[TC] Why does training marines take such a ridiculous amount of time?

[quoick]

I mean seriously. I have 30 marines all 5 stars after so much training but they didn't have 100 in all skills across the board (all within 91-98 ). I thought I would just try and top them up and from force of habit selected advanced all skills for the first 10 and then quick and dirty for the rest. I now have to wait an eternity to get them back. I turn on my game before I go to work and just leave it going (not on Seta) just so I can get my guys back. Of course often I will find attrition too great (as I am not actually playing to protect my ships) to bare so I will have to reload so that basically my day's electricity bill is for naught.

Is it just me or do others think the marine training is a bit nerfed?

[Catra]

i only find the second time you take the advanced all skill training takes quite abit of time(for what should be obvious reasons ). other than that its pretty reasonable.

also,there are stupid marines that have quite a longer training time than usual.

[Dycor]

Quick>>>> 3-6 points

Normal>>> 20-26 points

Advance>> 30-42 points

Adv.-Adv.-Nor.

Adv.-Adv.-Nor.-Quick

Adv.-Adv.-Adv.

Adv.-Adv.-Adv.-Quick

Keep a schedule of their training, That way you can keep track of the cost and points needed. Alway start them in Advance training, It's cheaper that way. The higher, the training the more it cost.

[Allan F]

Well, they have to have training. Have you ever trained anything seriously - like martial arts or running - and gotten nowhere the first time out?

Training takes time. Improvement takes time.

[sleepy_head]

I mean seriously. I have 30 marines all 5 stars after so much training but they didn't have 100 in all skills across the board (all within 91-98 ). I thought I would just try and top them up and from force of habit selected advanced all skills for the first 10 and then quick and dirty for the rest. I now have to wait an eternity to get them back. I turn on my game before I go to work and just leave it going (not on Seta) just so I can get my guys back. Of course often I will find attrition too great (as I am not actually playing to protect my ships) to bare so I will have to reload so that basically my day's electricity bill is for naught.

Is it just me or do others think the marine training is a bit nerfed?

The devs tried to balance ship capturing between risk vs rewards. Unfortunately they are so far off on this one single issue that every game version since X2, and almost every patch, they have made it harder, more painful, more frustrating, more time consuming, more risky, or just plain more stupid. There is a middle ground between risk and reward and they went off the deep end. NO OTHER aspect of this game is more frustrating, harder and often out of a player's control than capturing another ship. I have captured many ships over the months, and I absolutely despise the way they have turned boarding into this process that requires a hundred things to all go right INCLUDING luck or else you lose 20 marines that you have spent millions and days to train. People whined about the "cheat" of saving and loading during a boarding attempt. The devs had practically designed it with repeated reloads in mind, because IF YOU CANNOT SAVE AND RELOAD, IT IS NOT WORHT THE RISK, and that is the plain truth. People prior to 2.5 have given the devs plenty of input regarding the direction they have taken the game and they chose to go one way. The only thing we can do as customers is to take this into consideration when they want us to buy their new games.

[sleepy_head]

Well, they have to have training. Have you ever trained anything seriously - like martial arts or running - and gotten nowhere the first time out?

Training takes time. Improvement takes time.

Sorry Allan, trying to compare a computer game with real life is folly. People pay for a game for some escapeism. We all know making millions requires plenty fo time and patience unless you are insanely lucky. If the game models an economy like real life than no one would have a thousand factories or a gazillion credits. And that precludes the "fun" of being the boss of a space trade empire or military fleet. In the ever increasing focus on making things "harder", I think they have lost sight of the purpose of the game, which is to have 'fun'. I have captured many Q's and Tyr's and such, but I can't say the process of reload-til-I-get-all-the-marines-in-and-survive particularly 'fun". Its just a process I put up with because I want the ship.

[Dycor]

Tell me a game that doesn't have the save option..? and If it doesn't have it, you start again from the beginning. Mostly, Short mission games don't use it, They use checkpoints.

[Allan F]

Real life training and education takes years, not days.

I practice 2 forms of martial arts and I teach pistol shooting. To get anywhere useful in anything like this you have to invest years of training, not a few days. So the game is 'true' to the game-form in the way it represents the marines training - and reverse-engineering and constructing ships at the PHQ.

If capturing was easy, was it worth doing? You can always head over to the scripts and modding forum and get the insta-capture-button.

[Da-V-Man]

If you capture a capital ship, you can sell it for millions, or save the 60+ million you would spend buying/building it. To make 30+ million credits in a single capture is a lot. I'm guessing that's why.

[sleepy_head]

Tell me a game that doesn't have the save option..? and If it doesn't have it, you start again from the beginning. Mostly, Short mission games don't use it, They use checkpoints.

There are numerous games like that. Practially all mmo's don't allow you to save and reload. You make a decision in there, you live with it. You can't unplug your computer, or turn off the modem, or undo choices you have made. There are also many other "iron man" type game where you are not allowed to reload until you get the result you want. Not to mention that you don't get to keep reloading when you are playing pvp against other players.

Some people here complained about players reloading boarding until they either get the boarding results they want. I'm not one of those complaining about this. But in that context, if X3 does not allow you to save/reload while you are trying to boarding a ship, very very few people would think boarding is worth it, because the devs had made it so risky, dangerous, with many aspects totally out of the player's control, all the while a single thing going wrong will cost you millions of credit's worth of marines that took ages to train.

Like I said, when it comes to capturing ships, there is a fine balance between too easy and too hard. Right now the pendulum has swung so far to the ridiculous side that I think the devs had utterly lost sight that this aspect of the game is supposed to be "fun" as well. Reloadng 10-50 times to get my 21 marines to successfully capture a Q or a Tyr or a Carrack without total wipe isn't my idea of 'fun'. I put up with it simply because I want the ships.

[StarTroll]

If you capture a capital ship, you can sell it for millions, or save the 60+ million you would spend buying/building it. To make 30+ million credits in a single capture is a lot. I'm guessing that's why.

Furthermore, there is the fact that boarding is the only way to own ATF capships, as well as Xenon ships, and it is a good way to get equipement like IBLs when you can't / don't want to buy them.
Training a troop of marines is well worth the time and the credits. Only for the first batch of 20 you feel the long training time, after that the others will train while you board or whetever you do without you having to be bothered.

[sleepy_head]

If you capture a capital ship, you can sell it for millions, or save the 60+ million you would spend buying/building it. To make 30+ million credits in a single capture is a lot. I'm guessing that's why.

Actually if your trade or fight rank is high enough, you can make MUCH more credits in the time it takes to set up and reload and cap a ship. A few taxi or delivery missions that take no more than 1 or 2 minutes each one earning you 10-15 millions a piece. Compare that to the time you spend setting up and reloading til all your marines survive and winning a capped ship there is no comparison. And you also risk losing marines that you have invested a huge amount of time and money on, not to mention that running missions is a lot less boring than sitting there waiting for the game to reload. To me. capping isn't an effective mean of making credits. I cap to get ships that I can't buy. There is no point in spending time trying to cap,. for example, a Colossus or Centaur or Mammoth, as it is much faster to earn the millions and buy it than to deal with the punitive boarding process. A Nemesis costs 9.1 million. An average taxi mission if you have a decent rank that isn't that hard to reach gives 10+ million and it takes less than a minute to do and there is no boring reloading involved.

[sleepy_head]

Furthermore, there is the fact that boarding is the only way to own ATF capships,

THAT, is the only reason I ever bother with capping. The boarding process is so hellish otherwise that I wouldn't bother dealing with it unless I want a ship that I cannot buy.

[Aro]

If it's that frustrating why not just script in marines with whatever skill set you want?

The vanilla game seems fairly balanced to me.

[Xander Cade]

If you capture a capital ship, you can sell it for millions, or save the 60+ million you would spend buying/building it. To make 30+ million credits in a single capture is a lot. I'm guessing that's why.

This.

The first time I captured a capital ship, back in XTM, I nearly wet myself when I saw how much money could be made from stripping a single capture. As frustrating as it is having to wait all that time, and spend all that money, the training really is a measure of balance.

I had to resort to Nividium mining last night, when I came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to make enough money to get my Hyperion in the time I had left. It took about five hours to simultaneously fill up five Mercurys (more than 90 minutes of that was spent with them docked during a huge, and never-ending, Xenon Patrol in Kingdom End). That works out at about 6 million credits per hour. Most people consider this, to one degree or another, to be an exploit.

Now, consider how much money you can make selling off the equipment and hull of a capital ship... and how many of those you can capture in an hour. Buying fully trained Marines "off the shelf" would make the Nividium exploit a waste of time and effort. With that sort of profit capacity you wouldn't need any factories or UTs either.

[sleepy_head]

If it's that frustrating why not just script in marines with whatever skill set you want?

Not sure if you were asking me or the OP. For me, I have already gone through the pains of training marines so already have a bunch at max skills.

[Aro]

Generic comment aimed at anyone getting overtly frustrated playing the game.

[Kryten]

I don't mind the time it takes to train marines, a typical game for me would be 30 days+, marines trained by about day 6. I consider boarding only when absolutely necessary, its only a small part of the game.

It would be nice to be able to buy fully trained marines for a very inflated price to balance things. The only ship I really miss capturing early is the hyperion but I've got used to the skiron filling the role until I can get my hands on one

[ADStryker]

...It would be nice to be able to buy fully trained marines for a very inflated price to balance things...

That's the route I took. I downloaded the Marine Training Manager by Grax and diddled with the calculations to get training time reduced by a factor of 4 and training cost increased by a factor of 4.

[froger]

i know this is going to sound stupid but first if your that much of a *#ch that you have to use a mod than do it leget then don,t play the game second how do you find the advance tarining thing