Well the obvious balancing lever would be to make enemy fleets similarly uncapped in number of officers, which I’m sure baseNumOfficers already does.
Well, that's good news. I'll see if it does!
And for the second part, not sure what you’re aiming for. Do you mean, e.g. want to pay, say, 10k credits per month on officers regardless of the amount, so if you have 5 officers you pay each 2k/month and if you have 50 officers you pay each 200/month? That seems arbitrary and it makes more sense to me to at if you field more officers, you incur greater upkeep.
Not quite. More like reduce officer costs by about 27-33% because a fleet has 30 ships and the player used to have at most 8-10 officers, so a full set of officers would cost the same as before.
Also not really sure how slowing officer leveling maintains power balance considering that they still reach max level eventually. Regardless, there’s probably an officer xp multiplier somewhere in settings.json.
Eventually being the key word. Most player runs end early, from what I have seen, so slowing leveling would meaningfully reduce total officer power. That said, if enemy fleets would have similar officer counts, this lever might be unnecessary.
So my understanding then is that you’d like to have very large fleets with upwards of 30 officers, but find the cost unmanageable? Actually, I’m pretty sure base officer pay and officer pay gain per level are also in settings.json, so you could just reduce them.
I want the player and enemies to have an officer aboard every ship, but, expecting the cost to be unmanageable and worrying having too many total skills too early might overwhelm other gameplay features, I thought slowing level progress might help delay that effect until and unless the player stuck with leveling 30 officers over a long time. Fixed, exponentially distributed per-officer level caps could work too, though!
Also, I want to know why Alex capped deployed Officers at 8-10 rather than letting the player have an officer for every ship and balancing accordingly. I figure the answer is obvious but just don't know.
