[Exploit] Quickly Level Crew Shield Skill

[Sheepdude]

There is a well-known exploit that allows you to level your crew member's shield skill quickly by continuously deactivating and reactivating your shield during an encounter. Each time the shield comes back online, the crew member manning the shields gains an experience point. It's very possible to have a maxed shield skill by the end of the first sector, or even by the end of the first encounter of the first sector, if the enemy is incapable of damaging your ship.

If the developers consider this a bug, then the simple solution is to not award shield experience when shields come online after being manually powered-down.

[Number43]

Even if they fixed that, you could still max out shield exp in one fight if you wait around against an enemy that is incapable of piercing through however many shield bars you have and do damage. If you upgrade shields to 2 bars early you should encounter multiple such fights in the first couple sectors. You can then max out engine at the same time, and if you have an ion weapon, a beam, or a laser that doesn't fire more shots than the enemy shield you can max out weapons too.

[Matthew]

This is the problem with "learned" skills. In the Elder Scroll series, I'm sure we've all jumped around to level Acrobatics (pre-Oblivion), or just sat in an inn casting shield to level Alteration.

For me, the pain of doing the exploit isn't fun and is enough of a block to prevent me from doing it. If someone would like to spend the 10 minutes training their crew, then that's their choice We've considered putting an xp cap as a per sector basis, but I would rather not punish people who are in legitimately long fights just to stop a silly exploit.

[dogthinker]

A smaller change to shields would be to award XP for being in control when shields absorb enemy fire, instead of when they come back online. This could still be abused by patient people, but it's not quite as bad.

An alternate training mechanic that's harder to abuse would be to award a fixed amount of XP per fight per room, for piloting, engines, weapons, and shields. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's more of an abstraction than the current system.

Example:
Suppose one fight gives 10 XP to piloting.
If the cockpit is crewed for 50% of the of the duration by crew member A, 20% of the time by crew member B, and uncrewed for the remaining 30%... Then A gets 5 XP, B gets 2 XP, and the remaining 3 potential XP are lost.

[HonestJim]

I started a similar topic on the steam forums. An eloquent solution we thought of there was to make a small AI adjustment. Currently the enemy only seems to run away when their hull is being badly damaged. Wouldn't it make sense that if the enemy captain notices his weapons are unable to pierce your shields (no hull damage being done at all) he decides to bail after a few minutes, unless he still has the option of boarding?

[Hoa_Binh]

Actually this seems to work for engines, bridge and weapons too (just slightly different). If you get to an enemy that can't damage you in the first sector, which is easy if you get level 2 shields, you can just reduce your weapons to a single one that cannot penetrate their shields and wait.

After a while the dodge skill of engines and helm will be maxed. Same with weapons and shields. Boring but possible.