Can the NPCs learn and get better?

The more they do stuff, they'll get better. So if you have a ship and you have an NPC that's in the turret and you survive, you win 10 battles or 20 battles, they will get better. Basically the way the NPCs will run is they'll have very basic stats in the background, like their morale, their accuracy, not probably to the level you would in a full RPG, but enough that we can rate the NPCs. I mean, we already do it for enemy pilots, like if you're fighting, say, the Vanduul in Vanduul Swarm, there's obviously the boss NPCs of a different level of skill compared to the base grunt ones. And so it would be the same, that you would basically just have NPCs that, if they're your crew for a while and you happen to continue to do well, they get trained up, so to speak. And it will also affect, because you can hire a crew member and they're cheap, but they may not be very good, or you can hire a more expensive crew member and they've obviously got higher stats.

Or you can get your friend. And basically what you'll wind up having is, and this is actually a pretty critical point, a lot of these occupations will, I actually call it specialization, for each one of these things. So you've got somebody who is actually going to be an extraordinarily good pilot given the flight mechanics that you're going to need to employ for this particular type of job. Same thing for a refinery operator. It's not going to be flip a switch and all of a sudden your ore gets processed. You're actually going to have what I call a mini-game. Basically, you're going to have a lot of mechanics that you need to manipulate within the game and some players will do that better. Some of these challenges will primarily require dexterity. Other ones will primarily require intelligence. Other ones will require some combination of those two.