Indeed. Without proper Task Force Training, warships will act uncoordinatedly and suffer delays in the execution of their orders when in the face of the enemy.
Thank god it was only a scout-ship then. I've got my (two, undershiped) fleets doing task training now, in the hopes that they won't suck as horribly when the aliens actually attack.
Be advised, though. Task force training only helps coordination. Crew ratings (the other percentage column next to TF training) are what determine how well the men and women of the ships actually perform. It increases much more slowly, however. Like TF training, though, it improves according to the task force commander's Crew Training Rating and that of the given vessel's captain.
You can boost the starting rating of crewmen in
Empires -> View Race Details. In the upper left corner of this window, there's a value called
Training Level, which is 1 by default. That means 1000 crewmen graduate from each military academy annually, with 100 starting grade points, which translates to the standard 0% (average) crew rating. Graduates get 100 points per Training Level (which can be set to a maximum of 5). In my current game, I have configured my race's level to 4, and 400 grade points mean a 10% starting crew rating. A warning, however: the amount of annual graduates is divided by the Training Level (at 4, you would get 250 per academy per year), and raising it, no matter how many steps, halves your pool of available crewmen. You can check how large your pool is on the
Teams / Academy tab of any given population.
On the other hand, to preserve potentially skilled graduates, you can tick the Conscript Only box on a given design (say, a commercial vessel). This option has ships of that class employ conscript crew and thus leave the standard crewman pool untouched. While your supply of conscripts is unlimited, the downside is that said ships enter service with a default crew rating of -10%.
PS: If you
lower your race's training level, the rating of the pool of crewmen obviously changes, but its size remains unchanged. And before I forget, this whole mechanic I just explained is completely unrelated to named officers. It doesn't affect their quality nor volume of training.