While you the player will only have the number of officers you have managed to find. It is not uncommon in my case for this number to be zero for a significant amount of time since I don't obsessively check comm directories on the few occaisions I visit the core, mostly because I'll forget about it.
Have you not found any officers in cryo pods? They aren't terribly common, but I typically found at least five of them. At some point I was even thinking that Officer Training skill is pointless, since you will find enough level 7 officers out in the rim anyway...
Now, I'm not exactly great at combat in the first place. I have less than great physical dexterity because I used to be a riveter and whitefinger is a ***t of a thing.
But I've found the combat in 095 to be significantly harder than it was in 09.1 to the point that I just don't want to deal with it.
I can't quite identify what it is that's making things feel this different, but I suspect it's because I don't have nearly as many officers as the opponent and that's making them really aggressive, while my guys are really passive.
(This is all guesswork on my part - so ??)
If you don't bother hiring officers, that's probably it. 0.9.1 could be played without ever taking Officer Management, so the base number of them was 4. Now it's 8, and you (and the enemy) can get mercenaries, too.
Honestly, I think this is one of the worst design descisions. Basing fundamental game mechanics off luck based events.
That's basically campaign, isn't it? You can be certain to find in the outer rim, in the enemy fleet, for sale or raid for
a ship/weapon/officer/blueprint, but if you want
the ship/weapon/officer/blueprint, you have to get lucky the game rolled the dice in your favour. At least now you can mentor officers to change their personality slightly and get more skills to choose on promotion.
If this is staying in, there really does need to be some way for the player to create officers. Raise crew from the ranks etc.
There's an intel message you can receive after combat (it's random), that let's you promote a member of your crew to a full officer.
In 09.1 the player could ultimately control 4 planets directly, plus another 3 via governers for a total of 7. This was fine.
In 095 the player can control 2 planets directly, plus another 2 via governers for a total of 4. This, less so.
Plus 1 more directly and 1 more via admin, if you take Colony Management.
I would also say that when it comes to "I waste a skill point because to get a skill I want, I first need to get a skill I don't want" issue, that was a thing in 0.9.1, too. You could get 49% of all skills, instead of 38% now, but people didn't mind wasting a skill point, because the value of each skill point was low, because you had 52 of them (and now just 15).
* AI can have more than ten officers and break caps if they want, which they did not do before. I blame mercs for this, and I wished they were never implemented. At least AI would have no excuse for breaking caps if mercs were never implemented (and if it did anyway, it would be a blatant violation of rules like fleet caps were in previous releases.)
Two mercenaries at all times are sustainable. Alex is also extending contract duration to double, so it should be possible to have four. I hope he will implement a way to find multiple mercs to hire (not hire multiple mercs, because I don't want to pay four story points to get one good merc and three I don't care about).