pilot training

[Vladolf Putler]

Hey, I noticed that my fighting pilots are not gaining pilot skills but only morale, is that so? So either buy seminars or let them trade first to gain skill?

And in M ships, where there are 3 places to sit, I have only 2 crew members, is it because the game wants the free reserved for me? I hope that my ships are not under performing because of that.

What ship do you personally like most to pilot yourself? I just bought Dragon raider with those split deadly shotguns or what is it and cant go to anything else after some battles when I annihilated maaaany xenons in record time, I modded it for even more firepower and speed, but here I think I could go for better cooling instead of more firepower, what do you guys prefer? thanks for tips and hints

[Cellar_Cat]

As I understand it, skill goes up faster the more morale you have. So what you probably witness is that morale is going up, and skill will eventually start to pick up but generally will be slower. If you need one particular pilot to have skills for a role, you can actually 'teach' them by making them the captain of a ship you yourself fly, and then going on a combat rampage with it. They gain the skill from that, so it's as if some lowly NPC pilot just massacred a fleet of Xenon or what-have-you.

The seats in the bridge are not really relevant, although the number of service crew on your ship do affect performance.

[blackphoenixx]

Pilot skill raises very slowly through most actions, at least above 2 stars.
You can get a couple mid-level pilots after 20+ hours by letting them do exploring or regular combat, but it's not really an efficient way to get them imo.

Instead of bothering with that i prefer to do missions to farm some seminars in the early game for my miners and then rush terraforming for the pilot academy ASAP.

It's mostly just getting a S/M build module on your HQ (which you want anyway) and teleporting it to a suitable sector, the pilot academy terraforming itself is pretty cheap after that.
The teleport research needs a ton of advanced electronics but the rest of the materials isn't particularly expensive or challenging to supply. And advanced electronics tend to sell like hotcakes, so building a big station to produce them is pretty much always worth it.

As for M ships to fly i'm a big fan of the Nemesis (5 beams & argon flak turrets) - it doesn't do much against capitals but anything smaller just melts (especially with weapon mods), beams never miss and they also have relatively low heat.

[Min]

Originally posted by Vladolf Putler:

Hey, I noticed that my fighting pilots are not gaining pilot skills but only morale, is that so? So either buy seminars or let them trade first to gain skill?

And in M ships, where there are 3 places to sit, I have only 2 crew members, is it because the game wants the free reserved for me? I hope that my ships are not under performing because of that.

What ship do you personally like most to pilot yourself? I just bought Dragon raider with those split deadly shotguns or what is it and cant go to anything else after some battles when I annihilated maaaany xenons in record time, I modded it for even more firepower and speed, but here I think I could go for better cooling instead of more firepower, what do you guys prefer? thanks for tips and hints

Takes a long time but combat is best way to raise stars

[Vladolf Putler]

I just did a mission where I gave my 2 engineers away and hired another 2 on the spot and they went to cockpit and taken all the seats available, it was soooo cool, no more constant moving from one seat to another, so the game is ready for this obviously, when I teleported and then back to the cockpit, again one seat was free, I know that it does not affect the ship, but can I somehow force the crew to fill the seats in cockpit? I am thinking mods might help me but I still collect achievements, its just little bit annoying because when the crewman change the seats, he opens the door also as he is passing by them so he makes too much noise:D

[Salvor Hardin]

I no longer have problems to train pilots since I have a fleet guarding a Xenon gate. About 3 destroyers, two wings of 20 fighters each. Whenever i need a 3 stars pilot for a new trader or capital ship, i just take pilots and crews from those fighters. It is not "quick", but definitely the quickest i found outside of seminars. Should work with smaller fleets without destroyers.I only use seminars for Managers, or when i want to train a particular pilot very quickly for whatever reason.

Another reason to keep fleets guarding Xenon gates is the loot. For each fleet i have doing this, I have at least one Pegasus scout with a repeat command to collect loot and deposit to my HQ. The loot brings in far more cash than what is needed to replace the occasional fighter and repair the capital ships.