There do not seem to be enough missions that earn combat experience. I have tried the Advanced Combat Practice missions, but they only give combat experience as bonuses, and these seem too inefficiently small for gaining combat levels any higher than 5.

I would suggest a Combat Guild, similar to the current Trading Guild (which, IMHO, is a great idea). Unlike andreas's "Intergalactic Combat Training Network" idea (see http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/5565#71953), the purpose would be to gain combat experience bonuses for exceptional combat skills, as opposed to simulating combat without penalties.

Specifically, combat experience would be awarded proportionately to the difficulty of the skill of the combat itself, not just the robots destroyed, during the missions. Further, to scale skills gained to the existing level even at higher levels, the experience would be awarded not as a specific point increase, but as a percent increase over the existing combat points (that way, skill increases would be awarded more highly than mere experience increases).

Both the ship and the armament used would be taken into consideration in computing the award for each mission. The player would be restricted to using one weapon type per robot; otherwise, no bonus would be awarded at all. One example of a proposed list of missions (one for each ship class) would be as follows (the awards would be given immediately upon destroying each robot using the appropriate weapon, with the specific ship class variant's attributes' advantages/disadvantages taken into account in computing the bonus adjustment--that way, obscure/secret variations of existing ship classes could still participate in such missions):

EC-XX[X] Missions:

Variant | Armament | Opponent | Award
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EC-98 | Ion Blaster MkII | TyCorps Assault | Combat +10% of Current Total
EC-101 | Ion Blaster MkII | TyCorps Assault | Combat +8% of Current Total
EC-101 | Neutron Blaster MkII | TyCorps Assault | Combat +1.5% of Current Total

-

Wraith Missions:

Variant | Armament | Opponent | Award
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wraith/Wraith MkII | Plasma Cannon HX | Orne Guardian | Combat +2.5% of Current Total
Wraith MkIII | Plasma Cannon HX | Orne Guardian | Combat +2% of Current Total
Wraith MkIII | Stingray Homing Missile Launcher | Orne Guardian | Combat +1% of Current Total
Wraith MkIII | Plasma Cannon HX | TyCorps Assault | Combat +0.33% of Current Total
Wraith MkIII | Neutron Blaster MkIII | TyCorps Assault | Combat +0.015% of Current Total

I would not advise including battery types, though, because they do not affect very short battles involving mainly strafing, and readjusting the awards every time the ships are rebalanced would make the system too complicated.

-- DekuDekuplex Ornitier

Maybe for new combat missions, you get a choice of 4-6 AI ships to fight with varying loadouts, AI Skill Levels, and base awards. You can add bonus based on what weapons and ships you use. I dunno.

Actually, I wouldn't recommend extra AI ships, because of the following disadvantages:

* If the AI ships are visible to other players, then why not use existing robots in the first place? Adding AI ships just adds unnecessary complexity.
* If the AI ships are not visible to other players, then creating invisible ships could make the coding more difficult than simply using existing robots.

Rather, I would just one field to the coding structures of the existing robots to adjust for specific advantages/disadvantages vis-à-vis specific ships (since some robots could be at a special advantage/disadvantage vs. specific ships), and just compute the skill level per kill based on the combination of the statistics of the robot and the ship, together with the specific adjustment variation.

-- DekuDekuplex Ornitier