@ Vanshilar: Not really a threadjack if it exposes hidden benefits of Support Doctrine. I would not mind jacking up vespene gas story point gain to feed my colonies.
Yeah just that it moves the thread a bit from "How to Make Support Doctrine Useful" to "How to Maximize your XP Gain". Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive.
So if I have my eight officers, but not assign them to anything, they still count toward my fleet rating even though they sit on the sidelines?
Correct. Even if they're just on your roster but not assigned to any ship, they still count in terms of your XP bonus (i.e. decreasing it). Yeah, stuff like this makes me wish there were a way to put officers on "shore leave" on one of your colonies or something, or some other way to store them when you don't want to use them yet.
So if I get a Doom, and let it use only Mine Strike as its only attack (and put Phase Anchor on it to prevent death and d-mod accumulation), then it does not count toward the full DP toward story points? If so, that is nice.
Yup, it would only count as 1/4 of its DP. This also applies to Zig. However, note that they're still counting the full amount in terms of what you can deploy, so although they only count as 1/4 for your XP bonus, they're basically a much less effective ship taking up the space of a full ship in terms of deployment. I presume Alex did this so that if you're taking ships back from exploration (such as Legion XIV), you won't lose as much of an XP bonus if they're not equipped to fight (since they'll only count 1/4 of their DP toward your fleet total), rather than as a way to usefully construct your fighting fleet. But ships that do interesting things with their shipsystems, as opposed to their weapons (I'm thinking Afflictor for example), could use this to your advantage if you don't mind that they won't actually do damage in combat.
You know you're on to something when you run into problems like this! Nice job.
First world problems...
I've been running into this same problem for a long time now - it's weird that I can't fight 2k+ battles against Remnants even though I could get mega-battles against human factions (especially with Nex invasions), and the problem is even worse in 0.951 since running d-mods with Derelict Operations lowers the fleet FP for assistance thresholds even more. I wish there's a modder who could make an "always assist" mod that negates these fleet restrictions for the playerfleet, assuming one hasn't been made already.
Well I'm not sure if Derelict Operations lowers the fleet FP for assistance (or for XP); Support Doctrine lowers the DP for deployment but doesn't lower your fleet rating for XP bonus nor assistance. But yeah, it's based purely on the "fleet pts" column in ship_data.csv, so if you have a unique ship that only you have (i.e. Zig), then you can just set that ship's fleet pts to be a high value (such as 400) to make sure other fleets will assist. Or, you can stick say a Kite in your fleet or something and do the same thing...just be aware that the column is used for stuff like fleets auto-resolving combat so this may make random fleets which just happen to have Kites in them suddenly demolishing other fleets. Not sure if any faction fleets will spawn Kites naturally...maybe pirates.
Actually...you can make a skin for this. For example, assuming no fleets will naturally create a Kite (S) (so you don't have to worry about auto-resolve screwing up other fleet battles that you're not involved with), you can take the kite_original.skin and replace the "fleetPoints":2 with 1000 or whatever. You can also add "suppliesToRecover":0 and "suppliesPerMonth":0 if you have it purely to force other fleets to assist and don't want to screw up your fleet's deployment points and stuff. So that Kite (S) would basically serve as the "Great Attractor", there simply to make other fleets join in against your fleet.