once you start having enough stations and control over the economy. So why bother spending time finding seminars for pilots when you can just directly jump to station building?
So I am just wondering (this is actually a genuine question): what idea does Egosoft have of what the level distribution of all pilots must look like, for let's say an empire that is of the order of magnitude of a faction (endgame)? Are most station/universe traders, even the ones you have since a very long time, supposed to stay around 2-3 stars? Are we supposed to spend time to hunt seminars to train a handful of pilots so they can be assigned to more important positions, like carriers, L transporters, etc... in order to maximize their utility? Or should we expect all pilots to eventually reach 5 stars by themselves, after a reasonable time and/or money investment? I don't know if it's clear so I'll try to reformulate. My question is essentially: do the devs want the player to have an overwhelming majority of average, non-qualified pilots, that are never expected to reach 3+ stars by themselves, no matter how long they spend trading or how big your empire is? Or do they just want to limit how fast they gain levels in order to prevent the player from automatizing things too fast at the beginning, meaning that once the player's empire is developed enough they should be able to find higher level pilots easily?
If it's the first case, then most trade commands that are locked behind 3+ stars are not really useful, since as said before, it's not cost-effective at all to hunt for seminar missions to train a pilot so they can do something that may (or may not) be slightly more lucrative than what a regular trader does. Moreover, in this case the level for traders is virtually limited to 3 stars, since a high level pilot is so precious you'll want to put them in a destroyed or a carrier. This means that any bonus traders may have when they reach 4 or 5 stars is irrelevant, since you will never have enough (if any) of them for it to have a significant impact.
If it's the second case, then the current leveling system is overkill. Yes it should take time, but at some point you should still expect traders to level up by themselves. And as reported many times by many people, it is simply not the case.
I know Egosoft is limited when it comes to manpower, so it is not reasonable to ask them to come with a very sophisticated experience-like system in the near future. However, here are some ideas that in my humble opinion would not be that long to implement:
1. The automation commands could be locked until the player reaches a given rank, and/or a given reputation level with the faction that owns the sector in which they wish to trade. For instance traders could only do the Distribute Wares command if the player is at least trading rank 5 and/or reputation level 10, Auto-trade would be 10/20, etc... Or there could be a limit to how many automatized traders there can be in a given sector, once again depending on rank/rep. This would do a good job at preventing automation snowball, while still allowing the player to actually use advanced commands.
2. The player could hire more experienced pilot, at a cost of course, depending on their rank.
3. Split the pilot skill into 2 or 3 different skills, as suggested by many people before (see in particular the post by TwistedSeven a few posts before mine). This would solve so many issues, while making things more logical (for instance farming Khaak stations or Xenon gates to level traders makes little sense, so does putting a skilled trader in charge of commanding a destroyer).
4. Pilots would have to buy a license before being able to use more advanced commands (like in X3). Lock the advanced commands behind very expensive licences to dissuade players with only a few ships from buying them.
5. There could be some facility/schools where pilots could go to get taught trading. You'd have a new command 'Go learn how to trade at %Station' and they would ping you when they're done.
Keeping the star restriction but implementing a couple of these ideas combined with an actual level progression system would give a new and welcome breath to the game. Not that this counts much but I have a personal preference for a combination of 3. and either 4. or 5. (or both).
People love the game but many (I'm among them) just find the current star/leveling system too restrictive, arbitrary and, sorry for the expression, quite nonsensical. In my humble opinion, this should be the one thing Egosoft should focus on before releasing 4.0 (apart from new content).
Last edited by
M4lInX255 on Mon, 21. Sep 20, 14:34, edited 2 times in total.