[Baron Munchausen]

Keeping track of 'crews' is a bit difficult since a 'crew' is actually a composite of hundreds or possibly thousands of people/creatures. And the number of crew required for each given size/class of ship is going to be different, not to mention differences caused by changes of the equipment in use. An 'experienced' crew of a missile ship is not going to be nearly so competent if you transfer them to a carrier. How do you track the 'type' of training that the crew has? And anyway, the AI cannot use the current system. How will it handle a more complex system?

I think that what is required is some sort of 'pool' of crew experience based on the number of ships in you have in service and how long they are in service. A sort of 'accumulated hours of operation' measurement, averaged over the number of ships you have. As this pool grows larger relative to fleet size, the default experience of your ships can increase because you can assume a better general level of training in your 'armed forces'. But ships getting destroyed in combat means dead crew, so you should also suffer losses from your pool due to combat losses. Ship and fleet training facilities will still have a use, but they should just add to the 'experience pool' and all ships just rely on the global 'average' experience/training level. This would be much more usable by the AI then the current system.

Ships should still gain experience individually for success in combat, but this system would tend to 'even out' the difference between ships and make your fleet have a similar level of effectiveness. I suppose some people will not like this feature of the system. But isn't that how it works in real life? Do navies in our world generally have radically different levels of crew competence among their ships? If you still want to have 'elite' units than maybe you should be able to give some ships a special designation as 'elite' and pay extra maintenance costs for their extra training so they can be above the fleet average. The AI could also deal with this more easily than having to park ships over a given planet until they are trained.

[ September 06, 2002, 02:49: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]