Maybe have crew grade scale explicitly with the capabilities of the ship (so a higher grade crew refitting to more advanced weapon systems, most specifically beam fire control and missile quality, will have their grade lowered somewhat, but still be higher than lower grade crews), and then make it so grade increase is based on the difficulty of the shots your ship makes?
That would be an interesting idea, although it's not at the top of my list of reforms I'd like to see for crew. The problem is how to scale it properly, particularly because BFCs have two factors.
I'm going to repost a suggestion I made long ago for improved crew realism:
First, the crew pool tracks people and points separately. The academy has a level that it pumps people in at. For example, it may add 100 people and 20000 points in a given week. These are added to the pool values. When a ship is commissioned, it takes the correct number of people and points, based on the pool averages. Adjusting the academy training level only affects the inflow, not what's already in the pool. Also, people should leave the pool. Maybe 5% a year, of average points. In wartime, you can check a box which temporarily slows the loss rate, but eventually (5 to 10 years later) it comes back to normal, or even goes higher. After you uncheck it, the war timer counts backwards until it reaches 0, so people don't just toggle it on and off when they get to the point of diminishing returns.
Second, rotate people on ships. To make it easy, whenever a ship gets shore leave, a certain number of people rotate back into the pool, based on how long it's been out. Maybe 10% per year. They're replaced with normal people from the pool. This is to avoid the "ICBM station with an enormous crew rating" problem.
Third, allow picked crews, and unpicked crews. These have maybe 150% and 50% of normal points, respectively, taking the appropriate number of people and points from the pool, and getting those values when the crew rotates. This is to allow you to have a good crew on your fancy new battleship, and give your second-line PDCs the dregs.
Fourth, conscript-crewed ships should not feed into the pool. Because of the nature of the crews (and to avoid flooding the pool with untrained people), the people who leave the ship at the end of their tour are just lost.
Integrating your suggestion would mean that while under refit, the crew loses points, or at least stops gaining them.
I would require hostile targets, otherwise you could be shooting at rocks or waypoints and while "live fire excersizes" are good they aren't that good.
Agreed. It also avoids minelayers being the best ships in the fleet.
You could also for missiles scale the experience with the (cost of launched missile/most expensive missile of that size) but that is likely a pita to program and has its own issues.
That's not a bad suggestion, although it isn't perfect. First, it would be easy to build a weird training missile. Size 1.1, maybe. Or, if rounding is implemented, some size that doesn't get used for anything else. Second, the most expensive missile might be a special-purpose one considerably more expensive than normal. It's better than counting all missiles equally, certainly, but I still don't think it's the right solution.
Also keeping a neutered spoiler about is different from firing cheepso missiles how exactly? In both cases your are exploiting the mechanics, and if someone wants to do this in aurora I think that is an issue between them and their confessor.
There's a fine line here. You don't want to create a system where it's too easy to make exploits, but this isn't a multiplayer game, either. And my point was that a neutered spoiler could be used to bypass a system which required you to fire missiles at a hostile target if firing was all that was required.
The issue of fake wars and crew grade is a big one in Starfire so I'm familier with what can be abused but I still think the current system is in dire need of a good (or Good and KISS) suggestion on how best to implement a better solution.
I think our best bet is to base it on damage to hostile ship targets. It's hard to fake that, and with a bit of careful design, gaming the system will be limited and come with tradeoffs. You can get XP by shooting up the civilian fleet of the people you're conquering, but then you won't get it when they surrender, for instance.
