Introduction
There are 19 types of NPC, which can be grouped as follows:
- NPCs that may work on the Skunk
- NPCs that may work on other ships
- NPCs that may work on stations
- Specialist NPCs can boost the output of stations.
- Trader NPCs appear on stations but do not affect their output
euclid describes them all here, and further down this page their stats and abilities are summarised in a table.
Detailed info about NPCs
Each hirable NPC has 7 skills and each skill has 5 levels of competency (the more stars, the better). Numbers of stars are somewhat randomly generated in that I don't think it is possible to get NPCs with really low numbers of stars any more. <Clarification: this may apply to hired NPCs only; 'free' NPCs given when buying or given plot ships may still have very low skills - Snafu>
In general when hiring an NPC the higher price the better; however as the higher price is calculated from their /total/ skillset (not necesarily from their /primary/ skillset) it's often worth smalltalkng to find the best skillset available during the early game when you are short of cash
Only the skills marked in bold font are relevant to the performance of the NPC in question (their Primary Skills). In most cases, each NPC will have three Primary Skills, but Engineers and some Specialists only have one or two. Marine Officers are unique in that they have a skill that improves with use: "Boarding Experience".
For all NPC types where we know the relative significance of their primary skills (see below) they have been listed in descending order of significance in-game. So for those NPC that we don't know the relative significances of their primary skills (e.g. Managers and Specialists) it is reasonable to assume that they may be in descending order, or of at least equal weighting. For the NPCs with 3 primary skills other than MOs, the average significance of a primary skill is 3.4 and, going down, their average weightings are 44%, 33%, 23%. Those percentages are roughly equivalent to ratios of 4.5:3.5:2.5.
We don't know the weightings for Mangers or Specialists. If wishing to compare Managers to each other, using the above rough ratio may be better than nothing. The same could be done with Specialists although perhaps they are more likely to have top-heavy weightings like Marine Officers.
In Rebirth 3.00, Virtual Seminars were introduced to the game, which allow us to add a star to a Primary Skill of our hired NPC. They are only currently available via Smalltalk from other NPCs and this feature is described in more detail in the official guide to 3.00 here and on this wiki here <edit: they may be obtainable as mission rewards too; needs checking - Snafu>. Virtual Seminars cannot be used to increase a Marine Officer's Boarding Experience, but since Virtual Seminars take some effort to acquire I would suggest that would be a waste anyway.
Info on exactly how the skill values are are used is sketchy but CBJ has revealed a few titbits:
Further info on Marine Officers from w.evans:
Stats and abilities for NPCS
NPC | Skills + (relative significance) | Effect | Description | Hire Fee |
---|---|---|---|---|
Skunk NPCs | ||||
Engineer | Engineering (1) | Repairs damaged equipment (e.g. weapons). Doesn't repair Skunk's hull (only done by Engineers on stations) | 13'000 39'000 | |
Marine Officer | Boarding (15) Leadership (3) Morale (2) | Affects boarding strength multiplier | 19'000 57'000 | |
NPCs on player-owned ships | ||||
Engineer | Engineering (1) | 0* - repairs to 60% max hull | Repairs damaged surface elements and hull. They also do his job on NPC-owned stations but Player-owned stations cannot employ Engineers and so instead must pay Architects to do these tasks... Maximum repaired hull percentage: | 13'000 |
Captain | Leadership (4) Navigation (3.5) Morale (2.5) | Captains control capital ships (AKA Large and Extra Large ships). This includes when following trading and combat orders. Skills infuence the following Parameters (taken from libraries/parameters.xml //aiflight/skills and made into a formula): Strafespeed, Stafe Acceleration, Steering Speed and Steering Acceleration (this is a multiplier to the max value): 0.5 + ( 0.1* skill ) Reaction Time (this is a delay in seconds): 1.0 - ( 0.2 * skill ) | 27'000 81'000 | |
Defence Officer (AKA a DO) | Leadership (5.5) Combat (3.5) Morale (2) | Controls surface element weapons on capital ships in accordance with their orderstate and their Capain's orders. When set to Attack, any hostile target in range will be fired upon. When set to Defend, hostile targets will only be shot if they attack the ship or if the DO's Captain is running a combat-related order. Primary weapons (e.g. Balor torpedoes) may also be controlled by DOs but they don't seem to be used defensively (e.g. to shoot attackers while set to Defend and escorting another ship). | 58'000 174'000 | |
Architect | Management (3.5) Engineering (3.5) Navigation (3) | These NPCs can only work on Construction Vessels and they are responsible for building selected stations, upgrading them with missing surface elements or additional production expansion options, equipping drones and initiating station repairs. Higher engineering skill seems to decrease build time, but this is unconfirmed | 36'000 108'000 | |
Pilot | Navigation (5) Combat (3) Morale (2) | Pilots control Small and Medium ships. In combat to capitals, these ships typically attack surface elements (e.g. weak points that may be shooting back at them) rather than ship hulls. fight.attack.object.fighter.xml: | 11'000 | |
NPCs on Player-owned stations | ||||
Manager | Leadership Management Navigation | These NPCs work on stations and they're the equivalent of Pilots and Captains on ships. Managers look after creating Buy and Sell orders for their station, are required before ships can be assigned to work for stations, and supply a list of required wares to Captain's of assigned ships, who then decide what to buy. | 48'000 144'000 | |
Defence Officer | as DO above | |||
Specialists boost production up to 10% depending on cumulative skill | ||||
Agricultural Engineer specialistagriculture | Engineering Science Leadership | Meat, Plankton, Soy Beans, Spaceweed, Spices, Wheat | 122'000 366'000 | |
Cell Specialist specialistpowerstorage | Engineering | Antimatter Cells, Energy Cells, Fuel Cells, Ion Cells, Plasma Cells | 168'000 504'000 | |
Food Technologist specialistfood | Engineering Science Management | BoFu, Food Rations, Spacefuel | 157'000 471'000 | |
Chemical Specialist specialistchemical | Engineering Science Management | Bio-Electric Neuron Gel, Chemical Compounds | 185'000 555'000 | |
Precision Assembler specialistprecision | Engineering | Bio-Optic Wiring, Microchips, Plasma Pumps, Quantum Tubes | 195'000 585'000 | |
Weapons Technologist specialistweapons | Engineering Combat | All Missiles, EM-Spectrometer, Scanning Array, Warhead Components | 220'000 660'000 | |
Pharmaceutical Agent specialistpharmaceuticals | Engineering Science Leadership | Medical Supplies, Narcotics | 147'000 | |
Metallurgical Engineer specialistmetals | Engineering Science | Refined Metals, Reinforced Metal Plating, Silicon Wafers, Teladianium | 145'000 435'000 | |
Geophysicist specialistgeophysics | Science Engineering Navigation | Cut Crystals, Nividium Cubes | 128'000 | |
Surface Technician specialistsurfacesystems | Engineering | All Turrets, Force Field Projector | 232'000 696'000 | |
Power Specialist specialistpowersupply | Engineering | Fusion Reactors, Podkletnov Generators, Plasma Flow Regulators | 210'000 630'000 | |
Hydro Specialist specialistaquatics | Science Engineering Navigation | Water | 115'000 345'000 |
4.0 Beta 4 added parameters section regarding AI flight behaviour: low piloting skill causes penalities with steering and acceleration (up to 0.5), also it adds some delay between actions.
12 Comments
Anonymous
Is anyone know when NPCs classes and skills defined in xml? or it is hardcoded in exe?
Anonymous
They're mostly in the various AI scripts. Only exceptions I know of are the marine officer, that's in boarding.xml, and the various specialists, those are in wares.xml.
Sparks
Nice improvements, solntcev, thanks
Anonymous
glad you liked my edits.
unfortunately looks like most npc stuff hardcoded in game
can't find anything in xml files, had to load game to check bold skills for specialists
Anonymous
I'm not sure where you're getting the 'Hire Fee' numbers from, but some of them look wildly out to me..
Also can you recheck engineer's repair formula?
Maximum repaired hull percentage: engineer.ai.xml: 60+(30*<this.combinedskill>/100)
..seems to translate to 60+(<30*5/100> = 1.5) for a total of 61.5 for a 5* engineer (obviously observably incorrect), but perhaps I'm interpreting the formula incorrectly..
<aside - I can't seem to adjust the leading in my edits; is there an area for general website discussion (as opposed to its content)? I have a couple of other issues too WRT editing..> - Snafu
Sparks
Good questions about editting...I'm not sure. There's a bit of info here and at related child pages, and googling with 'confluence' may help. I suggest asking questions at the page I linked and we can always move them if Stefan has a better idea.
Anonymous
Hire fees are found in md/setup.xml, they are range: from price for npc with 0 start in all skills and price for npc with 5 starts in all skill. (all skills counted in hire fee, not only bold ones).
About combinedskill you can see in libraries/scriptproperties.xml:
You can try to raise Issues with wiki on page Known issues in the Wiki system, I did not have any trouble with aligning. What exactly are you trying to achieve?
--
solntcev
Stefan Hett
If you have any questions/suggestions/issues in regards to the wiki, feel free to use this post on the Forums: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=381405
It's also mentioned on the front-page on the Wiki (http://www.egosoft.com:8292/confluence/display/XRWIKI): "If you want to discuss the Wiki, have questions or suggestions, please use the threads set up in the Egosoft forums: support thread".
Anonymous
Sorry; 'leading' in printing is the space between the lines ('kerning' is the space between the characters). So I'm referring to the apparent mismatch in (eg) the Marine Officer & Captain's relative skills column. It may be just my browser (latest Firefox) but I don't think so,, - Snafu
Anonymous
You can use button "Insert > Markup" to open makrdown insert dialog. When you enter multiline text in there, they will be entered as one paragraph with line breaks within it.
-- solntcev
Sparks
Oh, I see! Sorry, I miss understood the origional question
It can be a bit troublesome but if you press shift+return after a line, the space between lines will be narrow. The tricky part is if you have a group of narrow gaps together and add a new line later, it can end up making the gap between the new line and the line below large (leading to needing to do lots more sequential shift+returns all down the group... Anyone know a away to avoid this?
Anonymous
Unfortunately I don't know way to change paragraph text to line-break text. When I filled table, I manually reentered all line breaks with Shift + Enter.
-- solntcev