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« on: May 22, 2023, 04:13:30 AM »
Reading complaints about various skills, I think one of the common ones is that it's kind of pointless to get combat skills, when you have officers. I think this is actually a valid point. Officers are common enough (the baseline number is 8) that actually the majority of your fleet's DP will be boosted with officers, barring some unconventional tactics that use Support Doctrine, Derelict Operations or both. It's simply pedestrian to fight with and against officered ships, and they are less buffs applied to specific ships, but the average, with some ships missing out on officers and performing subpar. This would be fine if you invested many points into the leadership skill tree and fought Hegemony, but you start with many officers and every factions fields lots of them, as if everyone put a couple of skill points into leadership before the game even begun.
Another factor is mercenaries, which allow you to get even more officers, but it's not an option that seems to have much use. Unless you are fine with spending story points on obtaining any random buff to your ships, it can be tedious to go searching through all the colonies, looking for a mercenary that combines skills you want with a fitting personality. However, NPCs use lots of mercenaries, since they don't care if they're a bad fit, don't have to pay anything for them and don't have to spend time to acquire and resources to retain them.
I would prefer the number of starting officers to go back down to 4, and one of the leadership skills could be replaced with a one that gives you two more officers, in addition to the current skill that does that. While this would increase the number of officer skills in the leadership tree, I can't think of a better solution. Skills that gave more officers being distributed in other skill trees would be a solution, but it might not fit them, when they have no skill slots to spare, or if it simply doesn't fit the theme. Fewer officers by default would increase the relative value of other playstyles (such as focusing on buffing all ships with things like Flux Regulations, or more flagship-centric ones), encouraging players to try them out by being less apparently suboptimal. Also, Support Doctrine might potentially be talked about outside of the Support Doctrine-Derelict Operations combo.
