Why would a ship need to level up to get a special module? How does that make any sense at all?

I've got an entire army of R&D creating fancy weapons, why would the crew need to be level 4 before they can get it installed?

Well I then think it would be a good game mechanic to increase ability when leveling up.

This a thousand times. GC is a science and materials based game, if my shipyard fits a module to a ship then the crew is going to be trained on it's use before it ships out like in any real military - keep skills on the fly out of it. The current xp system of making ships 'tougher' based on their crews experience by adding hitpoints is a great representation.

Fate,:beer:

Tech skill.  Say the crew didn't know how to use walkie talkies.  They needed better experience in combat  to use them...

Any crew that I trust to control a powerful warship surely MUST be rated on all of its design features before being given the keys. I'm a pilot, and the airlines sure as hell wouldn't give me the keys to a shiny big Airbus or Boeing if I didn't have a multi engine rating or knowledge of the fire suppression system. In a game like GalCiv it just doesn't make sense to have skills that ship crews learn 'on the fly'. It doesn't even make sense in Sins, but Sins at least caps the number of ships with skills that you can have so it doesn't get out of hand.

Fate,:beer:

Well employers want people with experience. I hear about rookie mistakes all the time. Lets not forget about journey men. My grampa had to train the manager out 0f cote dge because he had decades of experience that the kid wasn't old enough to have.. I wouldn't have a problem capping the skilled ships. You wouldn't let anyone aboard your ship who wasn't experienced, but the problem is the experienced crew only want to serve on  the exciting jobs that they won't give you because you need experience under your belt for it not to be to risky.

Interesting proposal for boosting ship xp and possibly diplomatic relations too: War games. You could assign a fleet to practice manoeuvres in a sector for five weeks and gain some moderate xp. Then in the diplomatic screen you could arrange to conduct war games with your allies or friends, the more involved the more complicated and risky it would be to do if your enemies caught wind of one of your fleets being out of position, but the higher the xp reward and better your diplomatic standing would become with those races.

Possible trade offs include fleets being out of position and unusable for a few turns, except in the case where war is declared which would immediately end all active war games, if you conduct a war game near somebody else's boarder that isn't a friend or ally it could antagonise them and reduce diplomatic relations, or if you and your ally conduct a large scale war game then the opposition faction would be outraged (think when Japan and the USA conduct war games and China get's very vocal).

Considering that we now have "space terrain" in GC3 if some of the new terrains reduce sensors or speed while traversing through them then conducting exercises inside those terrain elements could partially reduce those associated penalties.

Authors note: By xp I mean the current system of extra HP per level, I still don't support the idea that ships can acquire completely new skills by leveling. This isn't a damn MOBA.

Thoughts? I think it would beef up the value of diplomacy quite a lot!

Fate,:beer:

You know what the absolute worst time possible is to try and learn how to use your radio?

While you're being shot at.

In any kind of even remotely realistic environment, you're trained on your tools before you go into combat. The entire point of that training is so that in a combat situation, you don't have to stop and think about how to use the thing. You already know how. Experience with it will make you better & faster at it, but you're going to have the necessary training to use the thing before it ever comes up in combat.

Nobody would ever build a ship with a giant death laser and not bother to teach the crew how to use it. Even if that somehow happened, the problem would be solved by sending the crew on a training mission dedicated to practice with the giant death laser. It would never be "you got into a combat engagement and successfully used your missile launchers to take out an enemy ship, so now you for some reason know how to use the giant death laser."

You're overthinking this; every recruit in the Galactic Civilizations universe (which apparently includes children, the elderly, and the infirm) is just a glorified redshirt, there to die by the billions to take some useless objective. I'm sure that their government wouldn't mind throwing a few hundred million of those idiots in useless ships they don't know how to use at the enemy front lines. I do that all the time, and it works great!

Seriously though, unlocked abilities are bad.

My military is the opposite, I considered it to be a national tragedy if I lose an engagement or suffer a major loss of ships and life outside of obscene and suicidal! High quality ships and great logistics (and Arcean super warrior) is where it's at!