ORIGINAL: mullk
I like the idea of training improving skills and combat improving experience. However all training should improve experience to a certain point with low experience units. Also I think all training should be capped to experience level. If you have a unit with 50% experience all skills should be capped to 50%. Gives experience an importance in regards to training and even very experienced units still need advanced training. Training points should accumulate rather quickly as opposed to experience which should accumulate more slowly. I think of skill as how to fly and experience as nerve and ability to handle change and make right decisions. Skills put tools in the tool bag. Experience lets the pilot know the best time to use those tools.
I'll also agree wholeheartedly with this concept. However, I will posit some caveats. Experience in real life covers both combat and non-combat experience, as Kwik demonstrated with his landing on ice example. Non-combat but experience indeed. Being an old programmer, I tend to dislike variables representing two different things, but it seems to be necessitated by the limits of the game engine in this regard. Experience certainly must represent familiarity with the aircraft, but it also must represent combat lessons learned.
Perhaps a soft cap on trainable experience levels with the rest only earned through combat. What level that would be must be determined by those with more familiarity with how all these factors are used in the code. I definitely like the idea of combat experience growing quickly in early missions and tapering off rapidly after that.
Skills OTOH should be gained by both non-combat and combat semi-equally. Perhaps defensive skills should lean more toward combat experience, whereas bombing, strafing and other such skills aided most by repetition should be equally by both methods.
