Experience is rather...unbalanced right now. Every officer gets 1 exp for doing a certain thing. Pilots get 1 exp per landing (planet landed on?). Gunners get 1 exp per hit in space combat. Science officers get 1 exp per planet scanned. Doctors get 1 exp per injury fixed. Captains get 1 exp per payday. Security seems to get experience for hurting/killing wildlife, I don't have any concrete metrics as I can't see who is hitting what.
In practice this means pilots and science officers on merchant ships and combat ships don't really gain exp. Doctors on the other hand, gain experience way too easily. Just find a planet with ammonia, buy some armor, and go swimming repeatedly. Captains seem to take forever, but since I can't figure out what skills they use, and they're already pretty tough, it doesn't matter much. Exp also resets at every level.
My suggestion regarding experience is to raise the experience requirements, but to allow more than 1 action to grant experience gains.
Experience should be granted for a number of actions:
-hitting/killing a creature
-landing on difficult terrain
-capturing an asteroid
-navigating a gas cloud
-dodging a attack in space combat
-hitting in space combat
-useful tactical command decisions (i.e. those that make the difference between sucsess and failure).
-making contact with an alien species
-making scientific breakthroughs (i.e. finding novel organisms)
-healing wounds
-curing disease
-evaluating dead humans
-finding alien artifacts (including disintegrators and adaptive body armor which the game doesn't count)
-completing missions
Experience is granted to the person who succeeds at the role, so pilots would get exp from landing, but if the pilot died the captain would gain exp for planets he landed on. Finding artifacts and completing quests should grant experience to everyone who was there. Not all of these actions should grant the same experience (i.e. flying through a gas cloud should be worth three to five times what a difficult landing would be worth.
Officers should require 100, 200, 300 exp, security forces should go 25/50/75. The reason for this difference is that officers can function like security forces (i.e. shooting stuff) while security forces can't function like officers (although battlefield promotions would be kinda cool).
EDIT: in lieu of double posting I'm going to post my bugs here:
- when you scare aliens into giving you resources, they don't get sold to the corporations
- officers who have been killed sometimes retire upon landing
- The alien scoutship doesn't seem to have stats...
- it can rain sulfuric acid inside a cave
- Alien space craft which describe themselves as not haveing an atmosphere should have one
- gratefull crewmembers say "thank you for safeing our lives". It should be "thank you for saving our lives".
- why would you deploy a sattilite when boarding a drifting space craft?
- Casino thugs will eat each others corpses
- Predatory seaweed should not live on airless rogue planets
- Stations will ask you to deliver cargo to themselves