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Autotrader Skill Rebalance

Working on 7.1

Autotrader & Autominer order skill requirements reduced to 0 stars.

Autotrader and Autominer max ranges increased slightly over vanilla, primarily to improve feasibility with new Terran sector shape. Further, range is now determined by either piloting or management skill, whichever is higher. See below for more details on both range and skill changes.

Autotrader and Autominer range when first setting command will now default to the maximum range available by skill level, rather than 0. Range will still need to be updated as the pilot's skill increases. (I highly recommend using Mimic behavior default orders for your autotrader/miner fleets so that the most experienced pilot can be put in charge of the ship being mimic'd, which will automatically raise the maximum ranges of all traders below them up to their own maximum set range as those pilot's skill levels increase over time. The mimic'd pilot's max range will still itself need increased manually in their orders as their own skill level increases.)

You can find my mod removing the skill limitations on fleet formations here.

Range details:

The maximum buy and sell ranges of autotraders, and gather/sell of autominers are now based on one of three skills;
1.) Piloting skill of the pilot.
2.) Management skill of the pilot.
3.) Management skill of the station manager to whom the ship is assigned.

When based on the pilot's skill, the range is based on whichever skill is HIGHER. Each star is 3 skill levels, and the range is half the skill. So a 2-star pilot with 3-star management would have a max range of 9/2=4 (4.5 rounded down).

This is an increase in the range of vanilla traders, which were piloting skill divided by 3. (4 star = 4 range, this changes it to 6 range. I did this as a result of the release of the CoH expansion. Unlike the rest of space, Terran territory is not a core sector with territory then branching outward like a spider web, but rather a very long thin line of sectors. As such the ranges of autotraders/miners were no longer sufficient to actually do their job in these sectors. Ofc this doesn't change the generally weak effectiveness of autotraders in Terran space on account of the severe lack of trading opportunities. The miners in particular will very much benefit however. Mining zones are in very specific areas of Terran space, and the miners must then travel some distance to reach some consumers. This will help with that, and also make it much more feasible to actually seed the Terran economy with the raw resources that is so heavily the focus of their production chain.

My autotrader only has a range of 1?!

This is normal. Autotraders at 0 skill in management/piloting have the minimum range of 1 jump to sell. This range will increase as their management or piloting skill increases, which should be fairly quick for the former, and the latter can be raised through seminars.

Is this cheating?

No - At least in my opinion. The skill system in X4 is extremely poorly implemented by the devs. Without the use of seminars, it will take in-game days/weeks to get a tradeship to the 3 stars of piloting skill required to simply start the autotrading process, let alone have good range for it. And getting the level 2 seminars to do so is incredibly tedious and time consuming as well. Meanwhile you have to manually assign each and every trade your transports do. This mod will make that command available from piloting star 1, but will have the appropriately low range that such an untrained trader should have. In this manner, autotraders are much more similar to one of the core aspects of the previous X3 game, where autotraders were started out as single-sector Sector Traders and slowly worked their way up to 25-jump Sector Traders or turned into Universal Traders. This does increase the range of autotraders, but for good reason, as detailed above.



While this mod can be used entirely on its own, I do recommend using DFun's Skill Increasing mod, or another mod that changes the speed at which crew gain skill. The current vanilla system is not well designed or balanced, and getting piloting skill up takes a very long time waiting, or a considerable amount of PC time spent gathering high level seminars. Without a skill training mod, it is likely that none of your pilots will ever get to 5 stars piloting on their own in a playthrough. Management skill increases far faster than piloting, which limits the effect on autotraders somewhat, but increases slower on autominers, and having an increase in piloting skill in improve the experience for non-autotrader/miner ships as well, such as your combat craft.