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OK, a lot of people have been asking & complaining about skill training for their employees, especially pilot training. This is my current understanding of how things work (I am not a DEV: all info here is gleaned from assorted forum posts plus gameplay experience!)
Experience gain can happen in 2 ways: the easy way & the hard way. The easy way is fairly simple: use seminars. These train 1/3 of a star of experience per seminar, & can be easily & cheaply bought from any station shop (shops restock fairly regularly after some time), so gaining a 2 star <whatever> employee is fairly quick with a little station-visiting & purchasing. Above 2 star seminars (ie to train to 3 stars) seminars you’ll need to start looking for mission rewards or rely on random loot/lockbox drops (very rare); fortunately the lower tier seminars are fairly common as basic faction/war mission rewards (eg for satellite repair work etc), if not for unaffiliated missions. For higher-tier (lvl 3+) seminar rewards though, you may well have to perform some non-trivial task(s) for an affiliated faction
The other way for NPCs to gain experience is for you to use them to completetasks assigned to them: with each successful task completed, the NPC gains some experience (XP). With this mechanic in mind it’s easy to see why (eg) your station managers are gaining management skill like crazy (unless you’ve been a complete idiot WRT setting up their station & assigned orders ofc); likewise any ship with crew that’s assigned to engineering & often suffers damage (even minimal) will lvl that crew’s engineering skill very quickly (eg miners). Morale gives an incremental boost to all skills & increases passively over the time that employee is employed*; marines gain their experience from successful boarding ops* ofc. See https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4945274#p4945274 for a quick summary
* (See below for more accurate linked info; I'll summarise it here when I get a round tuit)
Increasing Pilot skill
So now we come to pilots: the bane & essential element of many an X4 player’s strategic as well as tactical plans! Piloting skill is crucial in many ways: it increases the combat capability of the NPC craft (eg main gun/turret accuracy & heat management), plus its manoeuvrability (crucial in a L/XL ship, but also important for an M frigate or even an S fighter/bomber), while decreasing time taken for the NPC pilot to make decisions (eg which direction to point when travelling, manoeuvring in combat, or performing docking/gate manoeuvres*).. the overall result for higher-skilled pilots is less travel time taken for that ship/fleet to traverse to where you want them, & better effectiveness once they get there
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- Give trainee pilots ‘short’ jobs. They don’t gain experience while flying around in space but only when their task is completed, so exploration missions are no longer optimal (but see below). ‘(re)Visit discovered stations’ is probably the easiest option here, but short trade/transfer wares missions between nearby stations may also be helpful. This is why your personal 'taxi ship' gains piloting so quickly (if you allow the NPC to pilot ofc): they're completing their tasks more frequently than your other NPCs as you fly around!
- The pilot gains more experience for more ‘difficult’ tasks successfully completed, so (eg) trade missions making a lot of profit will gain XP faster (while a loss may even decrease their XP by a minor amount).. This may work out to be a double-edged sword: if your pilots are spending more time flying to profitable destinations than completing their 'tasks' their accumulated XP will rise very slowly. Trade missions currently only gain XP upon emptying their cargo hold, so stuffing a ship with wares & sending it out to distribute or auto-trade won't usually be the best tactic for levelling their pilot
.. & it's why you usually would prefer to keep that ship with an empty hold if XP maximisation is your preference (hence the unintuitive effect of auto-traders running with minimal cargo utilisation) - NPC combat missions ofc! A pilot gains a lot of XP from enemy kills, & somewhat less (although non-negligible) XP from a ‘partial kill’ (ie hull damage to a hostile that’s subsequently destroyed). If you’re happy with the potential attrition rate, you could send out several clouds of cheap S-class fighters to attack enemy M or even L ships, then ‘farm’ the best pilots from the survivors (plus gaining a bunch of dropped loot, if you care)
- Pilots gain ‘passive’ XP from damaging/destroying random bandits or other hostiles, but this is pretty much RNG game mechanics. It does mean, however, that equipping your mining fleet(s) with aggressive weapons as well as mining lasers can gain tiny amounts of XP if they manage to do damage while running away; similarly, explorers may benefit from having a less ‘GTFO’ attitude if looking for pilot advancement there..
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Many thanks to Werit Gaming for providing those talkthrus!
DEV links WRT training skills in v3.x (j.harshaw)
https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4945115#p4945115
https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4945137#p4945137
https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4945102#p4945102
As always, this is WIP so don’t expect it to be entirely accurate, especially as & when new versions/fixes are released! However, please leave comments/observations below & I’ll try to incorporate them to make this guide more accurate for current or future game versions/fixes
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