What happened to crew training costs?!

[CfX]

Hi,

so Iast time I played was before 2.0 and I know that crews have been reworked.
I just build my first academy block for this game and now I am sitting here asking myself WTF happened to training costs and what is the point of training anymore.

Example: A boarder costs me 15.000c to train. It was (as per wiki article) 80c before, which was probably too cheap, but 15k? And hiring one costs 3.525c (at only good relations if that matters). Miners: 940c hiring fee but 4k training costs? And you have to invest the resources in academy blocks and wait the training time.

Just what is the point anymore? Hiring crew is not hard enough to make the opportunity of creating needed specialists at any point this expensive.

And you still need hundreds of boarders to enter stations, cloning and training the cannon fodder seem utterly unpractical to me right now. And I don't even know yet what cloning costs these days.

I am honestly flabbergasted at what happend here. Can someone explain why it should be this way?

[pryt]

I gave up on training myself because of that. In any populated sector you can get more personnel cheaper and faster.

If the self-trained ones would be level 2+ by chance it may be useful, but that way.

Even the argument that you may need people and you are far from a friendly sector is invalid, since there is always something friendly nearby. Except you are at war with the whole galaxy, then a mine with academy blocks and cloning pods can do the work.

[Defektiv]

The lesson here is that higher learning is a scam.

[Nuculear Baggins.]

Academy block is alright if you flying fighter heavy ship and the game decides to deck out so many pirates with point defense weaponry, but that's about it.

[rickcarson]

Originally posted by Nuculear Baggins.:

Academy block is alright if you flying fighter heavy ship and the game decides to deck out so many pirates with point defense weaponry, but that's about it.

Didn't they change it so that fighters are now piloted 'remotely' and you don't lose pilots when they die now?

(People were complaining a lot)

[Defektiv]

Took me a few days to progress to Xanion in the new system so I could actually use the crew training system, and I can totally see what you are paying for. With just a 5 capacity academy and 26 person cloning facility, I can completely replace the need to go to friendly stations to upgrade or supply new crew to fleets. And it can be put on any ship or station. I don't like having to go to certain stations to get certain crew types as it is, so the ability to progress to a point where you can supply and train your own crew even while behind enemy lines is quite a significant advantage you are gaining.

[jahill007]

Having a type of block that unlocks so early in the game, but is only maybe useful at end game doesn't make sense. Crew training should be slightly cheaper than buying from NPC stations. There are so many available that this is just useless.

[ouch67]

If you take up boarding, this is really the only way to viably do it regularly. You can earn 10's of millions this way fairly easily, so the cost is understandable.

[Skulls for the Pyramid God]

Yeah, the training is kind of ridiculous.
I can train a group of allrounders to be level 1 Engineers or mechanics for 2,000 Credits each, it seems, and half an hour for the group. Size of group depends on size of the academy. Sure.
But I can hire an Engineer or mechanic for 400 credits. And they're not hard to come by. There's not a reduced salary for allrounders that you train to specialists, and you can't raise their level (which was what I had originally thought the Academy's purpose was, until I built one).
It looks like I should do some testing in another gamemode that will actually show my credit costs : if it's 2,000 Credits to train a *group*, then that's fairly reasonable, I just have to train a lot of them at once. But if it truly is 2,000 Credits *per person*, that's absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ridiculous. Paying 5x the price of hiring to train them? For no additional bonus?
Even for boarders, I can hire them for 3,000 Credits apiece or train them for 15,000 Credits each. Again, if I'm paying 15,000 for the full group, that's fine. But if it's 15,000 per person, I haven't had any trouble finding boarders to buy, and I have yet to use them because I've only just worked my way into the Trinium regions in my proper savefile (I have one creative savefile for design and testing, and a savefile I'm playing the actual game in). If you lose boarders en masse that routinely that you need to mass produce them, just mass-buy them and make a freighter that's crew quarters instead of cargo bays to carry the boarders, you'll save millions.
If this was supposed to be the solution to a problem, then they should've had the academy *give levels to existing specialists*, so that I don't have to take them into combat five times to get a level two specialist. Better yet, let me put captains in the academy to give them levels, since I use captains largely for their autopilot options and not full operations, since that leaves them open to threats I can't respond to.

[Skulls for the Pyramid God]

And I've confirmed that the cost is per-crewmember.
If any devs are reading this, I'd like to make the reccomendation that the training cost be ammended to - staying with the current price point - be for a whole class rather than an individual. If training multiple professions simultaneously, default to the most expensive.
This keeps training expensive, without making it literally half an order of magnitude more expensive than just flat-out hiring them. Also helps to incentivize having a large academy a bit more. The only change that would need to be made to the academy UI is a 'start' button, rather than immediately starting training when the first crewmember is assigned - cost is not deducted until start button is pressed.
To give a purpose to higher-material academies, have output crewmembers have an additional level per material (so if Trinium is Specialist Level 1, Xaonite could be Specialist level 2, Ogonite would be specialist level 3, and Avorion Specialist level 4). At a higher cost of classes, of course.
If you still want a reason to have smaller academies, then make the cost of a class scale with maximum class size. Mechanics are 400 credits to hire, so maybe a mechanic class costs 100 credits per maximum class size. Boarders are 3,000 credits to hire, so 750 credits per maximum class size if you're training any of them.
If you don't want higher material levels to output more skilled specialists, maybe let them level up existing specialists (Xaonite academies accept both crewmen and Level 1 specialists. Cremen become level 1 specialists, level 1 specialist inputs become level 2 specialists). Or maybe let them give Captains XP, or give higher-material academies an increasing chance to turn allrounders into captains instead of whatever specialist they were training to be.
There were so many opportunities with the academy, and it sounds like the starting point with them was on the right foot, but an attempt at balancing them just stripped them of the little worth they initially had.

[!?!]

Weird.
Why would training need to be expensive?
It already costs time and they still want their salary.
Is this to prevent some weirdo kamikaze melee ranged fighter builds to become too powerful? Because fighters already cost resources.

[Wiawyr]

Originally posted by !?!:

Weird.
Why would training need to be expensive?
It already costs time and they still want their salary.
Is this to prevent some weirdo kamikaze melee ranged fighter builds to become too powerful? Because fighters already cost resources.

My most pressing question with regards to 2.0, training, and cloning is this:

Why don't we just clone the level 3 specialists from the get go?

Why add these pointless hoops to jump through, that don't even work smoothly on ships in your fleet? You have to wait for all rounders to finish being cloned before you can assign them to the academy, which means you have to come back and start that process after the first one silently finishes. But you would never set a bunch of crew to be cloned just to keep them as all rounders without sending them to the academy as well. It's a single goal that needlessly requires micromanagement for no damn reason, and that's a thematic failure with 2.0 in general.

[Bantocks]

Just encountered this. 1.5k to clone a generic dude, 350 credits to hire said unskilled dude at a station. 15k to train a generic dude to be a boarder. That's 16.5k total per boarder, not including salary. It's well worth the extra 2 mins to jump to a station and grab all the guys you need. 60 odd boarders would cost around 1mil, it'd be so much cheaper for any scale operation to go get cheap men at a station.

I get you're paying for the convenience of not going to a station, but at this stage you've got decent scouts and a good hyperdrive range/cooldown, so I agree this needs a bit of balancing.

[Skulls for the Pyramid God]

Even without any of those things - I'm at the stage where I've got academies and have only left trade routes to complete cargo-based missions. Spending the handful of credits to go through gates of factions you've got half-decent relations with is more than worth it if they're longer than base jump range, and I can find any specialist within a few systems even if I don't already know where they are. And it's not hard to build relations if you've got a half-decent cargo ship, even if it's a dedicated cargo ship. Even using a faction's resource depots to refine raw ore and scrap build some relation, and if your miners themselves are undefended and you guard 'em with a well-built assault ship, you'll bait pirates into attacking you enough that killing them will give you endless salvage, plenty of chips and turrets, and a ton of relation progress (assuming the sector is considered within the faction's borders - does not have to be a system they have things in!)

[Bantocks]

Agreed. Possible fixes/interesting ideas are:
- Make the cost approximately equal to a station, so it's just like hiring except you don't need to dock anywhere but the drawback is it takes longer (again, any moderate scale operation will probably need stations because they're just faster. Can get a few hundred men in 5 mins easy)
- Make specialists & general crew harder to come by and only available in small quantities (kinda sucky way of artificially inflating the value of the crew to justify the high cost and clone/train time, and while it would technically solve this issue, it would become quite annoying)
- Clones don't need regular wages/only need very low wages (high upfront cost and time consuming to do, but low running costs, so there's actually a reason to do it beyond filling slots)
- Make clones a subclass of crew which are capable of fulfilling any role, including boarding, moderately well (better than untrained but worse than specialists. This gives clones somewhat more utility, but it would make the academy less useful).
- Make crew a tradeable commodity. At the moment, crew can only be bought, but not sold (to my knowledge). Taking untrained crew, training them in academies, and selling them to areas lacking specialists, would be an interesting dynamic. Price corrections would need to take supply and demand into account, but viable cloning/training vessels and stations would be pretty cool (much like how certain stations want war robots, others could want specialist crew).
- As mentioned above, have the cloning/training cost on a per batch basis, the larger the batch the cheaper the individual, but obviously the larger the upfront cost.

I'll be honest, a droid subclass of crew would be pretty cool. You'd need a droid control subsystem which outlines what roles droids can fulfil, but you could manufacture a workforce which doesn't need wages and comes programmed with the ability to perform certain tasks (i.e. no training). All you'd need is power from your ship to run them (the subsystem consumes power, so I'd tie it into that), and maybe a small regular material cost for "repairs". Also they'd use up way less crew quarter space, as they'd need a shelf instead of a whole room. That's just stray thought though, and I'm sure it would have a host of balance issues.