That's the first third of my suggestion: I want to put an officer on every ship, reduce officer pay to keep the same overall cost, and slow officer leveling to maintain power balance with enemy fleets.
Well the obvious balancing lever would be to make enemy fleets similarly uncapped in number of officers, which I’m sure baseNumOfficers already 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. 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.
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.