How do you get pilots and captain to three stars or better?

[Sillls]

How do you get pilots and captain to three stars or better? I have been trying to do this for a while. I found skill books but nothing past one star. The best I can do is a two and two thirds star pilot/captain. How do I do better?

[Sillls]

Thanks

[blackphoenixx]

2-star and above seminars are common rewards for guild missions - Teladi Trade Guild, Antigone Trade Guild, Segaris Pioneers, Argon vs. Holy Order and so on.
You get a message + quest about joining those once you reach reputation 10 with the relevant faction.
Once you've done the quest their missions will show up in the mission offers tab when you're in their sectors.

The second way is low effort but slower and is basically "make them do things that raise pilot skill". Mining and trading will slowly gain skill to about 2-stars, but exploration (discovering new stations in particular) and regular combat can get you 3-star pilots after about 30-50 hours or so.

Easiest way is filling a carrier with fighters set to "intercept for commander" and parking it in front of a gate to Xenon space. You'll have some attrition but not that much if they're decently equipped (mk2 across the board is sufficient, no need to spring for mk3 engines/thrusters, though i'd suggest mk3 shields).

Looters (a fighter set on repeat order + collect items) also gain skill at a slow but noticable rate if they're being attacked (fleeing counts, so set them to escape) while providing you with a steady flow of mod parts and stuff to sell for extra income. Obviously combines well with the above.

There's also a little "trick" of using builder ships - they don't do anything for pilot skill but if you keep them busy their service crew will gain engineering and morale quite fast - and a guy with 2 stars in piloting and 4 stars in morale is a 3-star pilot too.
They're also ideal candidates for the option below.

The mid-late game alternative and best/fastest option is terraforming. Once you have a S/M fabrication module on your HQ and researched the entire teleportation tree you can teleport your HQ to Black Hole Sun IV (or some other systems too i think), build a Bubble City and Aerial Maze and train pilots up to 4 stars in groups of 100, 1 star at a time (takes about 20 minutes per cycle).
Costs quite a few resources to set up though so you'll need a solid infrastructure to supply it.

[Sillls]

Thanks. :)

[Snork]

In my opinion, pilot leveling as it is in vanilla is an oversight and unmanageable.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it really is disproportionately difficult and time consuming.

For that reason, I use one of a variety of mods which leave levels in the game (I do like that they need to level up and gain ability as they do) but they make leveling enough faster that it feels like what you might have expected on first encountering it.

Your veteran haulers/traders by the time they become your veterans - the pilots are four or five stars but no longer do you stare wide eyed at your oldest pilots shocked that they are still two stars or less.

And for me, I found the whole implementation of seminars to be tedious and annoying so I wanted normal gameplay to be enough.

[Targaryen22]

I tend to assign low star captains to my station assigned ships, miners and traders and let them mine/trade for the station. They'll slowly level up, and when I'm in the market for a 3 star or better for a none station assigned miner or trader, or needing a new captain for a newly commissioned destroyer I can swap them off the station assigned ship and just assign the next best crewmember as captain of that boat to level them up and repeat the process.

[Snork]

I do basically that exact same thing except those captains I assign out are generally at about four stars in that time

[Daddy Shark]

Install the faster leveling mod.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2050537227

In the vanilla game the only way to level your pilots in any sort of sane timeframe is to assign them to combat ships. Miners take upwards of 500 hours to level up. It's absolutely ridiculous.

[blackphoenixx]

Publicado originalmente por Daddy Shark:

In the vanilla game the only way to level your pilots in any sort of sane timeframe is to assign them to combat ships. Miners take upwards of 500 hours to level up. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I disagree. There's no reason why performing low-skill routine tasks should turn you into an ace pilot, no matter how long you do it.

[Sarkubocael]

What do the stars actually do? and do you actually need a captain to auto order a ship to go somewhere? also does the crew do anything ? i have 1 marie and 1 crew on my starter ship and it seems nothing changed.

[blackphoenixx]

Publicado originalmente por Sarkubocael:

What do the stars actually do? and do you actually need a captain to auto order a ship to go somewhere? also does the crew do anything ? i have 1 marie and 1 crew on my starter ship and it seems nothing changed.

You don't need skill just to order a pilot to fly somewhere, that's a basic function. A low-skill pilot will be slower though (he won't FLY slower but take longer to make course corrections and such).

The most obvious is that certain behaviors (notably autotrade and advanced automine) have minimum skill requirements. If they don't have final pilot skill (final skill being calculated from skill + morale) of 3-stars you simply can't order them to do those things.

Less obviously pilot skill influences basically everything the ship does.
This is especially relevant with mining silicon - a 1-star pilot will literally take hours to mine the same amount of silicon a 5-star pilot mines in 10 minutes.

It also affects how fast npc-controlled ships find trades, acquire new targets or how efficiently they maneuver, fight and use their travel drives.

Service crew affects the same things but to a lesser degree (about 3/5 pilot skill and 2/5 crew skill). Crew skill also affects how quickly a ship repairs itself after taking damage.

[Bozz 💀]

Publicado originalmente por Daddy Shark:

Install the faster leveling mod.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2050537227

In the vanilla game the only way to level your pilots in any sort of sane timeframe is to assign them to combat ships. Miners take upwards of 500 hours to level up. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I have played with and without this mod, I must tell that I prefer to play without it !
With this mod you will have almost only 5 star pilots because they level so fast... Which makes the whole "training your pilots" part of the game completelly useless...
I like that even after 300 hours playing I don't have that many 5 star pilots, it's a rare and usually I keep them on my best ships and where they are the most usefull...
Also makes missions for seminars very precious and gives you something else to work for during your gameplay.

[Bufu69]

If you install the faster leveling mods, you miss a big part of the game - no just in early game.
Which doesn't have to be a bad thing if your time is limited.
But you provoke a situation, where in the endgame you get solutions that you do not need, because you installed a mod 100 hours ago.

[meraco]

I also used the faster crew leveling. but I was still waiting a long time it seemed. So I then plugged in this mod.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2436999794

Ahhhh much better. All traders now have 100 for all levels for sale. increasing in price for the higher tier ones obviously. But now when I build a ship I up the pilot to lvl 4 right from the start. Now go trade and mine...

Note: this does work on a previous save. but you have to leave the sector and the next time you dock.. the trader will have all the skill sets at 100. including management, pilot, etc...

[Arquebus X]

I will mod the ever loving crap out of X4, but the one thing I will NEVER do is install a leveling mod. Crew skill leveling is the true, underlying progression system in the game, toward which all other progression elements are ultimately geared. So it's designed to take a long time. A very, very long time. EGOSOFT designed the game specifically to be played for hundreds upon hundreds of hours on a single save. They are so dedicated to making sure that a save started on release day can still be played, they chose NOT to change solar strengths in all the non-Terran systems once they implemented solar variability in the CoH DLC. Because it could mess up someone's three year old save. That's how long the devs expect players will go.

Crew leveling is supposed to be just as much of a slog as it is. Making it faster means severely condensing the arc of the game, which undermines the goal of making extremely long saves viable. High skill pilots are supposed to be rare and difficult to obtain. The entire game is calibrated to that concept. The true endgame is having multiple 5 star pilots. If you bend that curve to make leveling faster, it short-circuits that structure. Obviously many players don't care about that structure and find other things about the game to be more fun/interesting, which is 100% fine. EGOSOFT makes the X games moddable for a reason. But leveling mods in X4 are the equivalent of those "billions of credits" mods for games like Sim City. They fundamentally undermine the central progression mechanics.

So others are certainly welcome to bend that progression curve, but I do think it's important to understand that there's a reason it's in place. It's not arbitrary, it's not "broken." Complaining that EGOSOFT keeps "not fixing" this "problem" isn't going to get anyone anywhere, because it's not a problem, it's not broken, there's nothing to fix.

[SpaceToast]

I just send wave after wave of my own level 1 and 2 pilots until the job gets done, its easier that way.